Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Repealing Obamacare; John Oliver On Vaccines & Hearing Voices
Vox: The Risky — But Not Impossible — Path Forward For The Senate Health Care Bill
The divisions between Senate Republicans about how to repeal and replace Obamacare only seem to be widening, and yet Mitch McConnell must see some path to consensus to fulfill his party’s seven-year pledge to undo the health care law. (Dylan Scott, 6/28)
Politico Magazine: How The GOP Turned Against Medicaid
Medicaid’s roots were humble, its ambitions modest. As originally conceived, the program provided health insurance to poor children, poor pregnant women and some qualifying parents. In its first year, its budget was less than $1 billion—about $7.7 billion in today’s dollars. Over 50 years, successive Congresses and presidential administrations vastly expanded the program’s scope to cover 80 million people, or almost one-quarter of the population. Its budget last year was $378 billion. To be sure, it has never enjoyed the popularity of Medicare, which covers a much more politically powerful constituency: seniors. But it has proven highly durable. Despite the GOP’s preference for smaller government and lower taxes, for many decades, Medicaid enjoyed broad backing from Republican leaders. (Joshua Zeitz, 6/27)
Medium: A (Not So) Quick Note About Insurance And The Government And Being Super-Disabled
Back in March 2005, while I was a 23-year-old junior in college (“23-year-old junior in college” is one of those phrases that kind of explains itself), I broke the C4 vertebrae in my neck and ended up mostly paralyzed from the neck down. (I have limited use of my right arm, very limited use of my left, and… that’s about it.) At the time, I was on my parents’ health insurance. This was good. Not the neck thing. That could have worked out better. (Brian Grubb, 6/25)
The New Yorker: How The Senate’s Health-Care Bill Threatens The Nation's Health
To understand how the Senate Republicans’ health-care bill would affect people’s actual health, the first thing you have to understand is that incremental care—regular, ongoing care as opposed to heroic, emergency care—is the greatest source of value in modern medicine. There is clear evidence that people who get sufficient incremental care enjoy better prevention, earlier diagnosis and management of urgent conditions, better control of chronic illnesses, and longer life spans. (Atul Gawande, 6/26)
HBO: Vaccines: Last Week Tonight With John Oliver
The benefits of vaccines far outweigh the minuscule risks, but some parents still question their safety. John Oliver discusses why some people may still feel uncertainty about childhood vaccinations. (6/25)
Vox: What No One Tells New Moms About What Childbirth Can Do To Their Bodies
Even with Obamacare, most women receive poor postnatal care in the critical first 12 weeks after birth known as “the fourth trimester.” Postnatal care is one of the most under-discussed and under-studied issues in medicine. (One reason, among many, that women still die far too often after giving birth.) Lately, though, we’ve begun to learn about the experiences of postpartum women, thanks to the 4th Trimester Project, a groundbreaking study led by a team of doctors and researchers at UNC Chapel Hill. For two years, they have been following postpartum women and health care providers to learn how new moms are served — and how health care for them could be better. (Allison Yarrow, 6/26)
The Atlantic: How Psychics Cope With Hearing Voices Could Help People With Psychotic Disorders
It was a lonely time in Jessica’s life. She was living away from home for the first time, and she thinks her grandmother was drawn by some sense of that. She eventually told her parents what happened, and according to her they were concerned, but not overly panicked. “My parents are probably the least judgmental people I know,” she said. As Jessica tells it, over the next two years, spirits visited her every now and again. Her brother-in-law’s deceased father began forming before her, ghostlike, just as her grandmother did. And while the experiences were intense and at times made her feel “crazy,” she said, they were infrequent, and insists that they were never a real source of suffering. (Joseph Frankel, 6/27)
The New Yorker: My Dentist’s Murder Trial
My dentist was recently indicted for murder.” It sounds like a droll line that you’d use at a dinner party, but in my case it’s true. On October 15, 2015, Dr. Gilberto Nunez, whose patient I had been for many years, was indicted for killing his friend Thomas Kolman, of Saugerties, New York, by getting him “to ingest a substance that caused his death.” (James Lasdun, 6/26)
