Archive for June 2010
The Deficit Commission and Cuts to Medicare, Social Security
This year, Medicare turns 45, and maintaining this important federal program and protecting it from those who want to cut it is more important than ever. Because of recent economic and natural catastrophes, many people in this country are finding their quality of life slipping to standards lower than before the 1990s. Despite this, our…
Read MoreCritics Question Study Cited in Health Debate
By REED ABELSON and GARDINER HARRIS for the New York Times – In selling the health care overhaul to Congress, the Obama administration cited a once obscure research group at Dartmouth College to claim that it could not only cut billions in wasteful health care spending but make people healthier by doing so. Wasteful spending…
Read MoreWhacking the Old Folks
By William Greider for the Nation – In setting up his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, Barack Obama is again playing coy in public, but his intentions are widely understood among Washington insiders. The president intends to offer Social Security as a sacrificial lamb to entice conservative deficit hawks into a grand bipartisan…
Read MoreIn Canada: Public health care as sustainable as we want it to be
Claim that medicare is too costly to maintain is based on economic and political myths By Robert G. Evans, University Killam Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of British Columbia, for thestar.com – “There are stark and unpalatable choices that we face with respect to health care, but there is no magic…
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