Marcia Angell, M.D., is one of the nation's most well-respected experts on health care issues. And with good reason. A board-certified pathologist who also trained in internal medicine, she's a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Her writing credits include The Truth About Drug Companies and an award-winning article at TNR on the same subject. (She co-wrote that with Arnold Relman, a distinguished physician, writer, and intellectual in his own right.)
Angell is a well-known advocate for single-payer health care: If it were up to her, she'd simply expand Medicare to cover everybody. This is not, of course, the kind of health care reform we're going to get this year. Instead, we will--if we are lucky--get something that looks like the bill that passed the House of Representatives on Saturday night.
Angell is not impressed, as she explains today at the Huffington Post:
Is the House bill better than nothing? I don't think so. It simply throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry. The danger is that as costs continue to rise and coverage becomes less comprehensive, people will conclude that we've tried health reform and it didn't work. But the real problem will be that we didn't really try it. I would rather see us do nothing now, and have a better chance of trying again later and then doing it right.
I'm a longtime single-payer supporter myself. If Angell could get her way, I'd be thrilled. But Angell can't get her way.
The wall-to-wall coverage this week focusing on the murder of Yale student Annie Le goes to show just how mad these Ivy League murders drive us. They create instant victims and villains, but almost never a mix of the two. However, this week, it was hard not to remember the case if James Van de Velde, the Yale lecturer accused of killing Yale senior Suzanne Jovin in December 1998. Once called “Richard Jewell with a Ph.D,” Van de Velde’s life was turned upside down that winter after being publicly named a suspect--the only to be named--despite a lack of any hard evidence. He had been the academic advisor to Jovin, and she had met with him on the day of her death. While he was never formally charged, the university responded by cancelling his classes that spring and not renewing his contract the following year--his reputation, academic career, and personal life were quickly ruined. In a 1999 New York Times Magazine piece, James Bennet chronicled his life as a suspect:
But layer by layer, his life has been whittled down. He has no job now and few prospects, just a growing pile of rejections. His casual friends and colleagues have dropped away, leaving a small, hard core of loyalists. He cannot, of course, date. His savings are dwindling, and his legal bills are rising. His upbringing, his career and his social life have been publicly fly-specked by journalists searching backward, through the darkest of lenses, for signs of a murderer in the making.
What’s become of him over the last decade? He has spent much time vehemently defending his innocence, publishing op-eds calling for a renewed seriousness in the investigations, and writing letters (as recently as last year) urging authorities to test the DNA evidence found at the crime scene (a palm print on a Fresca can, skin underneath the victims fingernails), which have either not been tested, or have not matched his DNA. Since 2007, the case has been in the hands of four retired state detectives and is ongoing. One of the detectives reportedly said, “What was done to Van de Velde should not have been done even to a guilty man.” The team has recently claimed that “no person is a suspect in the crime, and everyone is a suspect,” and they are reportedly not in contact with Van de Velde. With the 2008 release of a composite of a man seen fleeing the area after the crime, it seems Van de Velde is finally out from under the thumb of (at least official) suspicion.
Richard A. Posner is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for theSeventh Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of ChicagoLaw School.
The Judge in a Democracy By Aharon Barak
(Princeton University Press, 332 pp., $29.95)
