Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Abortion Clinic Protests; Sitting With Patients; The Health Law 5 Years Out
The Atlantic: Free Speech Outside The Abortion Clinic
It’s not clear how much has changed since the Supreme Court’s ruling in McCullen v. Coakley nine months ago. There’s no evidence that activists are succeeding in changing women’s minds. What is succeeding is the one thing the Supreme Court intended: People who believe abortion is murder are able to share that message with those who least want to hear it. (Diana Pearl, 3/19)
The New York Times: The Importance Of Sitting With Patients
For hospitals to run efficiently, it is widely thought that they must operate like companies. There’s a certain number of patients to be seen, doctors to see them, diseases to be managed, procedures to be performed, and hours in which all this must occur. For patients to feel cared for, we must treat them like family — with all the time, energy and compassion that entails. It’s a tension with which doctors at all levels of training struggle. (Dhruv Khullar, 3/19)
The New York Times' The Opinionator: Bearing Witness
As excruciating as it can be to bear witness when a loved one is at the end of life, I highly recommend it to everyone given the chance. The things I’ve learned from being in the room with souls whose journeys happen to be winding down are nothing less than sublime gifts given by the person on the bed, separated from me by a thin sheet and a trillion words, most unspoken. At this stage, sometimes there’s a suction tube. And sometimes there truly are no words. There are other ways to listen, though. (Jo McElroy Senecal, 3/25)
Pacific Standard: Is Medicine’s Gender Bias Killing Young Women?
Heart disease is the number one killer of both men and women in the United States, yet it’s long been considered a “man’s disease” in the popular imagination. This perception likely stems, in part, from the fact that coronary heart disease, the most common cause of heart attacks, is more prevalent among men—and tends to strike them at a younger age. When younger women do have heart attacks, though, studies have found that they are about twice as likely to die as their male counterparts—and more than 15,000 women under the age of 55 do every year. ... In reality, the themes that emerged from the interviews with 30 women in the Yale study, as well as previous research on women and heart attacks, paint a more complicated—and even more disturbing—picture of how gender bias plays out on multiple levels, both within and outside the medical system, to affect women’s ability to get life-saving care in a crisis. (Maya Dusenbery, 3/23)
The Daily Beast: GOP Will Never Stop Coming For Obamacare
King v. Burwell hinges on whether or not four words buried deep in the text of the law contain the seeds of Obamacare’s destruction by eliminating tax subsidies for people living in states that declined to set up their own insurance exchanges. But even if they lose again at the court, conservatives say that they will continue to try to undo the law through the courts. (David Freedlander, 3/23)
The Weekly Standard: Journalists And Justices
King v. Burwell has generated a lobbying blitz in the liberal media of seemingly unprecedented proportions. It began even before the King petitioners asked the Supreme Court last July 31 to review a ruling against them by the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and is unlikely to stop until the justices issue their own decision .... the bulk of the lobbying, in newspapers, magazine articles, websites, and blogs, has consisted of belittling the petitioners, ridiculing the legal theories that their lawyers have put forth, impugning the motives of conservative and libertarian activists involved in the litigation, engaging in [arguments] designed to make the High Court feel sorry for the 8 million people who might not be able to afford Obamacare-mandated health insurance should the King petitioners prevail. (Charlotte Allen, 3/25)
Vox: Obamacare Is 5 Years Old, And Americans Are Still Worried About Death Panels
If there's any area of consensus, it's in misperceptions of the law: 82 percent of Americans either say the price tag has gone up, or aren't sure (the law's price has actually decreased as compared with initial estimates), and only 13 percent know the law met its first-year enrollment goals. Taken overall, the poll paints a frustrating picture for Democrats: most Americans aren't changing their opinion; those who are have mostly become more negative; and some widely held beliefs about the Affordable Care Act are far from accurate. But it's not all good news for Republicans, either: though most Americans dislike Obamacare, more want to see it improved than repealed. Democrats have lost the battle — they haven't made the health law more popular — but in thwarting repeal, and keeping Obamacare in place, they're arguably winning the war. (Sarah Kliff, 3/23)
