Nancy Pelosi couldn’t have announced the new House healthcare reform bill, the Affordable Health Care for America Act (HR 3962), with any more pomp and circumstance. It was certainly more impressive than the Senate’s mouse-like rollout, apparently intended to avoid rubbing salt in the Baucus “bipartisanship” wound.

HR 3962 is definitely a major milestone in attempting to reform our broken system-less healthcare; it’s historic, certainly. But no, it’s not the best our legislators could do. Learn the 8 things you should know, good and bad, about the bill here.       

If you want to read a 4-page summary of the bill, get it here. If you are really ambitious and want to read the entire 1,990 pages, download the bill here. For further exploration, head to the Committee on Education and Labor’s HR 3962 site.  

Want to know how this bill compares to others in the legislative pipeline? See Kaiser Family Foundation’s (no relation to Kaiser Permanente) Side-By-Side Comparison Tool. This easy to use, regularly updated tool lets you select which bills to compare, and what features to compare them on.  Much better than wading through legalese!             blogsurfer.us

Want to get beyond the hype of “socialized medicine” and death panels, and find out what healthcare reform is really trying to accomplish?

T.R. Reid is once again taking the hype out of healthcare reform. The creator of the PBS series “Sick Around the World” is also the author of “Healing of America”, which provides more in depth coverage of his exploration of international universal healthcare systems.

He gave an excellent talk with a question-and-answer session for the Commonwealth Club in California on the 4 types of healthcare systems, where, how, and why they exist. Watch it!                    blogsurfer.us

Perhaps you haven’t heard of the Army of Women. The name may strike fear into the hearts of some men, and indeed these women are on the warpath. But their object of destruction isn’t the opposite gender; in fact this group actually includes men within its ranks too. Confused? Let me explain. The Army of Women aims to eradicate breast cancer by changing the face of breast cancer research. In fitting celebration of Breast Cancer Awareness Month (though football players wearing pink is nice too), this group dedicates itself to two revolutionary principles:

Read More…                   blogsurfer.us

If you thought the Senate’s “option B” of a public option trigger was a great idea, you need to read this. Get a crash course on this underhanded political trick, and why Olympia Snowe recommended it in the first place. Read it here.            blogsurfer.us

So Pay for Performance programs reward better quality at less cost. Sounds good for patients? Then why are Massachusetts hospitals in such an uproar over P4P? Find out here.             blogsurfer.us