Health Insurance

Thanks to America's health care system, today was a very stressful day for me. My story is so typical as to be boring -- which is a really sad commentary.

This morning, while thumbing through some routine paperwork, my wife discovered that I have no health insurance. Without going...

I happened to be in the room, researching a book, when a group of doctors were debating what to do for an 86-year-old woman with breast cancer. If she had been thirty years younger, with the same early cancer, the regimen would have included a lumpectomy with radiation. Instead,...

Hillary has stuck her political finger in the wind and discovered that 2008 is a good political year to find her inner populist and lash out rhetorically against oil companies, defense contractors, and health insurers who have benefited from nearly 8 years of Republican corporate welfare. Her rhetoric has rightfully...

What kind of nation are we when we fail to guarantee access to affordable health care for all of our children and others who are in need? And what kind of nation will we become if we continue to look the other way?

"Cover the Uninsured" week is an appropriate...

If every port on the West Coast of the United States of America was shut down because of a terrorist threat, do you think it would make the news?

So do I. Any event of this magnitude would be the lead story on every evening news broadcast in the nation....

Health policy proposals can reflect many different ideologies or political philosophies, but John McCain's plan isn't so much ideological as utilitarian. There has been a lot of excellent analysis of it in recent days, but one critical aspect has somehow been overlooked: The McCain plan, if enacted, would result in...

John McCain should be taken at his word. He just gave a major speech in which he unveiled his "new" idea for how to fix health care in America (which is actually just recycled Bush policy). To prove he knows what he is talking about, I challenge him to be...

In a stunning - if predictable - story, the Hill newspaper reports that congressional Democrats are now saying that they will effectively thwart any effort to create a national health care program. Here is the key excerpt:

"Congressional Democrats are backing away from healthcare reform promises made by their...

Saturday the Blue America PAC endorsed Larry Joe Doherty, a populist Democrat running for Congress in one of the gerrymandered districts Tom DeLay created to thwart the will of Austin residents by cutting the city up into three pieces and giving each piece to a bizarre entity designed solely to...

Government supported health insurance will not achieve universal health.

A phrase recently touted in newspapers, on radio and TV is "Universal Health Care." Expert pundits and Presidential hopefuls wave it about like the Holy Grail: the ANSWER to all health care woes. "Universal Health Care" is none of the...

It's a beautiful morning in Orange County, the surf's up, and it's spring break for the students at Valencia High School, except one: 17-year-old Nick Colombo. Nick is home in bed, suffering from the devastating and painful complications of his four-year battle with Ewing's Sarcoma. He's waiting for a break...

John McCain believes that the federal government has no responsibility to help homeowners who were bamboozled into taking out mortgages they couldn't afford. For him, it's not just a policy issue, it's philosophical.

Sayeth the Senator:

"I have always been committed to the principle that it is not...

The AFL-CIO and its community arm, Working America, just released their 2008 Health Care for America Survey. Most of the 26,419 online respondents are insured, employed, and college graduates -- those, the report explains, most likely to react positively to America's health care system.

But with its pie charts...

Following is the text of my speech at the Take Back America Conference panel on "The Single Payer Health Care Movement and the Plans of the Democratic Presidential Nominee." I was honored to be on the panel with Courtney Farr of the California Nurses Association and Congressman John Conyers, Chairman...

This morning, let's consider the case of Fay Derricote, an obese, 44-year-old former government contract worker confined to a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis. For the first time in her life, she has good health insurance -- provided by Medicare because she is disabled.

That's precisely what her former employer,...