Two posts from the blog They Pay to Kiss Your Feet deal with two issues very much on the mind of many people this year–jobs and health care–and the interrelationship between them.

The Senate yesterday rejected a health care amendment on abortion that mirrored the restrictive Stupak amendment passed by the House. The amendment bans federal subsidies that would be provided for individuals’ health insurance from being paid to any insurer that offers coverage for abortion. Abortion rights supporters were stunned and dismayed that the House, with [...]

Word is part of the Senate compromise on health care includes expanding Medicare to the uninsured who are 55 and over. This video from Humana is a pretty good primer on the Medicare process. For instance, I didn’t know the differences between Medicare Parts A, B, C, and D, and now I do.

A few months ago we did a series called Health Care Horror Stories. Back then, the House had yet to pass its health care bill and the Senate bill wasn’t even out of committee. The process is much further along now, but considering that the Senate still has to pass its bill (which its currently debating), and that the two chambers will then have to reconcile the differences between the two pieces of legislation and send that meshed bill back to their respective bodies for one more vote each, there is still a long way to go.

So it might be a good time to take another look at some of the more egregious experiences of those who have been ensnared in our less-than-perfect system of health insurance. In researching these, it’s not necessarily the anger, frustration, and sheer incredulity of the people effected that make an impression, but the sheer number stories in which those emotions have prompted a need to vent publicly.

These extracts have been edited for spelling, grammar, and length. A list of sites from which they were taken can be found at the end of the text.

In researching a “health care horror stories” post, I came across one that struck me as especially sad, posted on one of the sites devoted to such material. This had been edited for spelling and grammar. My mother became dizzy and fell on her kitchen floor. Since her hip was intensely painful, my sister called [...]

“This story should be a screaming headline on the front page – not buried on page 9999 in blogland. What is the US coming to?” Just one of the comments left on the New York Times site in reponse to an article about the end of COBRA subsidies yesterday. The subsidies, part of the stimulus [...]

Yesterday marked the expiration of the first wave of subsidies distributed to unemployed workers for their COBRA health insurance. The subsidies, part of the stimulus package passed in February, cover 65% of COBRA premiums for nine months for those laid off from September 2008 to December 2009. So unless congress acts, the cost of health [...]

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the House and Senate health care bills. Online, they have posted a “Health Care Toolkit” consisting of talking points, suggested emails and letters, videos from their national ad campaign, and other material for those who’d like to stall the current push toward reform. But here’s an extract from a [...]

Nate Silver of the political polling site FiveThirtyEight suggests the performance of health insurance stocks might be one way to neutrally evaluate the chance of health care reform’s success: It’s a bit hard to assess where we are in the health care debate. On the one hand, the (House) Democrats pushed through and passed a [...]

…listen to it! The entire Affordable Health Care for America Act, aka the House health care reform bill, read aloud by different volunteers. From HearTheBill.org.