Wonks, Nerds, and Hacks…

A few health-specific links of interest.

One is that the Kaiser Health News has taken to soliciting “health policy haikus.”Yesterday included my entry:

ACA: Too long!
It’s not like the health system
Is complicated.

Feel free to submit your own. If that’s not nerdy enough for you, then you can check out the new week’s edition of Health Wonk Review, with a “Campaign 2012 Edition” hosted by Louise Norris at Colorado Health Insurance Insider.

It starts by highlighting our post on the California Health Benefits Survey, showing the long-term erosion in employer-based coverage–and how GOP Rep. Dave Camp attempted to hijack that study (and my words) to prove the opposite of what is true.

For more amusement, here’s the POLITICO write-up of the incident, from a few weeks ago:

HEALTH CARE ADVOCATE NOT PLEASED WITH DAVE CAMP— It’s not terribly shocking that a pro-reform health care advocate would be upset with congressional Republicans. But Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California was particularly peeved when he saw his name appear on a Ways and Means press release about a California study that showed employer-sponsored health insurance was dropping. The press release from Ways and Means took the study, and a quote of Wright’s from an L.A Times article about the decline, to argue that “the Democrats’ health care law is harming the ability of employers to offer health coverage.”

“The article is pretty clear in saying the decline in ESI is due to decades long erosion and Rep. Camp is simply false in blaming health reform,” Wright tells PULSE. “It is even more duplicitous to try and attribute that belief to me when it is very clear I am making the exact opposite point. At the end of the article I say, and the head of California’s insurers agrees with me, that the federal law will go a long way in helping to turn these numbers around. I’m not surprised opponents of health reform would not have their facts straight, but this took some ‘chutzpah.’”

The original L.A Times story: http://lat.ms/z7Fa5b The Ways and Means release:http://1.usa.gov/zXPhZQ

Health Access California promotes quality, affordable health care for all Californians.