Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Different Takes: Figuring Out A Path Forward; Whatever You Call It ... It's Now The Nation's Health System
The New York Times: Why Obamacare Is Still In Peril
In a dramatic last-minute spectacle, the latest Republican plan to destroy the Affordable Care Act was defeated early Friday because of the courageous votes of three senators: Susan Collins, John McCain and Lisa Murkowski. This will come as an immense relief to millions of Americans who stood to lose their health insurance, but it would be naïve to think that this is the end of the road for the repeal-Obamacare movement. (7/28)
The Washington Post: It’s Not Obamacare Anymore. It’s Our National Health-Care System.
Republicans failed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act early Friday because of divisions within their own ranks, and because they tried not only to repeal and replace the ACA but also to cut and cap the Medicaid program, generating opposition from many red-state governors and their senators. But most of all, they failed because they built their various plans on the false claim — busted by the Congressional Budget Office — that they could maintain the same coverage levels as the ACA and lower premiums and deductibles, while at the same time slashing about a trillion dollars from Medicaid and ACA subsidies and softening the ACA’s consumer protection regulations. Had they succeeded, they would have won a big short-term victory with their base, which strongly supports repeal, but suffered the consequences in subsequent elections as the same voters lost coverage or were hit with higher premiums and deductibles. (Drew Altman and Larry Levitt, 7/29)
RealClear Health: The Golden Ticket In Health Care Reform? Experts, Not Politicians.
Although nothing is ever truly dead in Washington, now that Senators Collins, McCain, and Murkowski have derailed a seven-year effort to undo the Affordable Care Act (ACA), we need to stop treating health care like a political football and face realities about what can work. It is not hyperbole to say that lives are literally at stake, and ideology won’t pay medical bills. (Craig Kleiger, 7/31)
Lexington Herald Leader: Health Costs Real Problem
Americans will always be at loggerheads about health-care reform until we stop acting like the blind men trying to describe an elephant by touching only one part of the animal. Look at the whole elephant and you’ll see the cost of health insurance is the tail end of a much bigger problem. Republicans promised to cut premiums for many by reducing the number insured and what has to be covered, which doesn’t address the real problem: the cancerous growth in health-care costs. (John Winn Miller, 7/30)
Boston Globe: Let Psychiatrists Talk About Trump’s Mental State
By attempting to exclude psychiatry as a profession from the public discourse, the APA is inescapably devaluing the relevance and importance of the very profession it imagines it is protecting. If their own national organization can’t trust them to exercise good judgement and speak in a self-aware, reflective, and circumspect fashion, what lesson should the public draw from that? (Leonard Glass, 7/28)
WBUR: Harvard Psychiatrist: How Trump's Speech Was Toxic For Boy Scouts Beyond 'Rhetoric'
The carefully worded statement suggests that the Scout leadership heard loud and clear the complaints from parents who were offended by a speech that sounded much like one of Trump's campaign rallies: slogans, promotion of a political agenda, cutting remarks about his opponents. But as a senior child and adolescent psychiatrist and advocate for healthy youth development, I'm concerned that the leadership may still not get just how bad this speech was for the tens of thousands of Scouts who heard it, cheered it, chanted "We love Trump!" (Gene Beresin, 7/28)
