Health Insurance

Just in case your Monday isn't off to a good start, I found some happy talk this morning from Stagemanager John Hood over at the Art Pope Puppetshow. What's the subject of Mr. Hood's latest column? Why it's health care! Now that's something we can all laugh about!

I’m not a doctor, and I don’t play on TV. But my teenage nickname was “Doc,” one of my online-superhero alter egos is name after another famous “Doc,” and I have just successfully bandaged my son’s foot. So I’m taking the liberty today of prescribing a course of treatment for those suffering from Health Issues Confusion Courting Unwise Policy Syndrome (HICCUPS).

I have always been intrigued by the seemingly random nature of drug pricing and was inspired by a recent NPR story about Genentech to find a way to fill the Medicare Part D donut hole. It seems Genentech has a conundrum. It recently won approval for Lucentis, a drug to treat age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which costs $1,950 per treatment. At the same time eye doctors have been treating AMD in patients with small off-label doses of Avastin, another Genentech drug approved to treat colon cancer. The cost for the amount of Avastin used for AMD is $50 per treatment.

I just received an email through the David Sirota network. It was a column from the Washington Examiner and it laid bare the lie that people don't support universal healthcare through a single-payer system (that is, government).

I know it isn't polite to cut and paste whole columns, but maybe this will help.

David Sirota is the author of the new book “Hostile Takeover,” a national best-seller (Crown 2006). He is the co-chair of the Progressive States Network.
The column beyond the break.

From the News & Observer, a story that a bill to insure North Carolina's high-risk population has been killed in the Senate. The idea came from a N.C. Institute of Medicine task force, which included such varying interests as business owners, health insurnace executives, hospital admins, docs, consumer advocates, and lawmakers themselves.

The bill was so finely crafted by this task force of experts that it passed the House 95-10 just yesterday. But, it has been killed in the Senate.

What is a high-risk person?

I’ve been laying off John Hood, stage manager at the John Lock Foundation Puppetshow, for the past few weeks because he hasn’t had anything interesting or relevant to say. But today he’s back to his usual form, this time flacking a CATO Institute Report on the wisdom of Health Savings Accounts. As you would expect from a free-market Libertarian think thank, this particular report has all the earmarks of a Puppetshow “report:” foregone conclusions based on ideological bias, sketchy data, weasel words and false choices.

I've just started reading Uninsured in America (by Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, Univ. of Ca. Press, 2005), and I'm concerned. While the book is a much needed look at the working poor, and it promises to provide me with facts and stories I'll be quoting at cocktail parties for months to come, I'm worried that it won't make a lick of practical difference.

The point of the book seems to be to chronicle how working hard and playing by the rules is often not enough to let individuals and families meet crushing health care costs, and to shine a light on the often devastating consequences. It's a good reason to write a book. The potential problem lies in the presentation. Like most liberals, I already believe that if you work hard and exercise some minimal level of good judgment in managing your life affairs, a wealthy and powerful nation should be able to see to it that the necessities for health and happiness are available to you.

If this book is to make a direct change, then, it has to be aimed at the other side: people who believe (wrongly) that we do take care of our own; people who believe that because they are making it through, anyone can; and people who just don't give a shit as long as the market is humming. And by page 26, I've begun to worry that this book won't make a dent in that crowd.

I get emails from The Fitzsimmon File regularly, and today's is depressing as hell. Not coincidentally, it's about the sad state of mental health in North Carolina.

Robert started our week with his piece on Medicaid. I thought I would include my take on it to start our weekend.

A program essential to the health, even the survival of many of our most vulnerable citizens has been targeted for massive cuts by the Bush administration and the Republicans in congress. The poor, the elderly and disabled children will be particularly affected by these cuts and in many states are in a more tenuous situation than ever before. These groups may fare a bit better in North Carolina than in other states, but the possibility of a negative impact looms in the future.

Keep reading . . .

I was just browsing NC Policy Watch's website and came across this study by the NC Budget & Tax Center (PDF). I'll post a few facts and figures below the fold, but the quick summary is that North Carolinians aren't getting any richer while the world around us gets more expensive.

• Half of all NC full time workers in 2000 made less than $24,246. Half of all NC full time workers in 2004 made less than... $24,246.
• What would you do with $2,800? Don't think too hard, because chances are you don't have it to spare. The median household income fell $2,806 between 2000 and 2004. That's a drop from 91.4% of the national average to 88.5%. I guess our $2,800 is off in some other state.
• The percentage of North Carolinians living in poverty rose from 13.2 to 15.1 between 2000 and 2004. 15.1% is about one in every seven people. With about 8 million people living in the state, 15.1% is about 1.2 million people. By comparison, the entire combined population of Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point is about 1.3 million people.
• 14.9% of families with children under the age of five years lived in poverty in 2000. In 2004 it was 21.2%. One of every five children under the age of 18 lives in poverty.
• 14.1% of North Carolinians had no health insurance in 2000. By 2004, another 2.4% joined that group.
• The average man in North Carolina earns less than his counterparts in each of the other southeastern states; the average woman fares better than only those in West Virginia and South Carolina.

There is also data suggesting that Raleigh is doing unusually well, with a median household income near $50,000. On the whole, however, North Carolinians are worse off than they were in 2000, and "the data suggest that recent trends are not temporary ones caused by the last recession." What does all this mean? I'm no economist, but it seems to me that in times like these, we desperately need a government that is tuned in to the concerns of the working class. The rich, I'm sure, will take care of themselves.

A new survey shows that the burden of paying for healthcare in North Carolina increasingly falls on individuals, not employers. That means that a lot more North Carolinians go through their days just hoping that they and their families don't get sick.

The report, Prognosis Worsens for Workers' Health Care, published by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, found that the proportion of North Carolinians with job-based health insurance fell by 6.7 percent between 2000 and 2004.