Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
In 1993, Colombia enacted ‘la Ley 100’ (law 100) transformed the way in which the poor are able to access health care. Previously, the poor could go to public hospitals and receive free or inexpensive care if the hospital would accept them This was financed through higher prices for customers who were able to pay for…
The following is a timeline which summarizes the genesis and evolution of government provided health insurance in the United States. Major Foreign Events: 1883: Otto von Bismark, then Chancellor of Germany passes a compulsory health insurance bill for factory and mine workers 1911: Germany extends compulsory insurance coverage to almost all employees 1911: David Lloyd…
Fabio Bertranou (1999) in his article in Health Policy gives a concise summary of attempted health insurance reforms in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s. He looks at three cases: Chile’s reform in the 1980s and Argentina’s and Colombia’s reforms in the 1990s. He cites three major issues each nation faces: Does open enrollment…
Thursday’s edition of the New York Times contained an article (“British Clinic is Allowed to Deny Medicine“) describing how a British court ruled that local health authorities could deny coverage of a breast cancer medicine since it was not yet approved. The drug in question is Herceptin. “Herceptin, made by Roche, is currently licensed for…
While most Americans envy the Canadian single payer system, Canadians may be looking south for inspiration to reform their health care system. Today’s Vancouver Sun reports that: British Columbia’s Liberal government is launching a sweeping review of medicare, promising to let citizens decide if they want a health care system that might feature even more…
A 31 January 2006 Times article (“Smaller is better, says minister in hospitals shake-up“) states that the National Health Service (NHS) hopes to increase the number of small in the UK to counter the trend of recent hospital closings. Is this a good policy? Let’s look at the Pros and Cons: Pros: Smaller, more numerous…
A recent article in Nature (“The Scaling Laws of Human Travel“) claims that the flow of money may provide a good model of how diseases spread in modern society. Previous models of how pandemics generally thought that the dispersion would occur slowly over a contiguous geographic region. As air travel becomes more and more common…