Viewpoints: GOP Wrestles With Court Response; Mental Health And Poverty; Need For Nurses
A selection of opinions on health care from around the country.
USA Today:
GOP Fills Obamacare Replacement With Poison Pills: Our View
In the next month or so, the Supreme Court will issue a ruling that could deeply wound or maybe even kill Obamacare — an outcome that would leave opponents cheering. But like the dog that catches the car he's been chasing, their excitement is likely to fade quickly if they're not ready with a replacement. Insurance markets would fall into chaos, causing at least 7.5 million people to lose the subsidies that make their premiums affordable, and Republicans would rightly be blamed. (5/27)
USA Today:
Sen. Ron Johnson: My Plan Would Protect Patients
Americans went to the polls in November 2012 unaware that President Obama's assurance, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it," would be crowned "Lie of the Year" by PolitiFact. A year later, millions of Americans lost health care plans they liked and could afford while also losing access to doctors they knew and trusted. ... Now that Obamacare has been implemented and Americans can judge both the good and the bad in it, it should be a central issue in the 2016 elections. ... A bill I have authored would protect patients — and give America an informed choice in the 2016 election between Obamacare and an affordable replacement. (Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., 5/27)
Bloomberg View:
GOP Split: What To Hate About Obamacare
Republicans dislike Obamacare: The party is unified on that issue. But they don't all dislike it for the same reasons, and their disagreements help explain their continued inability to figure out how to respond to a Supreme Court decision on the law that's expected by the end of June. (Ramesh Ponnuru, 5/28)
Bloomberg View:
Republicans Would 'Save' Obamacare By Killing It
There's good reason for Congress to remodel some aspects of Obamacare. More than half of people who get health coverage through the insurance exchanges have high out-of-pocket costs, for example; 1 in 10 say they've gone without medical care because of the expense. Unfortunately, the congressional proposal getting attention at the moment -- from Republican Representative Tom Price of Georgia -- wouldn't fix these problems. And it would do away with parts of the law that are working well. (5/27)
Orlando Sentinel:
Senate Plan Deserves Fair Hearing From House, Scott
In a good-faith effort to break the health-care policy deadlock that has immobilized Tallahassee, Florida Senate President Andy Gardiner unveiled a compromise Tuesday. The ink was barely dry when House Speaker Steve Crisafulli and Gov. Rick Scott rejected it. This is not leadership. Floridians deserve better. (5/28)
Huffington Post:
Mental Illness Is A Much Bigger Problem For The Poor, New Study Shows
If you want to talk about inequality in America, you should be talking about mental illness -- and the ability of people to get treatment for it. On Thursday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new study that demonstrates, in vivid terms, something that public health experts have known for a while: Mental health problems are far more common among the poor than the rich. ... The study, whose lead author is CDC epidemiologist Judith Weissman, does not address the issue of causality -- in other words, whether mental health problems lead to more economic hardship or whether economic hardship leads to more mental health problems. But most researchers believe the process works in both directions. (Jonathan Cohn, 5/28)
The New York Times:
We Need More Nurses
Inadequate staffing is a nationwide problem, and with the exception of California, not a single state sets a minimum standard for hospital-wide nurse-to-patient ratios. Dozens of studies have found that the more patients assigned to a nurse, the higher the patients’ risk of death, infections, complications, falls, failure-to-rescue rates and readmission to the hospital — and the longer their hospital stay. According to one study, for every 100 surgical patients who die in hospitals where nurses are assigned four patients, 131 would die if they were assigned eight. (Alexandra Robbins, 5/28)
Forbes:
Does it Pay For Hospitals To Provide Lousy Care?
I recently had surgery to relieve an impingement of my left hip. I suffered a complication of the procedure [and] the hospital where I received the surgery performed follow-up care to treat the complication. As I lay on the table receiving that second treatment I wondered – okay, I mainly wondered “are they really going to stick a needle there?!,” – but I also asked myself “how strange is it that when patients experience complications, hospitals are rewarded with money to perform additional procedures?” (Peter Ubel, 5/27)
The Philadelphia Inquirer:
The Latest Weapon In Fight Against Superbugs
No, it’s not a new drug. It’s more policy. Antibiotic resistance is nothing new. The rogues gallery of superbugs continues to grow, with major concerns around antibiotic-resistant Salmonella Typhi, antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), multidrug-resistant Tuberculosis, and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). The CDC estimates that antibiotic-resistant bacteria cause two million illnesses and 23,000 deaths in the U.S. every year, and cost at least $20 billion in direct health care costs and up to $35 billion in lost productivity. (Marcelo H. Fernandez-Viña, 5/27)
