President-elect Barack Obama should take note – health reform is about the little things just as much as it is sweeping changes to the system.

Information gathered from a batch of more than 8,500 meetings held around the country in December will be compiled and used to help design the healthcare proposal that has been in the news as of late. Obama’s transition team plans to post some of the material at change.gov.

One particular meeting took place late December 2008, between newly appointed secretary of health and human services, the former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and more than two dozen seniors During this meeting, seniors told Daschle that they placed more importance on certain things such as waiting times to see their doctor, the increasing cost of prescription drugs, and the narrow range of Medicare coverage for certain medical procedures, equipment, and treatments.

(more…)

Universal healthcare could be useful in more ways than one. With more than half a million jobs lost in America in November (the biggest decline in a single month in more than thirty years), the country is in dire straights. Nearly 7% of the nation is wholly unemployed, and a total of 12.5% are either unemployed or barely working. That’s 19.3 million Americans who have little or no work.

The incoming administration is preparing a stimulus package to be introduced in the New Year, intended to get the economy ticking over again by investing billions in infrastructure. The package may include upgrading school buildings, upgrading public buildings to improve energy efficiency, building of bridges and roads, extending the reach of broadband internet, and improving electronic record keeping for medical billing.

(more…)

AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, but now known more commonly by its acronym) is a non-profit, non-government interest group which, according to its web site mission statement, is “dedicated to enhancing quality of life for all as we age,” by providing “a wide range of unique benefits, special products, and services for our members.” AARP acts as a member advocate, and is a powerful lobbying group. It also sells insurance, investment products, and endorses certain insurance companies.

Sounds good, yes? But by virtue of its habit of endorsing insurance companies, AARP has recently come under fire. The Kaiser Family Network recently revealed that AARP’s endorsements don’t come cheaply – 43% of the revenue the supposedly non-profit, independent advocacy group collected in 2007 came from royalties and fees the organization took from insurance companies – as payment for endorsements.

Doesn’t sound too much like consumer advocacy, does it.

(more…)

Many of us rarely ponder what our health and life are worth. It’s often assumed that life is priceless, but that doesn’t do justice to the stratospherically rising health care and insurance costs; in fact health bills are now the leading cause of bankruptcy.

One common way to calculate the value of our life is to use the same equation used by many health care providers. That cost was once $50,000 per year of quality life, according to the international standard for government-run health insurance plans across the globe. This number has been disputed by economists at Stanford and they were able to calculate that a year of quality life is actually $129,000! That is a lot of money for a year of life, but of course: life is priceless!

(more…)