As predicted, major insurance companies are complaining that they are not making enough money and so they are pulling out of the health insurance exchanges. What does this mean for health professionals and patients? How do we solve the ongoing health care crisis in the United States? We speak with Sam Jordan about his fight to force Care First Blue Cross to live up to its public obligations and Dr. Steffie Woolhandler about the current state of healthcare in the United States and what impact proposed solutions would have.
Listen here:
Relevant articles and websites:
Chase Brexton Union Vote to be Certified Next Week, Unless Health System Objects by Scott Dance
Care First is ordered to spend $56 million on community health needs by D.C. regulators by Mike DeBonis
Shameful Racial Disparities in Health and Health Care by Lyndonna Marrast, Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein
Mylan CEO Heather Bresch “Epi-Pen is my ‘baby'” by Damien Garde
Aetna warned it would drop out of Obamacare exchanges if its merger was blocked by Carolyn Y. Johnson
Physicians for a National Health Program
Guest:
Samuel Jordan is a lawyer, a human rights advocate, former chair of the DC Statehood Party and Executive Director of Health Care Now DC where he has led and continues to lead struggles to increase access to health care for residents in and around Washington, DC. Contact him at Samuel.jordan@msn.com.
Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH, FACP – internal medicine, New York/Boston is a practicing primary care physician, professor in the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College, adjunct clinical professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she co-directed the general internal medicine fellowship program and practiced primary care internal medicine at Cambridge Hospital.
Dr. Woolhandler earned her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University; her medical degree from Louisiana State University; and her master’s degree from the University of California. She worked in 1990-1991 as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health policy fellow at the Institute of Medicine and the U.S. Congress.
Dr. Woolhandler is a frequent speaker and has written extensively on health policy, administrative overhead and the uninsured. She has authored more than 150 journal articles, reviews, chapters, and books on health policy. A co-founder and board member of Physicians for a National Health Program, Dr. Woolhandler co-edits PNHP’s newsletter and is a principal author of PNHP articles published in the JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine in conjunction with Dr. David Himmelstein.