Indiana

Indiana Information

November 10, 2008

‘Medicare Advantage’ a misnomer
Jonathan D. Walker | The Journal Gazette
America has a split personality when it comes to health care. There is recognition that the government has to provide care for the people, but there is a conflicting sense that private industry has to be involved because it can somehow be more efficient. Medicare Advantage is the upshot of this thinking — but the result has been a lot of taxpayer dollars wasted on windfall payouts to private insurance companies.

October 20, 2008

Local surgeon tells audience at Greater Fort Wayne Chamber of Commerce: Health reform is crucial
By Bob Caylor | The News-Sentinel
Even a few years ago, a Fort Wayne physician laying out an impassioned argument for national health insurance - at the Greater Fort Wayne Chamber of Commerce, no less - might have seemed like an elaborate put-on. Dr. Jonathan Walker, a retinal surgeon, wasn’t kidding anyone. In his own highly specialized practice, he sees a toll in people with disabilities and avoidable catastrophic expenses, and he knows that it’s only a minuscule fraction of the human suffering and economic damage caused by tens of millions of Americans lacking health insurance.

July 23, 2008

Expand successful Medicare program to all
Edith Kenna | Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
July 30 is the 43rd anniversary of the passage of Medicare. Medicare began because no one except the government was willing to cover the oldest and sickest of us. Medicare now covers 34 million Americans. Consumer ratings of Medicare remain higher than that of private insurance companies. Medicare itself remains a model of effectiveness and efficiency, publicly funded and privately delivered, operating with administrative cost between 3 percent and 5 percent. If you don’t believe that Medicare is a success, try asking those covered by Medicare, friends, parents or grandparents if they want to give it up and go back to private insurance.

May 27, 2008

Health care for veterans should be a priority
By Jonathan Walker | Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
If you spend much time reading the news in Fort Wayne, you would get the impression that “Veterans Don’t Deserve Health Care” reflects how we feel about our veterans. For instance, there have been numerous reports about veterans trying to maintain the inpatient services at the Fort Wayne VA Medical Center so that they don’t have to drive to Indianapolis to obtain care. And veterans are not the only ones having trouble with health care. The family members of active-duty soldiers are given an insurance plan that is so bad that it can be hard to find a doctor. I have a patient who is married to a soldier in Iraq, and she has to drive from LaGrange to Huntington to see the only primary care doctor who will accept patients on the plan.

April 25, 2008

U.S. must look for a health care system to cover everyone
By Robert Stone, M.D. | Bloomington Herald Times | Guest column
Nationally, the week of April 27 to May 3 is Cover the Uninsured Week. Locally, many of the 883 GE employees and their families are getting closer every day to becoming uninsured. Since World War II, access to health care in this country has been based on employer-sponsored insurance, but the percentage of workers covered by their employers peaked in 2001 at 65 percent and has been dropping ever since. The projections are that in a very few years less than half of Indiana workers will have coverage through their work.

April 24, 2008

Providing health care for all shouldn’t make insurers rich
By Milton Fisk and Kay Mueller | Herald-Times | Guest column
Government subsidies and outsourcing may be good for business without always being good for the public. Medicare outsources the administration of its prescription drug program, Medicare D, to private insurers. Medicare Advantage — Medicare C — subsidizes managed care insurance plans for seniors choosing them. Several current presidential aspirants — Clinton and Obama — would subsidize the purchase of insurance for the low-income uninsured. Each of these plans offers private insurers protection against a less wasteful plan, one that does without private insurers.

February 11, 2008

Veterans are growing segment of the uninsured in America
By Dr. Rob Stone | Bloomington Herald Times
A newly published study from Harvard in the American Journal of Public Health (Himmelstein, Woolhandler, et al, December issue) adds a new sad story to the picture — another bunch of losers — American veterans. Almost 2 million of the uninsured are veterans, along with almost 4 million of their family members, so that one in every eight uninsured is a veteran or member of a veteran’s household.

February 11, 2008

Prescription for change
By Daniel Lee | The Indianapolis Star
Dr. Rob Stone, an emergency room physician at Bloomington Hospital, has emerged as one of Indiana’s most outspoken advocates for making insurance accessible to all. He is co-founder and director of Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan, which contends that the current system is too profit-driven, too inefficient, and leaves too many people without affordable access to health care.

November 14, 2007

Myth buster
Indira Dammu | Indiana Daily Student
Contrary to Republican claims, however, no Democratic presidential candidate has advocated a “free” universal health care system. Sen. John Edward’s health care plan, the most promising within the field, calls for a small tax increase and repeal of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. Sixty percent of Americans support such a tax increase if it means universal access to health care.

September 9, 2007

Medicare-for-all would keep everyone covered
Aaron E. Carroll, M.D. | The Indianapolis Star
One year ago, when the U.S. Census Bureau released its figures on Americans lacking health insurance in 2005, I wrote a piece here describing the sad state of the health care system in America. Recently, the 2006 numbers were released, and things have only gotten worse.