News In Healthcare

A recent arti­cle in the New York Times told the story of one small busi­ness and their health insur­ance woes.  After one aged employee became seri­ously ill and even­tu­ally died, her impact lived one.   The year after the employee passed away, the employer was still feel­ing the pain of her insur­ance claims — to the tune of a 28% increase in the pre­mi­ums.  Despite the fact that the employee was no longer liv­ing and all of the other employ­ees were rel­a­tively young and healthy, the insurer kept that one employee’s health record on the books for three years.  Such is the case for most small busi­nesses.  Accord­ing to the Gov­er­nor of Kansas, “afford­able cov­er­age for small-business own­ers and self-employed indi­vid­u­als is prob­a­bly the biggest chal­lenge” most states face.

Hillary Clin­ton learned a lot from her first go around with try­ing to get uni­ver­sal health care in place in Amer­ica.  Now, she says she is ready and she is mak­ing uni­ver­sal health cov­er­age her goal as Pres­i­dent.  In a Fox News report, Clin­ton said it will be eas­ier this time around because pres­sure for change has built in the last decade.   And while she says it will be eas­ier, she hasn’t laid out a plan as to how she would achieve uni­ver­sal cov­er­age.  She says she first wants to hear from the vot­ers what kind of plan they would favor because “[w]e are big­ger and more diverse and peo­ple like their choice.”

Well dur­ing a recent visit in Raleigh, NC, the repub­li­can can­di­date said that the plans the demo­c­ra­tic can­di­dates are putting out there, call­ing for manda­tory uni­ver­sal cov­er­age, are basi­cally the start of social­is­tic med­i­cine.  The Wash­ing­ton Post reports that Giu­liani isn’t say­ing that we shouldn’t cover the poor.  He believes we should do so by pro­vid­ing them with vouchers. 

The AARP has launched a cam­paign, Divided We Fail, aimed at get­ting voices raised from the mil­lions of Amer­i­cans who agree that access to health­care and life­time finan­cial secu­rity are the most press­ing domes­tic issues fac­ing the nation.  The AARP is focus­ing its ini­tial efforts in the states with early pres­i­den­tial con­tests.  The Las Vegas Review Jour­nal reported on the recent kick-off of the cam­paign in Nevada.  In a speech before mem­bers, law­mak­ers and oth­ers at the state Capi­tol, AARP Pres­i­dent Erik Olsen said that health care costs, which con­tinue to increase for employ­ers and employ­ees, have affected U.S. com­pet­i­tive­ness abroad. Olsen said that AARP will ask pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates to address health care on a bipar­ti­san basis and will “demand action, answers and account­abil­ity” from the candidates.