Obama Team Engages Public on Health Care

Daschle Visits Indiana for Grass-Roots Forum

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/29/AR2008122902230.html?wprss=rss_health

Dolly Sweet, 77, has battled cancer more than once. She's a fighter. But when her doctor recently prescribed a medication that cost $35,000 a year, she felt she had no choice.

"I canceled the medicine," she said matter-of-factly to former senator Thomas A. Daschle, President-elect Barack Obama's top health adviser, who had come to the fire station here on a quest for "fresh ideas" on improving U.S. medical care.

"I wonder if you could talk to the drug companies," Sweet asked Daschle. "That's more than my Social Security."

Daschle, seated on a metal folding chair with pen in hand and videographer in tow, symbolically kicked off the incoming administration's effort to revamp health care with a grass-roots event that not-so-coincidentally mimicked the types of gatherings that Obama drew on to build support for his presidential candidacy.

"It's stories like that that can make a huge difference as we try to persuade members of Congress and others about the importance of trying to make the system better," Daschle told Sweet.

(snip)
Daschle told the 35 people at the open meeting in Dublin -- one of 8,500 that will be held nationwide -- that it was "designed really to engage the public, to get out of Washington and hear directly from you about your concerns, about your recommendations, about ways you think our system can be made to work better." Aides said Daschle plans to attend another health-care forum today, at the Congress Heights Senior Wellness Center in Southeast Washington.

On the other hand, if you go to the healthcare section at Obama's "Ask a question site?" (http://change.gov/) single payer is being brought up a lot. I guess they'll find out how much attention is paid to that site by the response to the single payer questions. (Make sure you go to the site to vote, someone posted that only the most popular questions get answered.)

HHS Secretary made a comparable tour to get health care reform off the ground. We attended. Told Donna Shalala of Single Payers' virtues. She told us it was undo able politically, But nice try..

They chose UTMB in Galveston as one of the locations for the meetings. I hope to make it.

The major causes of death and disease in our country are all strongly related to lifestyle choices like smoking, diet, drinking, drugs and exercise: Heart disease, lung disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes.

just because I prefer to feel well and would prefer to avoid the doctor. But the fact appears to be that healthy lifestyle may cost healthcare systems more in the long run

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/15293006.html




If future studies bear this out I can just see for profit health insurers demanding that we go back to the days when everyone on T.V. smoked and doctors did cigarette commercials.

won't.

They will fund corporate fitness centers. Watch.

And if you smoke some pot? No health care for you!

tell him we got no system, just a bunch of band-aides and rip-offs?

We spend 16% of the US GDP on health care, and fail to insure 50 million people while providing substandard care for many of the rest. Other developed nations provide better care for all their citizens at substantially lower costs. The difference between them and us is that we permit a greed-driven, for-profit insurance industry to determine who will be covered, at what cost, and under what conditions. A major reason that we are not competitive in the world any more is that American industry and workers have to support the parasitic health insurance industry. We must look to the rest of the world for health care models. I believe that the most workable system for us would be a single-payer model with independent service providers operating under a system of reasonable cost controls.