Health Care | Press

Dramatic Savings When Parents Care for Kids' Illnesses | UCLA/Johnson & Johnson Health Care Institute

11.07.2007 | New York Times | New research proves that a "dose" of hands-on health care training can transform parents' abilities to care for common childhood ailments at home - and save Medicaid millions of dollars annually. | Read

Thousands exercise their right to make a difference

08.22.2007 | Everett Herald | Our family has been in three sports events in the past 10 days. The first was the Crohn's and Colitis Three Mile Run in Seattle. Seven hundred people showed up to run, walk and push baby strollers past Safeco Field two Sundays ago. Some were great athletes. Some were sick from Crohn's. Some showed the effects of medication. One was Mike McCready, the bassist from Pearl Jam. All were out exercising on a Sunday morning, thumbing their noses at these diseases and living their lives as healthfully as they could. Plus, altogether we raised $140,000 for the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation. | Read

Medicare's good coverage should be expanded to all

06.27.2007 | Everett Herald | Our modern advances in health care enable people to live a lot longer than a generation before. What becomes a concern is not so much the medical advances, but the ability of social services to keep up with people's aging and health. That's the rub. We can keep people alive. Can we make sure they have a good quality of life? | Read

Women in Seattle triathlon provide lessons in living fully

08.23.2006 | Tacoma News Tribune, Everett Herald | Most of these women don’t have the time to get in shape and train up for the triathlon; they are working, taking care of their kids, volunteering in their PTAs. But they find that time anyway. And they summon their will not just for the big day of the triathlon, but for every training session they go on, whether that’s running, bicycling or swimming. It is a living metaphor for lives well lived; instead of waiting for someone or something to do something to you, you decide that you are going to do something for yourself. | Read (Tribune) | Read (Herald)

The Health Care Crisis and What to Do About It

03.23.2006 | New York Times Review of Books | Medical costs are once again rising rapidly, forcing health care back into political prominence. Indeed, the problem of medical costs is so pervasive that it underlies three quite different policy crises. First is the increasingly rapid unraveling of employer- based health insurance. Second is the plight of Medicaid, an increasingly crucial program that is under both fiscal and political attack. Third is the long-term problem of the federal government's solvency, which is, as we'll explain, largely a problem of health care costs. | Read

House bill would audit results when state allows tax breaks

02.22.2006 | Tacoma News Tribune, Everett Herald | The Legislature makes big and yet silent trade-offs with tax breaks. The Senate agreed to fund 5,000 additional slots for the Basic Health Plan’s subsidized sliding scale health coverage for lower-income workers. That cost about $10 million. But one in 10 Washington citizens lacks health insurance, and the number is growing. Why not take back those $46 million in tax breaks and add Basic Health coverage for 20,000 more citizens? | Read (Tribune| Read (Herald)

Pedaling toward Portland, bikers take road to better health

07.13.2005 | Tacoma News Tribune | The great thing about this ride is that it wasn’t just a bunch of jocks racing each other. There were thousands of ordinary people of all ages, shapes and sizes who got on their bikes and made the journey to Portland. | Read

Can-do attitude could help us solve health care troubles

06.01.2005 | Tacoma News Tribune | When you have a big and growing problem, the solution demands changes in business-as-usual. The incentive is to avoid these changes and to just make do. So we replace “can do” in policy formation and social progress with “make do” in just getting by. | Read

Press Conference: Health Benefits at Wal-Mart

06.01.2005 | EOI | More than 3,200 Wal-Mart workers are on active duty. To help them, Wal-Mart claims that they continue their benefits and make up the difference between their military pay and the regular Wal-Mart wages. That’s not a very difficult thing to do when only 48% of Wal-Mart employees are covered by Wal-Mart’s health insurance and the employees end up paying 40% of the cost. | Read

Don't look to Wal-Mart for health-coverage answers

05.04.2005 | Tacoma News Tribune | Wal-Mart employees and their dependents end up looking to the state for health coverage. Wal-Mart encourages its employees to sign up for the Basic Health Plan, so the public subsidizes Wal-Mart’s employees’ health care, and Wal-Mart’s profits. Wal-Mart has figured out how to outsource its benefits to other employers, the government and the taxpayer. | Read

Smoking, Death and Taxes

03.30.2001 | Smoking has returned to the headlines like a flare-up in the Balkans. The latest dispatches from the nicotine wars are a grim combination of carnage and hope. | Seattle Times