Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Mexico Now Has Universal Health Care

August 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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As the contenders and seconds in the United States’ presidential duel continue slapping each others’ cheeks with allegations about who loves Medicare more, Mexico has quietly (at least in decibels heard north of the border) achieved universal health coverage for all of its citizens. That Mexico could join Canada, Britain, or Israel, among others, in providing for all of its citizens may seem especially remarkable given the country’s frequent one-dimensional depiction as a dystopian narco-state. And of course, coverage isn’t equivalent to care. Mexico’s health system isn’t ... Read More

More like this: Health, The 101
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Obamacare Wins—Yet Single Payer Refuses to Die

June 28, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Health Care Law Upheld

Even though public debate over American health care policy has been trapped in legal limbo, research into the nuts and bolts of fixing American health care has never gone away—and, in fact, has evolved in strange new directions. In at least one case, a major health care provider has concluded that a single payer system was viable at the state level. In late March, a study by the Lewin Group, a research subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare, the country’s biggest health insurance provider, found that a broad single-payer plan would save the state of Minnesota $189.5 billion from 2014 to 2023, ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Findings, Health, Uncategorized
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Employer Health Costs Rise Faster Than Medicare

November 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Much of the attention on the rising cost of health care has focused on unsustainable public outlay for programs like Medicare. The federal government — using tax dollars — pays for millions of peoples’ coverage (and, eventually, will chip in for all of our care if we live long enough). The spiraling costs of doctor visits, medicine and surgery for so many people have contributed considerably to the country’s glum economic outlook. While businesses have been screaming about it, less focus has gone to the cost of employer-sponsored health care, and these rates per person have, in ... Read More

More like this: Health, The Idea Lobby
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Obamacare: No Friends in Free-Market, Single-Payer Camps

May 31, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

You might think in a debate over President Barack Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act would have one side arguing in support of it. But when Miller-McCune.com moderated a debate between an advocate of free-market approaches and one for a single-payer system, neither endorsed what's come to be called Obamacare. Which is not to suggest that Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a nonprofit research organization advocating a free-market approach to health care, and pediatrician Margaret Flowers, a congressional fellow who directs the Maryland chapter of ... Read More

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Why Should I Buy Health Insurance?

March 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

As judges around the U.S. weigh the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act — Obama’s sweeping health care reform law — it’s worth asking how Europe navigated the same questions. The problem in most state challenges to the new law is the un-American-sounding mandate, the requirement that everyone in the nation must buy health insurance. Europeans have had similar mandates for decades, but you hear very little soul-searching here about fairness or freedom of choice. Is it because Europeans are all a bunch of socialist weenies who don’t mind an overregulated market? Not ... Read More

More like this: European Dispatch, Politics
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Building an American Insurance Bazaar

September 30, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Recently — and this doesn't happen very often — I had lunch with a number of Turkish military officers. One of them said, "I think your President Obama is trying to do something good for his people. Yet they are protesting in the streets. They don't seem to want this health care reform. Why?" I said Americans had a profound mistrust of government. The protesters — or the sane protesters, anyway — objected to a probable increase in taxes and regulation that would come with any reform. Above all, the idea of a law requiring people to buy something, even health insurance, made the ... Read More

More like this: European Dispatch, Health
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Making a Plan and Not Sticking To It

August 31, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

People switch from one health plan to another all the time. But unlike, say, changing to a different grocer or movie theater, signing up for new health insurance might actually hurt other customers. That's because less healthy people cost insurers more and drive up premiums. When Congress returns from its recess to resume wrestling with health care reform, legislators will have to overcome that predicament if they hope to cover some of the tens of millions of currently uninsured Americans. A new working paper examines when and why people switch plans and suggests ideas for maintaining ... Read More

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Fainting in America

March 30, 2009 • By • 6 Comments

There's really no good time or place for a blackout, though some are significantly worse than others. Mine, one subzero evening in downtown St. Paul, Minn., last December, fell solidly on the inauspicious side of the spectrum. The Level 2 lobby of the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts was teeming with people waiting for the second half of a fine production of Irving Berlin's White Christmas to begin. I was standing with my mom, sister and her three young-adult kids. Through the windows of a dazzling curtain-wall that spans the front of the trapezoidal building, I was admiring the golden ... Read More

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Buying the Farm

July 9, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

It wasn’t so much a sarcastic comment to Jim Carnicella, human resources director for the city of Ocoee, a small town in central Florida. The cost of the city’s health plan that covers 700 employees and their families rose by 20 percent last year — up to $2.4 million — putting a serious dent in tax dollars that could go to other services like police and education. Carnicella talked the City Council into self-funding its insurance plan, basically paying the full cost of medical claims and carrying stop-loss insurance that kicks in once the city spends $50,000 a year. Based on six ... Read More

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Dying for Coverage: Charting the Insurance Gap

May 6, 2008 • By • 1 Comment

Most people in the United States have grown accustomed to the idea that each generation will live longer than the previous one. Indeed, a new study shows that the average life span for American men gained 11 years between 1960 and 2000; over the same period, the average life span for women grew by 7.5 years. But this isn't true for everyone. Since 1983, life expectancy for 4 percent of the male population and 19 percent of the female population has either stagnated or worsened, according to the same groundbreaking study by the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of ... Read More

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