Tag: health care reform

Report: Health Care Sharing Ministries pose risks to consumers and insurance markets

Health care sharing ministries are exempt from virtually all regulation, do not guarantee payment, and offer extremely limited coverage. Because their features closely resemble traditional insurance products, they can confuse consumers into thinking they are buying conventional health insurance.

/ August 16, 2018

Dr. Donald Berwick and “patient-centered” medicine: Letting the woo into the new health care law?

There’s been a bit of buzz in the health blogs over President Obama’s decision last week to use the mechanism of a recess appointment to be the director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Recess appointments, for those who may not be aware, allow a President to put a nominee in place when Congress is in recess in order...

/ July 12, 2010

Beware religious meddling in the latest version of health care reform

Every so often, as the health care reform initiative spearheaded by the Obama Administration wends its way through Congress (or, more precisely, wend their ways through Congress, given that there are multiple bills coming from multiple committees in both Houses), I’ve warned about various chicanery from woo-friendly legislators trying to legitimize by legislation where they’ve failed by science various “alternative” medicine practices....

/ October 19, 2009

Tom Harkin, NCCAM, health care reform, and a cancer treatment that is worse than useless

PRELUDE: SOME BAD NEWS FOR ADVOCATES OF SCIENCE-BASED MEDICINE It was a bad week for science-based medicine. It was a good week (sort of) for science-based medcine. First the bad. There has been a development that anyone who supports science in medicine and opposes quackery will likely find disturbing. Do you remember Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA)? We’ve written about him extensively over...

/ September 14, 2009

More evidence that CAM/IM advocates see health care reform as an opportunity to claim legitimacy

Four weeks ago (was it really that long?), I wrote one of my usual lengthy essays for this blog in which I analyzed two editorials published by some very famous advocates of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM)/”integrative medicine” (IM). They included one in that credulous repository of all things antivaccine The Huffington Post (no, this isn’t about vaccines, but I can’t resist...

/ February 9, 2009