Well, popping over to Sen. Bingaman’s official site this afternoon, the first thing you see is a policy statement on, wait for it, health-care reform. Specifically, a public option:

Much attention has been given to whether the bill we send to the president should have a “public option.” I strongly support a public option.  The most critical elements of such a plan are that it would be established and overseen by the federal government, and made available to all Americans. The primary purpose of the public plan is to ensure that there is at least one option for Americans that is affordable and would provide meaningful care. By leveraging competition, a public plan would also safeguard against unscrupulous insurances practices.

Of course, the devil’s in the details, but if you like the idea of a public option you should head over to WeWantThePublicOption.com to register your support. And if you can find Sen. Tom Udall talking about a public option, let me know in comments.

This weekend, Dana Goldstein’s column in The American Prospect sheds some more insight into the contradiction that is Jenna Bush:

As her father threatens to veto the entire $34 billion 2008 foreign aid budget just because congressional Democrats have finally snuck in loopholes providing condoms and abortion services to women in the developing world, Jenna is on a nationwide book tour and media blitz, spreading the message that safe sex and education are some of the most important tools in fighting disease.

Did the apple really fall far from the tree?

Private insurance companies participating in Medicare have been allowed to keep tens of millions of dollars that should have gone to consumers, and the Bush administration did not properly audit the companies or try to recover money paid in error, Congressional investigators say in a new report.

That sort of behavior is, by now, to be expected from Bush & Co. the administration. However, the article goes on:

In separate action, the Bush administration is vigorously pursuing money that it says is owed to insurance companies by Medicare beneficiaries. The Medicare agency has sent letters to more than 135,000 people saying they still owe premiums for prescription drug coverage provided in 2006. In most cases, the premiums were supposed to have been withheld from monthly Social Security checks, but the government withheld the wrong amounts or nothing at all.

Kerry Weems, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said, “I am intently focused on this matter and will make it a priority to correct the errors and minimize them in the future.”

And, yet, somehow, I’m not surprised. Oh, and by the way, Weems — a New Mexico native — was appointed in May to head up Medicare.

Today, we’re seeing the president using federal controls to interfere with states’ efforts to improve access to health care for uninsured children.

Administration officials outlined the new standards in a letter sent to state health officials on Friday evening, in the middle of a month-long Congressional recess. In interviews, they said the changes were aimed at returning the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.

After learning of the new policy, some state officials said today that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children by imposing standards that could not be met.

Ann Clemency Kohler, deputy commissioner of human services in New Jersey, said: “We are horrified at the new federal policy. It will cause havoc with our program and could jeopardize coverage for thousands of children.”

The Republican way: identify programs (like SCHIP and Social Security) that are popular and effective, but don’t fit the mold for conservative principals, and then try to trim or slash them.

I’m open to debate when people don’t think we shouldn’t have a national, single-payer health plan. But trying to prevent uninsured children from getting insurance, just because they’re not “low-income,” is ludicrous. This is the ‘principled’ Republican position!

Well, in the past year there have been no leads into Shuck’s death. This week I spoke with Sgt. Arthur Betts, spokesman for the Maryland State Police. He said there are still no witness or suspects. Investigators traveled to New Mexico last year in an attempt to track the victim’s cross-country movements with little success. Police have long thought that she may have hitched one or more rides with a trucker.

“The investigation would be vast and wide,” Betts said, “trying to find out which trucks had loads that originated in New Mexico with an east coast destination.”

The investigation has since been transferred to the Cold Case Unit, which “works to solve homicide cases that have remained unsolved for a significant period of time.”

I’ve been unable to reach Shuck’s mother to see if she has heard anything from police in the past year. She sat with me for an interview last May, and detailed the events that led to Shuck’s disapperance.

Shuck shouldn’t be forgotten. There were 6,326 unsolved homicides in the U.S. in 2005 (the latest year with complete data). That means more than 37% of murders resulted in no arrest. Still, she should be more than a statistic, because her case exemplifies the way our system fails those who are mentally ill.

Putting aside the VHA, America’s annual per person health expenditures are about twice what anyone else spends. That actually understates the difference, as our 45 million uninsured citizens have radically restricted access to care, and so the spending on the median insured American is actually quite a bit higher. Canada, France, Great Britain, and Germany all cover their entire populations, and they do so for far less money than we spend. Indeed, Canada, whose system is the most costly of the group, spends only 52 percent per capita what we do.

The article is pretty concise, and delivers a relatively damning blow to the health care system in the U.S., and our focus on making money off of sick people:

This makes it hard to move toward a preventive system, as Canada has, because preventive medicine pays less. It makes it hard to address moral-hazard issues wisely, as the French have, because it’s unprofitable to insure diabetics, and less profitable still to make their care essentially free. It makes it hard to institute the cost savings that Great Britain has, because with less money flowing into the system, there would be far less profit to be made. It makes it hard to harness market forces while protecting against individual risk, as Germany has, because insurer business models are predicated on shifting risk to employers and individuals, and profits are made when insurers can keep that risk from being shifted back onto them. And it is impossible to implement the practices that have so improved the VHA, because doing so would require a single, coherent health system that stuck with its members through their life cycles rather than an endlessly fractured structure in which insurers pawn off their members as they grow old, ill, or unemployed.

Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system.

An interesting look at the way we get our food, why we pay what we do at the checkout aisle, and why those in poverty face obesity:

For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both).

The way low-income households deal with food scarcity is something I’ve blogged about in the past. It’s simply cheaper for low-income families to eat less nutritious foods. When you’re worried about paying the rent/mortgage, or whether you’ll be able to put gas in the car this week, or if you’ll have enough money to pay for prescriptions, making healthy choices in the supermarkets becomes a secondary concern.

It’s nice, however, to see the NY Times pick it up. If you want more information on poverty in America, I’d recommend this special report by The American Prospect. From the introduction:

In assigning and editing these articles, we were struck by a paradox. There is now growing ideological convergence on what it takes to end poverty. Liberals and conservatives agree that ending poverty is about both personal behaviors and rewards to work; about both values and economics. Ending poverty requires opportunities for wealth creation as well as income support, empowerment as well as transfer payments. It requires all children to be school-ready, which takes both stronger families and more effective public programs.

Yet mocking this hopeful consensus there is a disabling one. Too many elected officials, both liberal and conservative, believe that we know what to do, but just can’t afford it — whether because of budget deficits, or entitlement overloads, or national security demands. There is no shortage of good pilot programs, but time and again we hear that there is no money to take them to scale.

We disagree. This nation, on average, is twice as rich as in the 1960s. If America is to compete in a global economy, and honor its ideals, we can’t afford to waste a single American. There is no good excuse for failing to end poverty in our lifetime.

As the authors conclude, “although Canadian outcomes were more often superior to US outcomes than the reverse, neither the United States nor Canada can claim hegemony in terms of quality of medical care and the resultant patient-important outcomes.” The question raised is slightly different: How can we possibly countenance a system that costs twice as much as the Canadian system but delivers slightly worse care? Even assuming diminishing returns, our expenditures should result in care outcomes at least 20% or 30% better than Canada’s. Instead, they’re about 5% worse, but cost around 187%. Does it sound like we’re getting a good deal?

Ezra has more at his place, but this seems like one of those no-brainers.  Which would you prefer: spending more, or spending less?

The New Mexico Medical Society didn’t voice opposition to a bill that would have required all girls entering sixth grade to be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted disease that can cause cervical cancer until the measure had passed last month.

This week, in a move that surprised some, Gov. Bill Richardson vowed to veto it after hearing from doctors and others who oppose the bill.

“I felt bad that it was after the fact,” Randy Marshall, the medical society’s executive director, said Wednesday.

The new vaccine protects women against some strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV. The measure would have required all private and public school girls to decide whether to get the first shot in a series of three before school began this fall. Girls also could have refused the vaccine, which would have been as simple as checking a box on an information pamphlet about the vaccine.

Just like Richardson’s veto of funding to study the Gila and San Francisco rivers, his administration supported this legislation. During a January meeting with Grant County leaders, Sec. of Health Michelle Lujan Grisham said getting the vaccine into schools was a priority for the Department of Health:

“The HPV vaccine is a great thing,” she said. “This is a vaccine that will prevent cancer.”
Grisham said the vaccine will be targeted to girls age 11 to 12.
“Some people’s reaction to that will be, ‘That seems inappropriate,’” she said. “That’s not true. It’s flat prevention, and it’s most effective if you start with this population.”

And, as with the veto of the Gila Funding, Richardson’s action came as a surprise late in the game, with a quick reversal of the expected outcome. Fortunately, he did sign Sen. Dede Feldman’s bill mandating insurance coverage for the vaccine.

UPDATE: Cleaned up some redundant writing.

Richardson says that he understands first hand as a governor the issues with healthcare. “All Americans and all businesses… should be able to buy the same coverage as Members of Congress and the President” and Medicare should be available for those at an even younger age (60, I believe he said, instead of 65). Veterans’ healthcare should also be improved by giving them a card that would grant them access to any hospital.

There’s more there at MyDD, and Think Progress should have video of the event online later.