Archives » Thursday, August 13, 2009
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Katie Connolly
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Aug 13, 2009 02:30 PM
The New York Times reported yesterday
on the thousands of people lining up for a free health clinic in L.A.
Many came for routine medical care, like breast exams, TB tests, and Pap
smears. Reading this report reminded me of a recent conversation I had with Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund. The fund conducts a range of comparative analyses of First World health-care systems. Their findings are often surprising, and usually provide striking illustrations of the inadequacies of the American system. I discussed with Davis the difficulties many Americans have with accessing primary care, compared with their international peers.
Davis believes the problems can be accounted for, in large measure, by
the type of physicians available to Americans. "We have about the same
number of doctors per capita as other countries, but a higher
proportion of our doctors are specialists," she says. This shortage has
led to a squeeze on other services, and a yawning gap in after-hours
and weekend care. In a 2008 survey, the fund reports that 18 percent of
Americans end up in the emergency room for a condition that could have
been treated by their primary physician, if available. In Germany, only
7 percent of people end up in that predicament, and in the Netherlands it's
8 percent. Only Canada performed worse than the U.S. on this measure.
Similarly, only 40 percent of American primary-care physicians said they
have arrangements for taking care of patients on nights and weekends, a much
lower proportion than in other countries.
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Daniel Stone
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Aug 13, 2009 10:22 AM
Loyalty is everything in Washington, a town in which it's most elusive. The White House survives and thrives on it; staffers both high level and low tend to fall in line directly behind the president during an administration. But after it ends, do the rules change? They do if you're Dick Cheney, who's made it very clear in recent weeks that his loyalty, and even friendship, with his former boss were far less than cuddly in the latter years of the Bush administration. An account last month in Time detailed an 11th-hour spat between Bush and Cheney over the lack of pardon for the vice president's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, in the Plamegate scandal. But there was apparently more to their eroding relationship than just that episode. Now Cheney says he plans to open the floodgates, offering a full and largely uncensored account of what actually happened in the Bush White House. "The statute of limitations has expired," Cheney has told his biographer, referring to all the secrets that he felt, until now, he had to protect.
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