Last Tuesday’s mid-term elections will have a significant impact on health policy, but it may not be good for consumers! With Republicans controlling the Senate, House and the White House, federal health care policy will clearly favor pharmaceutical companies, health plans and providers of care. For example, while Republicans have said they support a drug benefit for Medicare beneficiaries, they are hesitant to make it a firm part of the Medicare program itself. Last summer the Republican led House passed a so-called Medicare drug benefit, but it would be run by private insurers with the feds as a backup. It went nowhere in the Democratic led Senate. But that may change with the balance of power shifting to the GOP…….And that’s not the only health policy issue to watch. Even though most candidates claimed they supported a Patient’s Bill of Rights, there is only a slight chance that a very strong bill will be passed. The Patient’s Bill of Rights legislation has been languishing in Congress for 6 years. The parties have been split over only one issue in recent years – the rights of injured patients to sue their HMO or health plan if it had a policy that might have caused or contributed to that injury. Republicans have wanted to limit the consumer’s right to sue. Democrats back the lawsuit provision. We’ll be watching this closely in the coming months…………Patient safety – more talk than action. When the People’s Medical Society was formed in 1983, medical errors and patient safety were at the top of our agenda. Our best-selling book, Take This Book to the Hospital With You and our later book Medicine on Trial, were the first major publications to expose the dangers of medical care. In 1999, the prestigious Institute of Medicine published its widely publicized report, To Err Is Human, which reiterated most of the studies we cited a decade earlier and called for major safety reforms in American hospitals. So what’s happened? While there have been a lot of conferences, papers and reports published about patient safety, in reality little has improved. In fact, based on several recent studies and reports, it might be fair to say that medical care is LESS SAFE today than it was 10 or 15 years ago……Consumers are paying more out of pocket for health care services. As the cost of health care rises at more than double the overall inflation rate, employers are passing that cost along to employees. In fact, adding in co-payments, deductibles, premiums and the cost of over-the-counter pharmaceutical products, the consumer is clearly the largest payer for health services. There’s no doubt that collectively American consumers are paying more from their own pocket for health care than are employers and the federal government. Remember that the next time your employer starts moaning about their share of health expenditures………..Privacy rules go into effect, but most are not complying. Under federal rules issued almost two years ago, new rules governing the transmission of your medical information by doctors, hospitals and insurers have started to be put into effect. However, more than half of those required to comply have filed for one-year extensions. Sure the rules are complicated, but there is a growing suspicion among privacy advocates that the requests for extensions are part of a larger campaigned to have the rules weakened or partially thrown out………..We’d like to know your views on the above issues or any other matters affecting your health. Send your comments directly to me at cbi@peoplesmed.org