Did Obamacare kill its First Ebola Patient?

[piezoe]

I don't know that it will take a "crisis" per se. What is most likely to provide the tipping point is a trend toward employers no longer providing health insurance, or making the costs and deductibles so high that few can afford it. WalMart has started the ball rolling on this one, and it'll be interesting to see how it all falls out.

I hope we can get entirely away from employer provided healthcare. A very bad idea in the first place. Health care should not be tied to employment! Maintaining this illogical arrangement is one of the major defects in O'Romneycare care.

I have said this many times in these these threads, and I'm going to say it again. American healthcare is delivered by a government protected Cartel, until the Cartel is dismantled you will have substandard, unaffordable healthcare in the U.S.

 

[dbphoenix]

I hope we can get entirely away from employer provided healthcare. A very bad idea in the first place. Health care should not be tied to employment! Maintaining this illogical arrangement is one of the major defects in O'Romneycare care.

We will. And it will likely happen much faster than most people think, largely because of problems in the economy.

 

[dbphoenix]

BETHESDA, Md. -- As the federal government frantically works to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and as it responds to a second diagnosis of the disease at home, one of the country's top health officials says a vaccine likely would have already been discovered were it not for budget cuts.

Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has "slowed down" research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe.

"NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It's not like we suddenly woke up and thought, 'Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'" Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready."

It's not just the production of a vaccine that has been hampered by money shortfalls. Collins also said that some therapeutics to fight Ebola "were on a slower track than would've been ideal, or that would have happened if we had been on a stable research support trajectory."

"We would have been a year or two ahead of where we are, which would have made all the difference," he said. more . . .

Sam Stein