For some, health care reform is all about insurance — MedCity morning read, June 3, 2009

WASHINGTON, D.C — President Barack Obama on Tuesday repeated his support for a government-supported health insurance plan, acknowledging that such a plan would sharply reduce Republican support for overhauling the nation’s health care system, according to the New York Times.

Senators who met with Obama at the White House Tuesday also said he told them to send him a health care reform bill to sign by October. “He said we need to be unflinching and unflagging,” Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, told the Times.

The president’s words of support for a public insurance plan were comforting to senators like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown. “The sentiment in the room, with the president and the rest of us, was that a public plan option will keep the insurance industry honest, will give people more choices in their health care and can save significant amounts of money,” the Avon, Ohio, Democrat told the Times.

Last week, Brown told a City Club of Cleveland audience that a public insurance plan doesn’t mean doing away with private insurance, but would give private insurers some competition in places where there now is little.

Meanwhile, the insurance industry says it has wholeheartedly embraced health care reform, promising Congress that it will make it easier for individuals to buy their own health insurance, according to another New York Times story.

But so far, the insurance industry has not reached out to small businesses, which by some estimates employ half of the nation’s uninsured. Some policy and industry analysts say that unless insurers are willing to give some ground to small businesses, too, then much of what’s wrong with the nation’s health care system will remain broken, the Times said.

The Center for American Progress estimates that the nation would lose (pdf) between $124 billion and $248 billion in productivity this year if it doesn’t do something to cover the uninsured. In Ohio, that means between $3.6 billion and $7.1 billion in lost productivity this year.

More stories worth a read:

• Proposal would combat recissions of health insurance policies in California (Los Angeles Times)
• Ohio Senate Republicans amend budget bill with hospitals bailout and amendment to allow drilling at state parks (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
• FDA awards $1 million in grants to three states to enhance food and feed safety (Food and Drug Administration)
• FDA creates transparency task force(MassDevice)
• Cardinal Health increases dividend by 25 percent (PRNewswire)
• Pixantrone produces high rates of complete and partial remissions even among aggressive NHL patients with extensive prior Doxorubicin treatmentor prior Rituximab treatment (PRNewswire)
• W.H.O. says it is closer to declaring flu pandemic (New York Times)
• Novocell snaps up second stem cell patent, new CEO pursues ‘next big field’ of biotech (Xconomy | San Diego)
• Biogen Idec showdown with Carl Icahn culminates in shareholder vote today (Xconomy | Boston)
• Report: Private equity funds sitting on $400B of univested capital (VentureBeat)
• UC students earn top spots in national biomedical engineering design competitions(University of Cincinnati HealthNews)
• Pharmacists can be center of medical home (Drug Topics)
• GlaxoSmithKline signs potential $1B deuterium drug deal with Concert Pharmaceuticals Inc. (BioSpace)
• Index Ventures launches biotech with speedy exit strategy (Wall Street Journal Venture Capital blog)
• PolyMedix receives $1.6 million contract from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to develop antibiotic compounds to combat biowarfare pathogens(BusinessWire)

[Graphic from America's Health Insurance Plans]