The law passed last year to provide health care to 9/11 responders will not pay for the treatment of cancer, according to a recent decision by the World Trade Center Health Program. From CNN: Workers who were involved in the response to the World Trade Center attack will not have their cancer treatments compensated under [...]

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has released a new report that indicates Gov. Deval Patrick’s goal of controlling health care cost by moving the state towards a global payment method is unlikely to produce real savings.

Single-payer health care was pushed out of the health care debate long before Congress voted in 2010. We’re determined to make sure that doesn’t happen again…but Karl Rove is already on the move. We must set the terms of the debate now, before Rove unleashes his inevitable attacks on Vermont. In order to build up our campaign for Vermont’s waivers early, we need to raise $15,000 before Rove turns his sights on Vermont.

Worrying about long term deficits with official unemployment over 9 percent and treasury bonds rates at near-record lows is inherently an act of madness. It is the antithesis of both progressive policy and basic logic. Left to their own devices, liberals would relegate reducing the deficit to a very low priority in this economic climate. Of course when you’re a billionaire like Pete Peterson and you’re willing to spend millions promoting deficit hysteria, your can convince “liberals” to play into your deficit fetish at even the most illogical of times. Hence the Roosevelt Institute’s participation in the Peter G. Peterson Foundations 2011 Fiscal Summit.

The country is suffering from high unemployment, underwater mortgages, and rapidly escalating tuition prices. Most regular people lucky enough to have a job are seeing shrinking benefits from health care to retirement packages
I would love to have a major political party or even a major politician simple tell the American people they actually don’t need to keep suffer.

I’ve often find Ezra Klein’s writing about health care policy confusing because from blog post to blog post there is often a jarring disconnect that can best be described at policy schizophrenia. The issue is most pronounced in his alternating from defender of health insurance exchanges, mostly when defending Obama, and his acknowledging they have been a proven failure, mostly when criticizing Republicans.

On the monumental issue of how to deal with rising health care costs, there are no two political leaders in America whose actions are more diametrically opposed than Democratic Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin and Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. Ryan wants to privatize Medicare, destroying America’s extremely popular and effective single-payer system for [...]

Massachusetts is still struggling with controlling health care costs since it decided to embrace health care reform by just expanding our broken private insurance system to cover more people. A problem in Massachusetts, which is common around the country, is that there are huge variances in what is paid for the same procedure. From the [...]

Getting waivers from HHS is going to be an important part of any state plan to implement their own single payer system.  And President Obama has already expressed his support for allowing states to begin receiving waivers from the ACA in 2014 rather than 2017.   That’s why FDL is joining with PNHP to ask both the President and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius to commit to granting Vermont the waivers it needs to make Green Mountain Care the best program it can possibly be for the people of Vermont.

You can sign the petition here.

Earlier this year, Connecticut’s Democratic Governor, Dannel Malloy, reached a deal that effectively gutted much of the SustiNet proposal that was a top goal of many health care activists in Connecticut. Originally, the SustiNet plan would have combined everyone currently covered by the state into a single insurance pool, and they would be offered a [...]