Health care: are you better off?
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As far as I can tell, health care gets very little coverage in the blogosphere. Yet health care is one of the most important issues Americans face today, and it&#39;s one of the areas in which Bush&#39;s policies have had the most nefarious effects.
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The most authoritative report on the cost of health insurance came out Tuesday, and itÂs sure to cause some new outrage.
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What you can learn about the health-care system in 10 not-so-easy hours.
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Health insurance premiums for  workers are rising around three times faster than their wages,  and health costs eat up a quarter of earnings for more than 14  million Americans, according to a survey on Tuesday.
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6 Perspective article on health reform (&quot;A referendum on health care&quot;). Hoff detailed the findings of a recent Commonwealth Fund Survey concerning the public&#39;s view of the health care system and then applied
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This week&#39;s question: What, if anything, should the federal government do to improve the country&#39;s health insurance system?
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SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- The national hand-wringing over rapidly rising health-care costs generally ignores one point that at least some people find hard to miss: Many patients are getting much better results for their money than they did in the past.
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WASHINGTON -- Routine failure to provide needed health care in the United States came with the price tag of $1.8 billion in additional medical costs and up to 79,000 avoidable deaths, according to a new study.
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WEDNESDAY, Jan. 5 (HealthDayNews) -- Children with special health-care needs have health-care costs three times greater than other children, says a study in the January issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
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A new study presents stark evidence that high medical payments do not buy high-quality patient care.
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Even with Medicare, you'll end up paying nearly half of your health-care expenses, so if you don't have retiree coverage from your employer, you may want supplemental insurance. Make sure you have what you need.
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Health plans with high patient-paid deductibles, embraced by many Republicans as a market-based solution to quell soaring medical-care costs, lead to poorer quality care and increasing patient debt, a study released on Thursday said.
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To cope with rising health care costs, companies are asking current retirees to pay more for health insurance and some are telling future retirees to do without, according to a study released yesterday.
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Despite boasts of Canada&#39;s superior healthcare system, heart attack patients might wish they were sick in the United States. That&#39;s because a new study suggests US patients fare much better than their northern neighbours.
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I hope the Republicans come prepared to debate health care this year, and they leave the platitudes and slogans home.  Enough of us have been seriously sick, or know someone who has, or have family members who have been or are now. The way the Republicans describe health care, it's as if they've never been through it or don't know anyone who has. I got some pushback, not much, from a casual mention of universal health care a few days ago. Some think the problem can be solved through the "private sector" but that's nonsense. There is no such thing in health care. It's not a free market, as anyone who's been through it can tell you. There's nothing free about it. (Free as in freedom, not as in free beer.) When you check into a hospital you turn over your whole being to the health care system. I can't imagine anything changing that, nor do I think it should. When you're dangerously ill, decisions must be made about you. To people who have never relinquished control, it's a big trip, because that's what you have to do. You spend huge amounts of time waiting. You can't sleep because hospitals are 24-by-7. You're much more likely to get an infection in a hospital, and infection on top of other disease can kill. Even so, people are treated and some even are cured by the system. Lives are definitely prolonged, pain is eased.  Whether we have universal health care or not, it won't change the basics of how health care works, and how unfair it is to be sick and fighting for your life. But there are some things we can change, and if you have a heart, and think about it, I don't see how anyone could be against universal health care and still sleep at night. One commenter said that no one is ever turned away from an emergency room, as if that's all there was to health care.  First, emergency rooms do turn people away, and some of them die. But most disease is not treated in emergency rooms. If you need drugs to treat cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, AIDS, heart disease, depression, arthritis, emphysema, to name a few common chronic diseases -- you're out of luck if you don't have insurance. You could die years before you would with treatment, or might suffer, where if you had good insurance, you wouldn't.  I'm lucky I have good health insurance. It's lucky that I lived in Massachusetts when my COBRA policy expired, it's the one state in the US that has liberalized health insurance. I'm lucky that I can afford the monthly payments. I'm lucky. But why should getting the care and treatment you need depend on luck? We can do so much better. And I think our country would do better with a healthy population that knows if they, or someone they love, got sick they'll the help they need. It'll be interesting to see if we can get McCain to talk about this, if he turns out to be the Republcan nominee. The Republicans have never been responslble about this issue. It's of huge importance to Americans, and McCain presents himself as an honest person. He must understand how the health care system actually works. He's been through it himself, probably many times.  BTW, Hillary's passion for computerizing medical records is a good thing. She's right, a lot of money could be saved, the system could be made much more efficient, people would get better treatment, and lives would be saved. The sooner we get busy doing this, the better it will be for all of us.
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How to benefit from increased spending on preventative medicine.
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SUNDAY, June 3 (HealthDay News) -- Not every cancer patient is reaping the benefits of advances in medical care, new research shows.