Candidates should criticize Part D, not Social Security (Best of MedCitizens)

Every week, MedCity News highlights the best of its MedCitizens — syndication partners and MedCity News readers who discuss life science current events on MedCityNews.com.

Now here’s the best of what YOU had to say:

Forget Social Security, Medicare Part D is what we should be worried about. “What about the Medicare Part D drug benefit? Unlike Social Security, there is no dedicated funding stream at all for this $62 billion per year program. And when it was passed there was no provision to make it revenue neutral; the cost went straight to the deficit. Today 83 percent of Part D is funded through ‘general revenues,’ 11 percent through beneficiary premiums and six percent through state payments.”

Million Hearts initiative: Good in thought, but lacking in scope. “It’s not the role of public health agencies like CDC and CMS to end unemployment, poverty and inequality in America. But any public health campaign to reduce heart disease that is worth its salt should start with public recognition of one of its primary economic causes, and call for a reduction in those risk factors.”

Anti-vaccine movement endangers entire populations, not just individuals. “Vaccines work in two ways: they help to protect the vaccinated individual from infection, and they reduce the likelihood that the disease in question can spread through a population by helping to produce herd immunity.”

Reflecting on 9/11′s anniversary and the need to honor emergency workers. “So I just want to ask ’ as our hearts and thoughts go out to all the families who’ve suffered, can’t we please, also, for the next 24 hours, call it a N.E.W. day? A National Emergency Workers’ Day?”

Where have all the PHRs gone? “The arrival of the CMS EHR Incentive Programs delivered a blow to PHRs. Stage 1 incentives did nothing to promote the use of PHRs and overnight they became the stepchild of HIT.”