Kate Steadman over at Healthy Policy is rocking the health-care news again, this time with news of equal care:

I’ve been meaning to post on this for awhile, but hadn’t really figured out the direction to take. A new research project by RAND found that regardless of race, age, or income, patients in the U.S. receive equal care once they get to the doctors office.

But, about that care. It’s pretty bad. In fact, according to the study, patients receive the correct care about 55% of the time.

As she says, it’s great news that people receive equal care when they reach a doctor, regardless of race, class, or other demographic indicators. What’s disconcerting is how often that “equal care” is completely wrong! Read the rest of the post for more.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein (another of those who offer essential reading on health care) brings us this story from Texas:

Via Kevin Drum, Ben Domenech is shocked — SHOCKED! — to see British doctors attempting to remove a crippled young boy from life support over the objections of his parents. Damn that socialized medicine, huh?

One wonders how Domenech feels about the fate of Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27-year-old cancer patient at Texas’s Baylor Regional Medical Center (located, last I checked, deep in the heart of Domenech’s “Red State America”). Kept alive by ventilator, one morning her doctor gave her a note explaining that, in light of her inability to pay for her treatments, she would be taken off the machine in exactly 11 days. Habtegiris wanted to die by her mother’s side, but her mother lived in Africa, and with the poor family unable to scramble together enough money to get her out within the 10 days, Habtegiris was removed from the ventilator, against her wishes and without her mother’s presence. On the eleventh day, she died. She was uninsured.

I only link these two because health care has the potential to be a major campaign issue, if progressives will only take up the cause. Keep them both in mind when your bored and looking for a good read.