Longreads Pick
Native Americans were promised health care by the government, but what are they really getting? A visit to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where health services are underfunded, suicide rates are high, and the life expectancy is just 46 years:
It’s well-documented that the government’s attempts to meet its obligations to the Native Americans have failed miserably; the primary cause is insufficient funding. Currently, prisoners receive significantly higher per capita health-care funding than Native Americans. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reports the federal government spends about $5,000 per capita each year on health care for the general U.S. population, $3,803 on federal prisoners and $1,914 on Indian health care.
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Published: Nov 2, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,655 words)
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Longreads Pick
Most attention has been on the Supreme Court fight over The Affordable Care Act’s mandate to expand health insurance to 30 million more Americans. But what’s overshadowed is what the rest of the law is doing to change the business model for health care:
“The program launched in June 2009 with a checklist of quality metrics. To earn a bonus, surgeons would, among other things, need to ensure that antibiotics were administered an hour before surgery and halted 24 hours after, reducing the chances of costly complications.
“Only three doctors hit the metrics that first month, but their bonuses caught the attention of others. ‘There was a lot of, “Why are those doctors getting more, and I’m not?”‘ Zucker says. Eight doctors got bonus payments in July; two dozen got them in August. Compliance with certain quality metrics steadily climbed from 89 percent to 98 percent in three months.”
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Published: Mar 23, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,295 words)
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Longreads Pick
The story of a woman, the husband she vowed to care for, and how their relationship changed after his severe brain injury:
“On a Saturday morning in the spring of 2010, Page had arranged for Robert to come home from Sunrise for breakfast. She had asked Robert’s brother Will to drive down from Annandale to be with them and sent the girls out for the morning with Allan Ivie, a friend from childhood who had come back into her life. She had consulted with Robert’s doctors and her minister. She cooked up some eggs. She was nervous as she sat down at the big oak table next to her husband of 16 years.
“Then she had a conversation with Robert she had never imagined she could have.”
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Published: Jan 5, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,584 words)
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Longreads Pick
If neither party is proposing effective solutions to the cost crisis, and political deadlock in Washington is preventing the consideration of new ideas, are we doomed to witness a slowly collapsing health care system that eventually will provide adequate care only to those who can afford to pay? In his latest book on health care,7 the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr, who worked on the ill-fated Clinton Health Security Plan, despairs of any political action that could bring about major reform. However, a new movement in the medical profession might help to start such reform by reconfiguring the way medicine will be practiced.
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Published: Oct 27, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,857 words)
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Longreads Pick
“I watch my bride who, in doing the same things, when she started her organization, she gives it 24/7 every day, in defense of liberty. You know, and maybe that’s why we’re equally young and we love being with each other because we love the same things; we believe in the same things. So, with my wife and the people around me what I see unreinforced is that we are focused on defending liberty. So, I admire her and I love her for that because it keeps me going.” Then, concluding his speech, he said, “My bride is with me, Virginia Thomas, and some of you may know her. But the reason that I specifically bring it up: there is a price to pay today for standing in defense of your Constitution.”
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Published: Aug 29, 2011
Length: 36 minutes (9,118 words)
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The Worst Case: How the Courts Might Decide On Health Care Reform
It revolves around a novel philosophical twist: a distinction between activity and inactivity that, repeal advocates say, makes the insurance requirement an illegitimate exercise of federal authority. It’s an arcane legal point, but, suddenly, a consequential one, and not just because of its relevance to health care. Some experts believe that a ruling striking down part of the Affordable Care Act could render vulnerable wide swaths of the regulatory state, breathing new life into a notion of limited government this country rejected a very long time ago.
By Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic
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Longreads Pick
What the research shows about the relationship between relationships and physical well-being.
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Published: Apr 14, 2010
Length: 15 minutes (3,801 words)
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Longreads Pick
Therefore, while the health care bill could be changed at the margins, at some point the question became not whether the bill would meet most of the progressives’ expectations but whether there would be a bill at all. It was a lot easier for progressive critics to attack the bill, and say that it should be significantly changed—arguing in particular that it should not rely so much on the flawed existing private insurance system—than it was to find sufficient votes to change it.
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Published: Mar 11, 2010
Length: 8 minutes (2,116 words)
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