Who’s The Most Important Doctor-Politician in America?

Dr. Barbara Bollier Mike Magee “I’m about health-care’d out.” Those are the words of Sen. Pat Roberts (R.,Kan.) One can understand his exhaustion. After all, seven years of relentless opposition to the ACA have ended in defeat. The leader, Mitch McConnell, of this effort acknowledged as much last week when he said “It’s pretty obvious […]

Tonight’s Reading Material For Republican Legislators.

Mike Magee Since the Republicans have stalled today in their eight year pursuit to repeal Obamacare, perhaps they should take the night off, and relax by reading UNC professor Jonathan Oberlander’s NEJM advice on next steps. Here are a few selections to whet your appetite: Romney Care Origins: “The ACA is a conservative reform model […]

Price-Less: Make America Red Again.

Mike Magee In the weeks ahead, we will see how far backwards our health will slide under Republican leadership. In the President’s budget proposal this week, we see that he doesn’t care much for the EPA. Juxtapose that with this week’s BMJ study revealing a link between global warming and rising rates of diabetes. “Fake […]

Medicaid Caps and Paul Ryan’s “Good Old Days”.

Paul Ryan’s “A Better Way” is actually the same old way circa 1960 when Medicaid Caps were all the rage, with Welfare providing “medical vendor payments”. What did that look like? State spending was low: $12 billion nationwide in 2014 dollars covering <2% of citizens. Eligibility, coverage and utilization were tightly constrained. No care for […]

Canada vs. U.S. Health Care: State Governance and Next Steps if Ryan Fails.

Mike Magee One of the most enduring myths that we Americans support when it comes to Canadian health care is that it is a nationally run, monolithic offering with little variability. That is patently false. In fact, Canada’s official beginnings in health governance began in the province of Saskatchewan in 1946. For several decades they […]

Canada vs. U.S. Health Care: National Governance Reform – HHS, FDA, NIH, CDC.

Mike Magee As we have seen, America’s health care system – disintegrated, opaque and heavily conflicted – didn’t just happen. It is the result of thousands of conscious decisions over nearly a century. Choices made have tipped the scale toward intervention, technology, and medicalization at every turn. Peggy Noonan suggested this week that Paul Ryan’s […]

Canada vs. U.S. Health Care: Common Wealth

Mike Magee Republicans this week demonstrated with clarity that further tinkering with our broken health care system will almost certainly add cost and undermine quality and coverage. To begin to define a way back home, we need to initially focus on two fundamental challenges. Problem 1: Defining a National Health Care Vision There is an […]

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