THE TREATMENT FEBRUARY 9, 2010
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CNN's Sanjay Gupta is staring a series called "Health Care Simplified" and invited me to be a guest on the first installment, which ran over the weekend. The other participant was Darshak Sanghavi, who is a frequent writer on medical issues and chief of pediatric cardiology at the University of Massachusetts.
Like me, Sanghavi supports the bills moving through Congress, albeit with reservations. For next week's segment, Gupta has said, he'll interview two relative skeptics.
About eight minutes of the discussion ran on air, which is a veritable eternity for cable news. You can watch the first part above, the second part below.
1 comments
Very good, Mr. Cohn. We already have rationing, done by the insurers when they decide what to cover and not to cover, based on criteria that is known only to the insurer. Even if you have good insurance coverage today, if you become ill, especially chronically ill, only then do you discover that your coverage is inadequate, that is doesn't cover many treatments, and has annual and lifetime caps that could deplete lifetime savings; not to mention (I would) insurer efforts to terminate your insurance coverage if you lose or change jobs. Without mandates only the sick or injured would buy insurance, resulting in unaffortable insurance; not to mention (I would) that everybody should pay their fair share of insurance costs so that the responsible people who buy insurance don't end up paying for medical care for the irresponsible uninsured when they show up sick or injured at the emergency room. My main complaint is with the host's focus on "details" that aren't details at all, but rather speculation of critics about the consequences of reform (rationing and, the one that sends me off the rails, taking away treatment options that only your very special doctor seems to believe in).
- raylward
February 9, 2010 at 1:52pm