I like Pete Buttigieg. I like Elizabeth Warren. I may even like Andrew Yang.
But I shall caucus for Joe Biden.
Category Archives: universal coverage
Health Reform and the Role of Private Insurance
As a family physician and health-care advocate, I have fought for universal health-care access for more than 25 years.
In 1997, I advocated for the proposed Healthy and Well Kids in Iowa (HAWK-I) program by writing in an op-ed that a “child with a laceration on the arm goes to the school three days after the injury happened. The wound is held together with a bandage of rags and electrical tape. The child has no insurance.”
Health Reform and Explosions in My Knee with Every Step
Three weeks and 1 hour ago, I ruptured my quadriceps tendon (tendon above the kneecap (patella)) while playing tennis. Five hours later, my quadriceps tendon was surgically re-attached to my patella using three drill holes and wire sutures. The surgeon said, upon opening my knee, that it looked like a “bomb” had exploded. I can sympathize with that statement because, for two weeks after surgery, every step with crutches felt like an explosion had occurred again in my knee.
Medicare for All and the Elimination of Private Insurance
An Iowan’s Plea for Honesty to Democratic Presidential Candidates
I last wrote to you regarding health care in Cuba after a cruise there earlier this year. Interestingly, that cruise has now been banned by our president. Now, six years to the month since I started this blog regarding health-care reform in Iowa, we have 24 Democratic presidential candidates crisscrossing the state and most of them on a national debate stage raising their hands regarding whether the country should eliminate private insurance in lieu of a Medicare for All proposal.
Health Reform and Cuba
After four days in Cuba, seeing much countryside and touring three cities – Cienfuegos, Havana, and Santiago de Cuba, I have some reflections regarding health care, there and here in the United States.
Health Reform: 2019 and Representative Cindy Axne
As my Health Reform blog returns in a new format, I wish to comment on two more significant startups — a new year and a new 3rd District congresswoman from Iowa. In relationship to health reform, by which I mean improving health-care coverage for Americans and especially Iowans, I think these new developments have meaning.
In Iowa, a new year will start with health costs continuing to go up, the individual insurance market pricing people out of the ability to have health insurance, a state-legislated health-association insurance plan that legally allows for the discrimination of individuals with pre-existing conditions (further perverting the individual insurance market), and a besieged Medicaid for-profit managed-care scheme that will continue to reward these companies’ shareholders at the expense of Iowa patients.
Health Reform and Mental Health
School shootings and other mass gun murders, the opioid crisis, homelessness — these social ills all could be improved with adequate attention to the mental-health infrastructure in America. What is missing in most of this current national discussion is that mental-health evaluation and treatment should be a primary part of the solution.
As a family physician, I contend that mental-health evaluation and treatment is too late if we only concentrate on the prospective shooter, the addict, or the schizophrenic person who is living on the street. Do not misunderstand me: We need to help these individuals. What I am specifically saying is that we need to help them, as well as the vast number of people with mental-health diseases, when the diseases first occur or even before they occur.
Health Reform and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis
For a few days of my recent vacation, I was laid low by a viral infection that included, along with other localized symptoms, overwhelming tiredness and emptiness. That ennui that I felt to my bones was all-consuming. I have recovered, thankfully. Regarding the malaise that I had for a few days has given me greater empathy for two of my patients who have had a similar malaise for years. These two patients, who were independently diagnosed, one at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and the other by a national expert in North Carolina, have a condition now called myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME).
Health Reform and $2,000 per Month Health Insurance with a $10,000 Deductible (which Is Only Going to Get Worse)
2017. The year health reform took it on the chin. The year the middle-class, individual health-insurance buyer was abused by President Donald Trump and the entire Republican Party.
In Iowa, where we almost had no insurers in the individual market, we were left with one for 2018, Medica. One is not a choice. Who knows whether we will have insurers in 2019.
Health Reform and the Orphan Called the Individual Health-Insurance Market
Last week, the buzz in Washington, D.C., where I heard numerous lectures and personally talked to two U.S. representatives and two U.S. senators, was about impending health-care legislation in the Senate and particularly focused on the imminent crisis in Iowa, where there probably will be no insurers for the individual insurance market in 94 of its 99 counties in 2018.
Seventy thousand Iowans may not have health insurance next year in a state that prides itself as an insurance state. Iowa is the poster child for the deficiencies in the individual insurance market. Across the nation, only a few counties in Tennessee have that known potential for 2018, though several potential fixes are being discussed at the federal and state levels.