Russ McBee

Here's something I don't say very often: a story in today's Knoxville News Sentinel is such a masterful example of beautiful storytelling, it brought a tear to my eye. This piece by Scott Barker describes the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra's Music And Wellness Program, in which musicians visit hospital wards to serenade the patients with the ...

In addition to the 47 million Americans with no health insurance, the ranks of those considered underinsured are growing at an alarming rate. A new study by the Commonwealth Fund has found that the number of Americans with inadequate health insurance coverage mushroomed from 16 million in 2003 to 25 million in 2007. That's a jump of 56 percent ...

By a lopsided vote of 349-62, the House of Representatives voted today to impose a moratorium on seven regulations promulgated by the Bush White House which would have eliminated $13 billion in Medicaid funding for health care for the poor. Every House Democrat and two-thirds of House Republicans voted to stop the enactment of the regulations, ...

A new survey has concluded that 59 percent of US doctors support a national, single-payer health insurance plan, while only 32 percent of doctors oppose the idea. That's a huge shift from the last survey, done just six years ago, which found 49 percent in favor and 40 percent opposed. The reasons are pretty obvious. Rapidly escalating costs have ...

Fourteen senators from both parties have signed on as co-sponsors of the Healthy Americans Act (S. 334); accompanied by a companion bill introduced in the House, the HAA seeks to address the problems of the crumbling US health care system. My mind isn't made up about this one yet, but the proposal does have some intriguing components. Unlike HR ...

After John Edwards's strong second-place finish in last night's Iowa caucus, he had this to say: [C]orporate greed has got a stranglehold on America. And unless and until we have a president in the proud tradition of Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, who has a little backbone, who has some strength, who has some fight, who's ...

Yet another study comparing health care in the US to that of the civilized world shows the stark reality of our system's inadequacy; its inefficiency and defects stand in blinding contrast to countries with universal coverage: Americans spend double what people in other industrialized countries do on health care, but have more trouble seeing ...

During the debate on whether to override Bush's veto of S-CHIP funding last week, Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) set wingnuts aflame with manufactured rage over these remarks he made on the House floor: You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough ...

So, what kind of country do we want, and what kind of people do we want to be? We can either continue making the mistakes of the past, pretending they never happened, or we can really apply ourselves and solve the problems that face us. That's the choice we're facing when we vote in 2008. We face daunting crises with Iraq, global warming, ...

One of the flashpoint issues of the 1965 Watts riot was the lack of a hospital in that inner-city LA district. As a result of the riots, Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital was built. Its recent failures of care and performance have made headlines; to make the headlines go away, the hospital has been shut down rather than being fixed. Now, ...