If you had any notion in your being that the government could run the highly complex world of health care…let us dispel you of that notion now. Hank Johnson voted for the health care bill and is one of those government bureaucrats who will be deciding your health care fate. Watch and shudder.

TBM prides itself on finding the difficult to find. We really want to try and bring our readers the latest and most in depth coverage of all health care topics. A question that we are asked a lot is, “What chance do you think these bills in the House and Senate actually have of passing?” Here is what our research has found. A true insider’s take on the chances for health care reform. Keith Hennessy’s bio is listed below from his blog. It doesn’t …

So, the wires are buzzing and the pundits are pronouncing. Something happened today on Capital Hill. But what exactly.
Well, our opinion will be withheld for now. Instead we just want to present the facts as we know them. We culled this primarily from the WSJ, but sources also include the LA Times, NY Times, and some other personal sources we have at our disposal. What is clear is that the House now has a Bill. The Senate has yet to vote on one. Once that happens (if ever), then …

In this health care debate, we are constantly bombarded with repetitive talking points. It seems like the more the politicians repeat their talking points, the more they hope we will just come to accept what they are saying as “truth” One of those drum beats has been the Democrats often repeated criticism that the Republicans have no ideas an they are just the “party of No”. Or in the case of Rep Alan Grayson(D), he implies they have a plan but there is they hop, “You die!” …

What the hell are we getting ourselves into?

Have a read. Trust us on this one.

In this revealing video, Robert Reich, former Clinton Labor Secretary and adviser to President Obama, pulls back the covers on the Left’s view of what health care should be. The question dancing thru my head: who are the people laughing and clapping in the audience? Don’t they realize this guy is talking about them? I guess just because you were a Labor Secretary and a Presidential adviser doesn’t mean you always know what your talking about. Regardless, this man is advising the President and these …

We state therefore, openly and clearly, and as loudly as is needed to make the point heard: all hope is not lost and the glint of hope that remains rests squarely with us. We have been in situations before that seem hopeless, we are, collectively– in them each and every day of our working lives. We share a combined experience with these things that is without a doubt, one of the most extraordinary and unexplored talents of our unified practice of Medicine. So, what is out point?

Tuesday the Senate Finance Bill was voted out of committee, and now work begins melding it with the Senate HELP committee Bill,  to create a final version for a future floor vote.  As noted in our previous post, “Congress Prescribes a Bitter Pill – Exempts Themselves“, there is a tendency for Politicians to create legislation that applies to others, while exempting themselves and their constituents from foreseeable problems.  The Baucus Bill is no exception.
A recent WSJ article detailed the many and varied ways Senate Democrats sought to diminish this legislation’s …

So, when I read about this I thought “it has to be from the Onion”.   A 65 year old man had his finger severed (bitten off to be precise) by a supporter of Health Care Reform.  The “incident” occurred at a rally in Thousand Oaks, CA organized by MoveOn.Org.  But no, much as I would wish it so, this was NOT a joke.  It actually happened!
I suppose there’s really no great moral to this story, except that emotions are high and Vegans can sometimes change their dietary preference.  But a …

You know, I just have to call this like I see it. The same man who had the temerity to imply that whatever oath we all may have taken has been, and continues to be easily superceded by things like profit motive, now invokes such an oath as a moral compass that somehow would have us all support his HCR ideas?

Unions give mightily to the Democratic party and helped usher in the current President. Now they are about to receive their payback and its a big one.

The RAND Corporation hosted a Health Care Reform event at their Santa Monica headquarters on Thursday, September 17th which I had the pleasure to attend. RAND senior policy researcher Jeffrey Wasserman moderated the event which featured Elizabeth McGlynn and Peter Hussey. McGlynn holds the Distinguished Chair in Health Quality at RAND and Hussey is a policy researcher at RAND. The following commentary addresses this event, their Health Care Reform Supplement in the Summer 2009 issue of the RAND Review, and their health care dedicated website, www.randcompare.org.
The evening’s …

If the government gave these guys money, how can we trust them with health care.

As most of the government are lawyers, it is amazing how they always seem to find new and novel ways to twist every other industry into government controlled pretzel except one: the legal industry. Lawyers practice as they see fit. Charging all of us for even listening to a phone message on their voice mail. Their business structure can be summarized in as follows: maximize the dollars. In malpractice cases, they often take anywhere from 50-70% of award given to the plaintiff. Think …

It is the fear of ATLA which keeps Democrats running scared.

During the August recess a tremendous amount of pressure is being placed on Mr. Obama and his team to drop the public option. As we and others wrote in early August, the rumble started the fine Sunday morning when Senator K. Conrad from the oh-so-representative-of-real-health-care-issues state of North Dakota (not to be confused with South Dakota, which is, oddly, South of it) sad to Fox News that the public option was not going to make it out of the Senate. The Senate, as we wrote, is doing its constitutionally penned …

Be careful of the grass is greener syndrome in health care.

We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government’s role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy.

We have always maintained, and do so now, that real reform is needed. There are too many people not well served by our system. There are too many flaws with medicine as big-business and there is so large a danger that doctors will stop caring– that a real debate about real reform is vital. Instead, we get the current HCR debate with town hall fiascos and the like. What a waste of a mandate and what a shame we have to find out this way.

Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer must have been in the Twilight Zone when they wrote this piece.

ALERT: The Obama Administration threatens dissent on health care reform.

That the recently believed future of Democratic politics has become the bullseye for the Liberal wing of the party tells us much about how tension is high, trust is faltering and people are becoming quite terrified of the fact that Mr. Obama’s plans for HCR are going to fail– or worse, pass without the key ingredients so long sought by that wing.

Congress arrogantly thinks its not their job to read the bills and laws they write.

To truly understand the mechanics of the health care reform legislation that is likely to come down the legislative pipeline, it would do well for more people to understand that Peter Orszag is going to be the driving Cabinet-rank figure behind health care reform.

Did Obama’s campaign chair actually say the public option is the path to nationalized health care? Haven’t we heard everyone from Obama, to Emanuel, to Sebelius drone on about how the public option is not a Trojan horse. The public option is about creating competition. Well here is a window into the Obama worldview on HCR behind the teleprompters.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Obama’s campaign Co-chair and wife of convicted felon Robert Creamer during a rousing speech to supporters offered us a glimpse into what the goal …

Our single greatest joy at TBM is finding truly rare gems of intellectual discourse, irrespective of their origin. This morning we found one, and how unbelievably fortunate for us, this evening led us to yet another.

The other day one of the surgeons we work with used this statistic to show the “problems” with the American health care system. We took exception and pointed him to this post from July. We decided to re-publish it for two reasons: because it is still a very common misconception even after months of health care discussion and two, as a reminder to us to follow up with another post on this topic and the topic of life expectancy. The other often mentioned quality problem in the US. Here’s to clearing up the things you knew which aren’t actually true.

We can only hope we are wrong here, but given the meeting between Mr. Obama and the CBO this week, the evidence of desperation and reckless betting has us quite worried that someone is going to call the bluff. The problem for all of us is that President’s rarely fold their cards.

“CBO’s scoring is a little bit wacky,” he said. “They are not quite fair because they don’t measure the cost savings down the road, just the immediate spending.”
As we wrote about in this post, the CBO has added a dose of reality to this HCR issue. The CBO is not an independent organization. It’s actually an office within the legislative branch responsible for budget analysis. It has no party affiliation. We get the feeling that if the CBO had come out with an analysis that came …