John on August 31, 2010
Politico reports on a new poll: The Kaiser Health Tracking Poll has support for the bill dropping 7 percentage points in August — down to 43 percent — while opposition rose 10 points to 45 percent. That’s the weakest showing since May — and a far cry from the bump proponents had hoped to see as some of the law’s more consumer-friendly provisions kick in. It’s going to get worse for Dems: The [...]
John on August 30, 2010
On Saturday, Al Sharpton held a “Reclaiming the Dream” rally at Dunbar High School. His focus, aside from Glenn Beck, was education. In fact, the only high profile Obama administration figure in attendance was Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education. The SEIU was there too: Note the spelling on the SEIU sign. You can’t make this stuff up, folks. It reminds me of this old Far Side cartoon: [HT: College Politico [...]
John on August 23, 2010
It’s official. The British National Health Service has refused to pay for the drug: Just this summer here in the US, the FDA reversed its approval of Avastin for the treatment of advanced breast cancer. Studies do show that the survival rate is not significantly different overall, however some patients respond well to Avastin and some do not. By dis-approving the drug, the FDA effectively robs dying women of the [...]
John on August 19, 2010
Ben Smith at Politico has a blockbuster. It comes in the form of a power point presentation that represents the accumulated wisdom of several Democratic pollsters: The confidential presentation, available in full here and provided to POLITICO by a source on the call, suggests that Democrats are acknowledging the failure of their predictions that the health care legislation would grow more popular after its passage, as its benefits became clear [...]
John on August 18, 2010
Remember when the discussion on the left was that, if they could just get Obamacare through, the people would greet them as liberators? Turns out, not so much: Mission accomplished, progressives! [Thanks to Stephen Gutowski for the tip.]
John on August 15, 2010
Full credit to Director Blue and Mark Levin for discovering this. The Ovarian Cancer National Alliance has put up a page on their website noting the following: Provenge, a vaccine to treat the recurrence of prostate cancer, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)…However, with respect to Provenge, it appears that CMS is arguing that while the treatment is safe and effective, it may not be reasonable [...]
John on July 19, 2010
Just before the health reform bill passed there was a threatened revolt by members of the Hispanic Caucus. The issue was access for illegal immigrants. It turned out that the caucus had been promised this would be addressed in conference, only the bill never went to conference. As we now know, the caucus did eventually line up with the administration and it was assumed that promises had been made about [...]
John on July 19, 2010
As most everyone knows already, Massachusetts was the model for much of ObamaCare. This is something we were discussing months before the bill passed. In fact, I made a video where a Mass. state senator pointed out that cost controls were a bust last May. At the time, no one in the Republican party was paying attention to such matters. Today, there are a couple of articles which point out [...]
John on July 18, 2010
Apparently the answer is whenever it suits the Obama Administration’s goals for it not to be one. Remember this exchange back in September of 2009: Obama: “But, George, you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase…I absolutely reject that notion.” That was then, this is now: In a brief defending the law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance [...]
John on July 15, 2010
This is a must read, but here are a few samples to whet your appetite: Barack Obama’s incredible “recess appointment” of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is probably the most significant domestic-policy personnel decision in a generation. It is more important to the direction of the country than Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court. [...] Let’s look, then, at what President [...]
John on July 9, 2010
Here’s the video of the quote I published earlier: And here he is again from a film called Money Driven Medicine: Don Berwick #5: Markets Mean Competition from Century Foundation on Vimeo. He clearly sees free markets as the enemy in health care. Competition doesn’t drive innovation in his view, it tramples patients. Meanwhile, the opposite of competition is…”love.” I kid you not. Don Berwick #9: “Health Care is More [...]
John on July 7, 2010
They were going to have trouble getting him through the Senate so they decided to skip that step: Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, said the “recess appointment” was needed to carry out the new health care law. The law calls for huge changes in the two programs, which together insure nearly one-third of all Americans. Mr. Pfeiffer said the president would appoint Dr. Berwick on Wednesday. Mr. Obama [...]
John on July 6, 2010
A liberal interst group known as Center for Science in the Public Interest has declared war on the happy meal, specifically the ones served at McDonalds: The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has sent a demand letter to McDonald’s that threatens to sue the company unless it stops using toys to market Happy Meals to young children. “By advertising that Happy Meals include toys, McDonald’s unfairly and [...]
John on June 24, 2010
This is old news if you’ve been reading VS, but it’s nice to see a story on this from Time: “If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan.” Throughout the long health care reform debate, that promise from President Obama was one of the few constants, made to reassure the bulk of Americans who already have insurance that the sweeping legislation [...]
John on June 21, 2010
Not just predictable, predicted: The number of doctors refusing new Medicare patients because of low government payment rates is setting a new high, just six months before millions of Baby Boomers begin enrolling in the government health care program. Recent surveys by national and state medical societies have found more doctors limiting Medicare patients, partly because Congress has failed to stop an automatic 21% cut in payments that doctors already [...]
John on June 14, 2010
The New York Post has an analysis that goes a bit farther than I did last week. It seems HHS is using the power contained in the new law to create a top down system in which everything is determined by rules set by the HHS Secretary: Ultimately, these rules force consumers to buy one of just four health policies — which vary mostly only by trading off higher co-payments [...]
John on June 12, 2010
Remember this promise: Apparently it has reached its expiration date. From Investor’s Business Daily: Internal administration documents reveal that up to 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage because of ObamaCare. Small firms will be even likelier to lose existing plans. The “midrange estimate is that 66% of small employer plans and 45% of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfathered status by the end [...]
John on June 9, 2010
What else do you really expect from the LA Times: Only in the topsy-turvy world in which end-of-life counseling services are called “death panels” could a doctor who champions patients’ rights and better medical treatment be labeled a threat to healthcare consumers. Only in the LA Times is a praising a healthcare system that leads to demonstrably higher death rates a sign of fitness to manage the American health sector. [...]
John on June 3, 2010
Awesome video: Baby Jonathan was eight months old when this was made.
John on June 3, 2010
The NY Times has a must read story today by Reed Abelson and Gardiner Harris. It points out that some of the data used by the Obama administration to sell the country on ObamaCare has some serious shortcomings. The focus of the story is the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care which produced this map: Red regions represent areas of high Medicare spending, yellow regions of lower spending. This map was [...]
