Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
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For end-of-the-year columns, it’s customary to recap the events of the past 12 months, usually highlighting a mix of the good and the bad. Because this year has been dominated by health, in particular COVID-19, and my beat is health, it seems fitting to reflect on where we are. Where we are is not good. A headline in the Los Angeles Times seemed to sum up the current state of the U.S. health care system: “Bodies pile up, patient care falters as COVID-19 devastates L.A. County hospitals.” In the Times’ story a hospital critical care nurse s...
As insurance companies push doctors to save money by switching their patients to generic drugs, complaints about those generics appear to be on the upswing. That’s the observation of journalist Katherine Eban, who has written a book, “Bottle of Lies,” that tells a very dark tale about the generic drug industry and the safety of generic drugs Americans are increasingly taking. “My inbox is full of communications from patients who were on a drug that worked but were switched to a generic that didn’t work,” she told me. “Patients find themselv...
Maybe – just maybe – Americans will get some relief from the relentlessly rising prices of pharmaceuticals. That, of course depends on Congress pushing back against the drug companies’ formidable lobbying machine, their generous campaign contributions, and the industry’s historical coziness with members of Congress. But this year seems different. When you consider that the country’s spending on prescription drugs increased by 28% from 2011 to 2016, it’s easy to see why it’s harder for politicians to ignore the public anger over prices of lif...
Consumers hoping a couple of recent policy proposals might lower prices for their prescription drugs may be out of luck, at least for now. Earlier this year the Trump administration had proposed a rule that would have required prescription drug manufacturers to disclose list prices for drugs advertised on TV. Drug makers would have had to tell the public the list price of a 30-day supply of any drugs covered under the Medicare and Medicaid programs that cost at least $35 a month. Some experts argued the rule would not have been very effective b...
Is the U.S. ready for a discussion about paying for caregiving, an increasingly vexing and costly problem for a growing number of Americans? The answer may be “yes.” It has become obvious that long-term-care insurance is not the answer to paying for nursing home and other kinds of care for the elderly. Sales for this product have been declining, the result of sky-high premiums, rate increases, and the difficulty of qualifying for a policy if you’re sick. But the elderly are not the only Americans needing care. At the other end of the age spect...
It is open enrollment time for medical insurance, and for people having to shop in the individual insurance market; the choices are as confusing as ever. Television ads splashed over the airwaves as the midterm electioneering came to a close didn’t help much. By the end of the campaign it was hard to find any candidate – Democrat or Republican – who didn’t want to cover people with preexisting health conditions. The devil was in the details, though, and how politicians suggested people should be covered remained mostly a mystery. In Missour...
Making decisions about Medicare coverage has never been easy. Over the years the task has become more complicated as Congress has moved to privatize the system. Open enrollment, the time for evaluating your coverage and making changes if you can, opens Oct. 15 and runs through Dec. 7 this year. This is the first of two columns that address decisions people who are about to become eligible for Medicare and those already on the program will have to make. While some 57 million people are still in traditional Medicare, which remains a social...
Anyone buying health insurance this fall faces a daunting task: having to choose among multiple, often complex options that offer widely varying degrees of protection. For starters, association health plans are back, allowing small businesses to band together to buy insurance. So are the short-term policies that may last from only a few months to a year. Then there are plans offered by church ministries that look like insurance but really aren’t. Plus, multiple and complex options remain from the Affordable Care Act. And to complicate matters f...
