Collected: The Key Must-Read Posts about Health Care

This blog is a safe space, where I highlight unreported and under-reported issues affecting people with disabilities, other underrepresented groups, and the human family as a whole. The goals of the Nick’s Crusade blog are:

• to give the overlooked policy debates that affect real lives a long, hard look
• to explain the hodgepodge of ideas and backstories that animate these policy contests and the mishmash of systems and non-systems we live with
• to question and think deeply about these underpinning ideas, histories, and cultures
• to ask the right questions.  For example, does the medical and social safety net work for the most vulnerable populations (high-need, medically complex children on “life support” before and after adulthood)?
• to illuminate the unseen issues facing us ignored vulnerable groups, use my first-hand knowledge of our dysfunctional medical and long-term care structures—as a sometimes successful Medicaid activist and end-user of multiple U.S. states’ buggy long-term care systems—to shed light on some of our society’s worst problems
• to engage with other bloggers covering similar topics

That is a mission statement of sorts.

The following is a kinda “Best of…” collection of what I have written to further these goals (so far):

• Health care activism

  • Foundational information
    • What Is Medicaid? What Are Waivers? – providing the basic definitions. October 2006
    • Medicaid: Why It’s Broken and How To Fix It – the problems + solutions. August 2008
    • Hospitals Are Very Dangerous Places – on hospital errors and preventable deaths. March 2007
    • Saving Emilio – about my collaboration with Not Dead Yet and affidavit in support of baby Emilio, who the Children’s Hospital of Austin was trying to legally euthanize because their “ethics committee” decided ventilator use “lacks dignity.” March 2007
    • More About Culling of the Sick in TN. Also, Bush Weighs In – 300,000+ were dropped from TennCare due to arbitrary across the board cuts. As deaths resulted, the president praised the TennCare changes. March 2007
    • George W. Bush’s Health Care Plan “just go to the emergency room” – August 2007
    • Money Following The Person Out Of Institutions “Not Feasible,” Says Alabama Medicaid – October 2006
    • Disabled Still Forced Into Institutions Just For Turning 21: Open Letter To The Disability Community, August 2009
    • Video: “Aging Out” of the health care needed to survive at 21 threatens future of two Florida college students – April 2013
    • What Is ObamaCare? 2013-2014: Overview Part 1—Insurance Subsidies
    • What Is ObamaCare? 2013-2014: Overview Part 2—Medicaid expansion
    • How ACA “ObamaCare” Exchanges Work: A Nick Animation – March 2013
  • Rants and personal experiences
    • How To Win An Advocacy Campaign: A Rant About Media Strategy – November 2006
    • This Is The Digital Soul of Nick Dupree – probably my most personal, unabashedly confessional blog post, written following my 25^th birthday in Mobile, AL and a traumatic ER experience. March 2007
    • Vigorously Insisting On A More Perfect Union: Fighting Cuts, Demanding Universal Health Care – examining the effects of Bush-era budget cuts to Medicaid/Medicare. February 2007 – perhaps because of how I humanized the dry budget numbers, this blog post was published by the Greenhaven Press imprint of Gale Publishing in their Opposing Viewpoints Series, which is heavily used both in libraries and high school and college courses, to introduce differing views of the issues. It’s in the 2008 edition of Opposing Viewpoints: Health Care, if anyone is interested.
    • Any Valid Social Contract Requires Universal Health Care – February 2007
    • For MLK Day, this newsletter clipping about a speech I gave at Rev. King’s old church in Montgomery
    • Disability A “Social Construct?” Not If You Lack Supports – March 2009
    • Fifth Nick’s Crusade Video Blog: “A Seat At The Table” Determining Health Reform, Doesn’t Include People With Disabilities – a vlog commentary on Obamacare’s “stakeholders.” May 2009
    • They Tried To Kill My Brother. Insurance Companies Will Always Put Profits Before Human Life – private health insurance companies were the ACA’s sacred cows, but they didn’t/don’t deserve it. May 2009
    • Feds Fiddling While State Medicaid Programs BURN – the super weird juxtaposition of the ACA’s Medicaid expansion with ongoing catastrophic state-level Medicaid cuts and arbitrary “age 21 cut-off” rule, including in Barack Obama’s home state of Illinois.
    • Why It’s Time For Survival Politics For People with Disabilities – September 2010: this post about the troubling political climate facing our disability community following the rise of “Republican Revolution II” prompted a roundtable discussion on WBAI
    • The Coler Chronicles: Collected Bloggings of the Institution Days – blogs documenting my 378 days on Ventboy Alcatraz, a collection of its own

 

See also:
The Key Must-Read Posts about History
The Key Must-Read Posts about Culture