Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, June 25, 2012

HCR -- The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

By John Ballard


As we wait to find out how badly the Supreme Court will savage PPACA this reassuring post and comment appeared at The Health Care Blog. 



Better Healthcare for Less - Even the NY Times Says: "It's a movement!"
By Joe Flower


I've been saying it for years now, it's the theme of Healthcare Beyond Reform: Doing It Right For Half The Cost - and now it's even hit the editorial pages of the NY Times: A June 2 editorial, "Treating You Better For Less," trumpets the "good news" about a "grass-roots movement" using "already proven techniques" that "could transform the entire system in ways that will benefit all Americans."


"It is a measure of how dysfunctional the system has become," says the editorial, "that these successful experiments - based on medical sense, sound research and efficiencies - seem so revolutionary." It goes on to describe several of the kinds of new ventures in efficiency and effectiveness that make up the core of Healthcare Beyond Reform, in different healthcare systems and health insurers across the country.


The news here is not that these things are happening, or that they are so widespread that they can be called a "grass-roots movement." The real news here is that the movement has gained such momentum that big, mainstream media organizations outside of healthcare, well beyond the policy wonk orbit, have begun to surface what may turn out to be the biggest story of our times: The largest sector of our economy turning inside out, like some movie transformer, on the way toward providing all of us with far better care for far less than we could possibly imagine. Better healthcare for half the cost.


There's a lot to it. This revolution may not be televised because of its very complexity, and the vast, subterranean, even tectonic nature of the structural economic changes causing the surface changes we are seeing. Nor will the movement stop if the ACA reform act is thrown out or gutted by the Supreme Court, or repealed by a new Congress and President, because the movement was not started by the reform law. It was generated by demographics and economics, the sheer unworkability of our current system, and the data power that allows us finally to see into it, to try new things, and measure their results.



And this comment from Maggie Mahar...



Joe you write: "This revolution may not be televised because of its very complexity, and the vast, subterranean, even tectonic nature of the structural economic changes causing the surface changes we are seeing. Nor will the movement stop if the ACA reform act is thrown out or gutted by the Supreme Court"


Yes! The movement on the ground has a momentum of its own- within the health care industry (where hospitals have already invested in improving how they deliver care) ; in the insurance industry (where Aetna is now funding the IT for a group of hospitals- Aetna's CEO understands that going forward they will no longer be in the underwriting business, they'll be in the "keeping people healthy" business, among small businesses, that have begun taking up the offer of tax credits as they offer insurance to their employees, and in the general public where more and more people want and expect guaranteed issue, community rating, essential benefits, and subsidies-even if that means that some pay higher taxes.


As you say,economically, our current fragmented, inefficient, wasteful, for-profit health care system has hit a wall. Fewer and fewer employers and families can afford it. A great many doctors and nurses are very unhappy with the quality of care. And Americans are beginning to realize that we don't have "the best healthcare system" in the world.



Moral of the story -- Calm down everybody and don't worry about what might happen next. A critical mass of the people who really count -- health care and insurance professionals -- has been paying attention to the public discussions over the last two or three years. And the people who count, the winners of the future, are already taking steps in the right direction. 


Not all of them are on the same page, but enough have caught the drift of the conversation to realize that if something is not done soon to improve the system -- making it less expensive and more widely available at the same time -- the future of both groups is in jeopardy. The word unsustainable is more than a political nostrum. The train is leaving the station. The political types with their polls, weathervanes and double-talk will eventually figure out what needs to be done. But improvements to the system are already happening, with or without Obamacare. 


Just in case the legislation survives unmolested by the Supreme Court, go read 11 Facts about the Affordable Care Act. 
To the extent that political types, judges and others tear at it, make mental note of who they are and the damage they are apt to cause.


 



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