Bernie Sanders
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As Vermont Goes Single Payer, So Goes The Nation?
Three years ago, Peter Shumlin, the governor of Vermont, signed a bill creating Green Mountain Care: a single-payer system in which, if all goes according to plan, the state will regulate doctors’ fees and cover Vermonters’ medical bills.
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Congress Tries To Curtail NSA Spying, Sort Of
Buried in a soon-to-pass government spending bill is a ban on the monitoring of any specific U.S. citizen's phone calls and online activities. The small, vague passage, however, leaves wiggle room for the National Security Agency to continue sweeping up Americans' call and Internet data en masse. Read More »
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Deaths By Medical Mistakes Hit Records
It's a chilling reality – one often overlooked in annual mortality statistics: Preventable medical errors persist as the No. 3 killer in the U.S. – third only to heart disease and cancer – claiming the lives of some 400,000 people each year...
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DoD Chastised For Role In VA Claims Backlog
Under fire from Congress for the Defense Department’s contributing role in the Veterans Affairs Department’s disability claims morass, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told House lawmakers Tuesday that DoD is “restructuring” relevant offices and responsibilities to ensure quicker delivery of medical records to VA. Read More »
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DoD Chastised For Role In VA Claims Backlog
Under fire from Congress for the Defense Department’s contributing role in the Veterans Affairs Department’s disability claims morass, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told House lawmakers Tuesday that DoD is “restructuring” relevant offices and responsibilities to ensure quicker delivery of medical records to VA. Read More »
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Drug Bust: Generic Drug Prices On the Rise
For 30 years, generic medications helped make health care cheaper. Why is their cost surging?...
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Fixing The Veteran's Healthcare Mess
What went wrong with our Veteran’s health care system? It comes down to two main culprits – first, the system was asked to do too much, and second, incentives put in place to make the system perform better backfired. In this post, I address the stresses in the Veterans Health Administration, how the incentives backfired, and ways to help get the VA health care system back on track...
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How Can Government Battle A 'Suicide Epidemic' Among Veterans?
The Fort Hood shooting is an extreme and shocking example of what has become a chronic concern for the military: soldiers with mental-health problems taking their own lives. And it's not just the active-duty military who face what has become an increasingly daunting problem.
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How VA Outsourcing Hurts Veterans
On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, announced that he had reached a compromise with John McCain and other Senate Republicans on how to fix whatever it is that needs fixing at the VA...the bill also contains one provision that is a significant concession to Republican enemies of government. If enacted, it would lower the quality of health care received by veterans while setting back the movement for health care delivery system reform generally.
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Instead of Medicare for All, How about VA for All?
I wonder -- why would people be calling for a new system that would still have thousands of private hospitals/facilities and millions of healthcare professionals, practicing FFS medicine using countless systems and data structures? In short, why aren't people calling for VA for All? Like Medicare, the VA -- more especially, its healthcare component, the Veterans Health Administration -- is charged with providing healthcare to a designed population, in this case, veterans. Unlike Medicare, though, it does so as an integrated health system (by far the largest in the U.S.), with 170 VA Medical Centers, over a thousand outpatient facilities, and somewhere over 100,000 physicians...it offers some of the finest care in the world. It offers a range of services that Medicare can only dream of, and it does so at, it is believed, lower costs than private coverage or even Medicare. Plus, it also was an innovator in electronic health records and is today in telehealth. What's not to like?
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Iowa Is Voting on Healthcare Tonight
Health care is no longer about us. Health care is about waste, fraud and abuse. Health care is about “bending the curve”. Health care is about global competitiveness of corporations. Health care is about carving up a $3 trillion opportunity. Health care is about private equity, mezzanine funding, return on investment, valuations and public offerings. Health care is about the economy, and the economy is no longer about us.
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Lawmakers Push Hagel On DoD-VA Interoperability
Lawmakers on the House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs committees are pressuring Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel for clarification on the agency’s plans for speeding up information sharing and updating its electronic health record system. Read More »
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Lawmakers Seek Lower Price On Bill For Vets’ Health Care
Stung by sticker shock, members of Congress are scrambling to lower the cost of a bill to fix veterans’ health care amid a growing uproar over long waits for appointments and falsification of records to cover up the delays at Veterans Affairs hospitals...
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National Nurses United Director RoseAnn DeMoro Named to 100 Most Influential in Healthcare List
It’s 14 for 14. On a list dominated by hospital, insurance, pharmaceutical, and other healthcare industry corporations, National Nurses United Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro has again been named as one of the 100 most influential people in healthcare in the U.S.
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Open Source Competitions And Prizes #1
I recently read Future Perfect by Steven Johnson. The book articulates what is meant by a person being a “Peer Progressive” – someone with a set of values based on the power of distributed networks to solve problems (a “Baran Web”) as opposed to a more regulated, centralized mechanism (a “Legrand Star”). Read More »
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