Obamacare – HHS SECY Sebeluis: Health-Care Premiums Likely To Go Up – Cavuto – Video

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Obamacare - HHS SECY Sebeluis: Health-Care Premiums Likely To Go Up - Cavuto - Video

Does the health care bill include dental? How much will it cost to buy mandator – Video

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Does the health care bill include dental? How much will it cost to buy mandator - Video

Clintons 1993 Health-Care Strategy Show Obama Pitfalls

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Hillary Clinton sought to improve the chances of passing health care legislation in 1993 by letting Congress fill in the details, according to documents made public today by the Clinton presidential library.

The legislative strategy from the first weeks of Bill Clintons presidency relied on the first lady making lawmakers and major stakeholders feel included in the development of legislation. By proposing broad outlines and ideas for a bill, while letting lawmakers know what the White House considered off limits, the administration foresaw a winning process.

Instead, the Clinton health care proposal withered. Members of Congress held it up in the committee process and interest groups complained of being excluded anyway.

The experience informed President Barack Obamas strategy when he rolled out his health care plan upon taking office in 2009 and framed her advice to the administration as the process got under way. Obama won passage with no Republican support and by pushing his version even as members of his party worried about the consequences for their re-election and the rest of the presidents agenda.

If the administration drafts a detailed bill and sends it to the Congress with a heres the bill, theres not much time, take it to the floor quick approach the bill might fail because of lawmakers feeling excluded, according to notes among the documents released today titled Discussion with Hillary Clinton and dated Jan. 28, 1993, written the White Houses top health care official, Ira Magaziner.

Trying to dictate details of the legislation would mean many Members would feel excluded from playing a role in the refinement of the bill [and] interest groups will object that their concerns, even those that are small or reasonable, have been excluded, he wrote.

Todays document release, the second of its kind this year, provides new insight into how then-first lady Hillary Clinton and top White House aides approached their attempt to pass a health care law, one that ultimately failed.

If she runs for president in 2016, Republicans are certain to use Hillary Clintons health care effort two decades ago to reinforce her ties to Obamas Affordable Care Act, which has been the centerpiece of Republican attacks on Democrats.

Last month, the Republican National Committee released a memo arguing that Hillarycare is Obamacare on steroids.

For her part, Clinton, 66, who lost the 2008 Democratic nomination to Obama and then became his first secretary of state, has been trying to put a little daylight between herself and Obamas law.

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Clintons 1993 Health-Care Strategy Show Obama Pitfalls

Book review: Reinventing American Health Care by Ezekiel Emanuel

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His review of how our health-care system got this way is a depressing reminder of forces that have little to do with health care and nothing to do with health. How did hospitals become so dominant? How did the Depression lead to the spread of health insurance? How did World War II price controls help lock health insurance to employment? And what do tax breaks have to do with it?

Quick: Whats the biggest single tax break in the United States? Tax-free health benefits, nearly four times as large ($250 billion) as the mortgage interest deduction ($70 billion). With employers able to offer health insurance to employees free of tax, the benefits became an increasingly important part of pay over the years. Getting rid of that deduction, Emanuel makes clear, is one fix that he regrets was left out of the new health-care law.

Despite this and other critiques of the legislation, its clear that hes a wildly enthusiastic fan. Consider his view that beginning in 2020 or so, the ACA will increasingly be seen as a world historical achievement, even more important for the United States than Social Security and Medicare has been. And Barack Obama will be viewed more like Harry Truman judged with increasing respect over time. Wow. His logic is that by 2020, the law and its effects will arrest health-care inflation to simply match the rise in gross domestic product, instead of the recent rate of two percentage points above the annual increase that has rocketed costs to nearly 18percent of GDP today. That would indeed be a major accomplishment.

Emanuel is no dispassionate outsider. A professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, he was a special adviser to the White House on health-care reform and worked directly on the Affordable Care Act. He also peppers his story with accounts of expletive-laden exchanges with his brother Rahm, current mayor of Chicago and former Obama White House chief of staff.

In 2009 and 2010, Ezekiel Emanuel was labeled Dr. Death after Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, among others, twisted his medical ethics work to conclude that he favored withholding health care from the disabled and advocated death panels. Thats sheer nonsense.

Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, theyre well argued, and he has marshaled an impressive amount of information. Some of the simplest facts bear repeating. For example, how vulnerable every one of us was before passage of the health-care law: More than half of us got health insurance through our jobs. But three-quarters of the uninsured were in households with at least one paycheck, and nearly one in 10 uninsured households brought in more than $94,000 a year. It wasnt just money that kept some people from having health-care coverage, it was also access. For some, their jobs didnt provide insurance. And yet others were rejected, ironically, because they were too sick.

Emanuel also reminds us that there is much more to the Affordable Care Act than the troubled insurance exchanges. There are targets to induce hospitals to lower infection rates, incentives to adopt electronic medical records, rules for better pricing transparency (a current nightmare!) and more complete data on hospital safety and outcomes, and better access to free preventative services such as immunizations and mental health screenings.

Where Emanuel goes off the rails is in extrapolating from these provisions of the law a vastly different future. He posits the end not only of health-care inflation but also of medical insurance as we know it. He sees employers ceding their roles as providers of access to health care, technology replacing costly hospital stays and specialists, hospitals closing in large numbers, and the remaining ones becoming safer and more efficient.

Thats wishful thinking. His own very persuasive review of history shows how exterior forces and grabs for dollars have thwarted and distorted sensible plans.

Look at the advertising in the D.C. Metro opposing cuts to hospital funding to see how rocky the path to hospital closings will be. Check out the sad fate of a Maryland nonprofit start-up, the faltering Evergreen Health Co-op, for a view of how hard it will be to create alternatives to traditional care. Anyone who has ever been part of a technology changeover anywhere can imagine what it will take to link the whole messy U.S. health-care system electronically. And consider the travails of 23andMe, a genetics company whose medical service was shut down by the Food and Drug Administration, for an example of how difficult it will be for newcomers to break into spaces that others own.

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Book review: Reinventing American Health Care by Ezekiel Emanuel

Robotic fish designed to perform escape maneuvers described in Soft Robotics journal

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

13-Mar-2014

Contact: Kathryn Ruehle kruehle@liebertpub.com 914-740-2100 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News

New Rochelle, NY, March 13, 2014A soft-bodied, self-contained robotic fish with a flexible spine that allows it to mimic the swimming motion of a real fish also has the built-in agility to perform escape maneuvers. The innovative design and capabilities of this complex, autonomous robot is described in Soft Robotics (SoRo), a new peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Soft Robotics website at http://www.liebertpub.com/soro.

Andrew Marchese, Cagdas Onal, and Daniela Rus, from MIT (Cambridge, MA) and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Worcester, MA), describe the design, modeling, fabrication, and control mechanisms of the robotic fish in the article "Autonomous Soft Robotic Fish Capable of Escape Maneuvers Using Fluidic Elastomer Actuators". A novel fluidic actuation system, embedded muscle-like actuators, and an onboard control system give the fish autonomy and the ability to perform continuous forward swimming motion and rapid accelerations.

"This innovative work highlights two important aspects of our emerging field; first it is inspired and informed by animal studies (biomimetics), and second it exploits novel soft actuators to achieve life-like robot movements and controls," says Editor-in-Chief Barry A. Trimmer, PhD, who directs the Neuromechanics and Biomimetic Devices Laboratory at Tufts University (Medford, MA).

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About the Journal

Soft Robotics (SoRo), a peer-reviewed journal published quarterly online with Open Access options and in print, combines advances in biomedical engineering, biomechanics, mathematical modeling, biopolymer chemistry, computer science, and tissue engineering to present new approaches to the creation of robotic technology and devices that can undergo dramatic changes in shape and size in order to adapt to various environments. Led by Editor-in-Chief Barry A. Trimmer, PhD and a distinguished team of Associate Editors, the Journal provides the latest research and developments on topics such as soft material creation, characterization, and modeling; flexible and degradable electronics; soft actuators and sensors; control and simulation of highly deformable structures; biomechanics and control of soft animals and tissues; biohybrid devices and living machines; and design and fabrication of conformable machines. Complete information is available on the SoRo website at http://www.liebertpub.com/soro.

About the Publisher

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Robotic fish designed to perform escape maneuvers described in Soft Robotics journal