Dems Will Have To Lie About Their Agenda To Win, Poll Shows https://t.co/gC7eZKmDcL— Andrew Malcolm (@AHMalcolm) September 19, 2019
‘Wheeee!’ Bernie Sanders announces what else will be paid off for you if he’s elected president https://t.co/P9uq1Vtb3N
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) September 21, 2019
Voters have repeatedly punished both Democrats and Republicans who've threatened to take away their health coverage, no matter how flawed it is. Are Dems ready to risk trying again? https://t.co/thjrXEdzsB
— Noam Levey (@NoamLevey) August 2, 2019
WASHINGTON — Sharp disagreements among the presidential hopefuls at this week’s debates have crystallized a critical and explosive political question: Are Democrats willing to upend health coverage for tens of millions of their fellow Americans?Still more.
The party is closer than it’s been in decades to embracing a healthcare platform that would move all Americans out of their current insurance and into a single government-run plan.
Plans pushed by three of the four leading candidates — Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kamala Harris of California — differ in their particulars but would all end the job-based system that provides coverage to more than 150 million people.
That’s a hugely risky strategy, as more-centrist rivals reminded the three senators during the two nights of heated, sometimes confusing, debates.
Sweeping healthcare plans have never fared well in American politics.
For decades, voters repeatedly have punished presidents and Congresses — Democratic and Republican alike — who have threatened to take away existing health plans, no matter how flawed.
Just last year, the GOP suffered historic losses in the House of Representatives after the party’s unsuccessful effort to roll back the 2010 Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
But at a time when rising insurance deductibles and medical bills are crippling growing numbers of American families, many Democrats on the party’s left believe public discontent with the current system has changed that dynamic.
“It’s time that we separate employers from the kind of healthcare people get,” Harris said Wednesday night, acknowledging that her “Medicare for all” plan would, after a lengthy phase-in period, end job-based insurance.
Harris, Sanders and Warren have made Medicare for all a central plank of their campaigns, riding a wave of discontent over rising medical costs to call for a historic expansion of government insurance.
Their more-moderate rivals say the three have misjudged the public mood and that by overreaching, they would squander an opportunity to enact significant, if incremental, reforms.
A survey earlier this year by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation found that support for a single government plan fell from 56% to 37% when respondents were told that it might involve eliminating private insurance companies or requiring more taxes.
“It doesn’t make sense for us to take away insurance from half the people in this room,” warned Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who is among many Democratic presidential candidates, including former Vice President Joe Biden, who back more limited approaches.
The more-centrist Democrats would preserve the current employer-based system, as well as state Medicaid programs and the insurance marketplaces created by the 2010 healthcare law.
They would add an additional choice to allow Americans to buy into a Medicare-like government plan, often called a “public option.”
“Every single person in America would be able to buy into that option if they didn’t like their employer plan,” Biden said Wednesday.
Critics on the left say that approach would ultimately cost more and would preserve an outsized role for private insurance companies.
“We have tried this experiment with the insurance companies,” Warren said from the debate stage Tuesday. “And what they’ve done is they’ve sucked billions of dollars out of our healthcare system. And they force people to have to fight to try to get the healthcare coverage that their doctors and nurses say that they need.”
But threatening Americans’ current health coverage has proved disastrous for previous Democratic efforts to expand protections, including President Clinton’s doomed initiative in the early 1990s.
The 2010 healthcare law was almost sunk by labor unions angry about a new tax on the kind of generous health plans many of their members enjoy.
And even though the law was designed to have minimal impact on the existing insurance system, President Obama faced a firestorm when a few million people found their health plans canceled after new rules took effect requiring plans to offer more-comprehensive benefits.
“Traditionally, fear of losing benefits — however flawed they may be — trumps hope of getting something better,” said Chris Jennings, an influential Washington health policy advisor who worked for Clinton and Obama...
I don't know about that.Keep reading.
But it occurred to me: Why aren't we entitled to a recording of what is said around our body when we're under anesthesia? Why should you have to sneak a recording device into your ponytail? You have to be knocked out for the surgery, and all these people have access to your vulnerable body, why shouldn't you have a right to use an artificial device to do what your senses would normally do — monitor what's happening to you? Do the doctors and nurses have an interest in having a private conversation around your body? I'd say you have the greater interest in finding out what's happening to you when you're unconscious. Anyone who wants to make a recording should be able to do it openly. You wouldn't need to take any additional steps to improve the "bedside manner" of doctors and nurses...
BELLEVILLE, Ill.— Jacqueline Racener ’s doctor prescribed a new leukemia drug for her last winter that promised to roll back the cancer in her blood with only moderate side effects.Not sure how to solve this problem, but it's obviously lame that Medicare prohibits recipients from receiving prescription help from drug manufacturers. Seems like government always makes these problems worse.
Then she found out how much it would cost her: nearly $8,000 for a full year, even after Medicare picked up most of the tab.
“There’s no way I could do that,” Ms. Racener says. “It was just prohibitive.” Worried about depleting her limited savings, Ms. Racener, a 76-year-old legal secretary, decided to take the risk and not fill her prescription.
The pharmaceutical industry, after a long drought, has begun to produce more innovative treatments for serious diseases that can extend life and often have fewer side effects than older treatments. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved 41 new drugs, the most in nearly two decades.
The catch is their cost. Recent treatments for hepatitis C, cancer and multiple sclerosis that cost from $50,000 annually to well over $100,000 helped drive up total U.S. prescription-drug spending 12.2% in 2014, five times the prior year’s growth rate, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. High drug prices can translate to patient costs of thousands of dollars a year. Out-of-pocket prescription-drug costs rose 2.7% in 2014, according to CMS.
For many of the poorest Americans, medicines are covered by government programs or financial-assistance funds paid for by drug companies.
For those in the middle class, it is a different story. Though many patients can get their out-of-pocket costs paid by drug companies or drug-company-funded foundations, some patients make too much money to qualify for assistance. Others are unaware the programs exist. Medicare patients, who represent nearly a third of U.S. retail drug spending, can’t receive direct aid from drug companies.
The upshot is even patients with insurance and comfortable incomes are sometimes forced to make hard choices—tapping savings, taking on new debt or even forgoing treatment.
“Drugs are so expensive that once they flow through our ragtag insurance system, we have patients who can’t afford them, or they can barely afford them, so they’re not getting therapies,” said Peter Bach, a physician and health-policy researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
A quarter of U.S. prescription-drug users said it was difficult to afford them, in an August survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. In another survey, published in the journal Lancet Haematology in September, 10% of insured U.S. patients with the blood cancer multiple myeloma said they had stopped taking a cancer drug because of its cost.
A look at how patients are coping with the cost of the medicine prescribed for Ms. Racener, called Imbruvica, illustrates the issues...
The current strategy of reducing a person's heart-attack risk by lowering cholesterol to specific targets is being jettisoned under new clinical guidelines unveiled Tuesday that mark the biggest shift in cardiovascular-disease prevention in nearly three decades.I'm not in any of those risk categories, although pharmacological treatment is the wave of medicine these days. If these medications are that effective, and less expensive generics are available, it makes sense to adjust treatment regimes to help the largest number of individuals.
The change could more than double the number of Americans who qualify for treatment with the cholesterol-cutting drugs known as statins.
The guidelines recommend abandoning the familiar and easy-to-understand guidance to keep LDL, or bad cholesterol, below 100 or below 70 for people at high risk—a mainstay of current prevention policy. Instead, doctors are being urged to assess a patient's risk more broadly and prescribe statins to those falling into one of four risk categories.
The aim is to more effectively direct statin treatment to patients with the most to gain, and move away from relatively arbitrary treatment targets that are less reliable in predicting risk of attack than is widely believed.
"We're trying to focus the most appropriate therapy to prevent heart attack and stroke...in a wide range of patients," said Neil J. Stone, professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and head of the panel that wrote the guidelines.
Cardiovascular disease is the Western world's leading killer. In the U.S., it accounts for about 600,000 deaths each year, or about one in four. About 130,000 Americans die annually of stroke.
Numerous studies show that statins reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. But solid data demonstrating the benefit of reaching specific targets are lacking, said Dr. Stone.
While lowering the LDL number remains a critical goal, the focus is on the risk reduction achieved with statins rather than the effect on LDL, said Donald Lloyd-Jones, chief of preventive medicine at Northwestern and a member of the guidelines panel.
Cardiologists expect the recommendations, jointly developed by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, to substantially change the conversation between doctors and millions of patients over the best way to lower their risk of heart attack or stroke.
The risk groups identified in the guidelines include patients who have already had a heart attack, stroke or major symptoms of cardiovascular disease; those with an LDL of 190 or higher, which typically has a genetic cause; people with diabetes; and anyone ages 40 to 79 who faces a 7.5% risk of having a heart attack over the next 10 years, according to a new risk score. That score—with a lower threshold than under current guidelines—takes into account cholesterol level, smoking status, blood pressure and other factors.
All are recommended to take high or moderate statin doses that would result in LDL reductions of about 30% to more than 50%. If fully implemented, the guidelines could more than double the number of people who qualify for statins, to more than 30 million, the authors said.
The new approach is likely to have a modest immediate effect on the pharmaceutical industry. All but one of the statins available, including Lipitor, have lost patent protection and are available as inexpensive generics.
PolitiFact debunked the Medicare charge in nine separate fact-checks rated False or Pants on Fire, most often in attacks leveled against Republican House members.
Now, PolitiFact has chosen the Democrats’ claim as the 2011 Lie of the Year....
With a few small tweaks to their attack lines, Democrats could have been factually correct, said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "I actually think there is no need to cut out the qualifiers and exaggerate," he said.
At times, Democrats and liberal groups were careful to characterize the Republican plan more accurately. Another claim in the ad from the Agenda Project said the plan would "privatize" Medicare, which received a Mostly True rating from PolitiFact. President Barack Obama was also more precise with his words, saying the Medicare proposal "would voucherize the program and you potentially have senior citizens paying $6,000 more."
But more often, Democrats and liberals overreached:
• They ignored the fact that the Ryan plan would not affect people currently in Medicare -- or even the people 55 to 65 who would join the program in the next 10 years.
• They used harsh terms such as "end" and "kill" when the program would still exist, although in a privatized system.
• They used pictures and video of elderly people who clearly were too old to be affected by the Ryan plan. The DCCC video that aired four days after the vote featured an elderly man who had to take a job as a stripper to pay his medical bills.
"Both parties use entitlements as political weapons," Ryan said in an interview with PolitiFact. "Republicans do it to Democrats; Democrats do it to Republicans. So I knew that this would be a political weapon that the other side would use against us."
Liberal bloggers and columnists contend it's accurate to say Republicans voted to end Medicare. Left-leaning websites such as Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, and The New Republic said PolitiFact's analysis was wrong, as did New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.Well, that's a who's who of the America-hating market-killing left.
