Monthly Archive for November, 2009

A number of conservatives have made the case that the US has the best health care system in the world, even if it does not have the best access to the health care system. Similarly, they’ve claimed that all Americans have access to care through emergency rooms, which are legally required to treat all patients who come to them, insured or not.

But the fact is that the uninsured have worse health outcomes, even in our emergency rooms. A new study in the Archives of Surgery shows that even when we look at trauma patients — in other words, cases which have little to do with a patient’s underlying health — uninsured patients at the emergency room are about twice as likely to die.

The fact is, even if the uninsured technically have some access to care via our emergency rooms, even that isn’t as effective for the uninsured as it is for the insured. In our system, if you don’t have health insurance, you don’t have access to quality care.

Before I get too far, let me admit that there are bound to be a number of inaccuracies in the jobs data posted at recovery.gov. Collecting real-time data on the impact of the stimulus, particularly when you are asking recipients to help with the reporting, is tricky business. I’m impressed, though, by the Obama administration’s efforts to clean up the data and keep its count as accurate as possible. Frankly, we’d never have seen an article like this during the Bush administration:

The Obama administration, under fire for inflating job growth from the $787 billion stimulus plan, slashed over 60,000 jobs from its most recent report on the program because the reporting outlets had submitted “unrealistic data,” according to a document obtained by ABC News.

The Office of Management and Budget document shows that before an Oct. 30 progress report on the program the administration asked the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to remove information from 12 stimulus recipients that contained “unrealistic data,” including “unrealistic job data.”

Is the data perfect? Of course not, but the Obama is doing an admirable job trying to clear up inaccurate data. The sheer level of data being made available to the public is incredible, too — just take a look at the map which breaks down every single award, including a brief description of the project. While America has always had a relatively open government, we’ve never had this amount of data presented so openly for the American people to view.

It strikes me as incredible that groups like the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota are complaining about minor inaccuracies in the data. FFM’s complaint is that recovery.gov shows spending and job figures for non-existent congressional districts in Minnesota. And it’s true — 0.3 percent of the data from Minnesota appears to be improperly attributed to incorrect congressional districts. This is a tiny mistake, yet a mistake nonetheless, and one that I’m sure will eventually be cleaned up. The irony, though, is that FFM can only complain about the data in the first place because of the Obama administration’s unprecedented commitment to make it available to us in real time.

The scoop on the streets is that PIM’s got it right and MAPE will be endorsing Margaret Anderson-Kelliher for Governor today at 11.

So far there have been a few endorsements but many of them have been of the favorite son/daughter variety.  The Nurses endorsed Paul Thissen (chair of Health Care and Human Services), the Carpenters endorsed Tom Bakk, the Steelworkers endorsed Tommy Rukavina, and womenwinning endorsed Anderson-Kelliher.  And well… AFSCME’s endorsement of Mark Dayton was so out there it makes me consider whether or not I wish to continue being a dues-paying AFSCME member.

With AFSCME’s endorsement basically ceding any input into the DFL endorsment I think MAPE’s approach is going to be trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, and provide as much of an influence on the DFL Endorsement has AFSCME had provided previously.

As well, if this is true MAK will be picking up another superdelegate in Kendal Killian, MAPE’s political director, and my lifelong nemesis.

MAPE is the largest professionals union in the state with 12,700 members.

Edit: It’s official. MAPE endorses MAK.