Saturday, January 03, 2009

Healthcare Guaranteed

I have just finished reading a book called Healthcare Guaranteed by Ezekiel Emanuel, in part for preparation for a health care policy class I am taking as an elective this next semester. In this book Emanuel has laid out a pretty good plan and defended it well and he compared and contrasted it with several other ideas such as a single payer system, health savings accounts, and others. He calls his plan the Guaranteed Health Access Plan. 

So anyway, I wanted to see if this book and his idea were getting any attention in the media to see if it was on any politicians radar screen. What I found out is that he is one of three brothers. One of his brothers is Rahm Emanuel, the new Chief of Staff for the Obama administration. Curiosity satisfied... I think it will be getting a thorough review.

I found a video of him on ABC 7 news out of San Francisco that introduces a brief outline of the plan and talks about the book. PBS also has a video and transcript posted on their web page that goes into more detail than the ABC 7 piece. Not much else comes up under a google search of news articles about Ezekiel Emanuel or from the name of the book. I did however find the website and blog for his plan using a regular google search. The blog has some interesting posts, some of them parallel what the ideas he wrote in his book while others expand and update his arguments. One that I found particularly interesting was the post "AMA Takes on Health Insurance Reform." 

One area of the book that wasn't particularly well thought out or discussed was why some doctors were advocating for a single payer system. In my mind this can be boiled down to the hassle of dealing with multiple insurance companies and because Emanuel's plan uses health insurance companies to cover patients and pay doctors, I feel like this is a gap that still needs some thought. 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home