Medical Staff

Featured blog post: Health reform--Now what?

Hospitalist Leadership Connection, March 16, 2010

A couple months ago, I wrote about health reform and predicted that it would fail to provide universal coverage and that hospitalists would not see much benefit from it. My predictions were technically correct, but I had not expected the entire effort to fizzle. The problem was that the healthcare plan attempted to expand access at great cost in the face of a profound recession while not providing much detail about how savings would be achieved.

The election of Scott Brown, an opponent of the bill, to fill the seat of the late Senator Edward Kennedy took all the wind out of the sails of the reform movement. There are multiple ironies in this turn of events. One is that if Senator Kennedy had been alive and well during the formulation of the bill, he might well have been able to forge a compromise that would have been acceptable to Republicans. The second irony is that if the Massachusetts legislature had not taken away the power of the governor to fill Senate vacancies, Brown would not have been able to run this year. The third irony is that the Democrat-controlled legislature had taken this action when a Republican governor was in office on the assumption that a Democrat would win any special election. . . Read more of this post by Richard Rohr, MD, MMM, FACP, FHM on www.hospitalistleadership.com.

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