Thoughts on Health Care

After my daughter spent a month in the hospital this spring, I have a whole new perspective on the debate raging over health care reform.

A fascinating new study helps to illustrate, the urgent need to move away from the for-profit health insurance model. According to a joint study by Harvard University and Ohio State University, sixty percent of US bankruptcies in 2007 were driven by medical bills. What's really alarming is that 75% of those folks had health insurance.

"Unless you're Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," Harvard's Dr. David Himmelstein, an advocate for a single-payer health insurance program for the United States, said in a statement.

"For middle-class Americans, health insurance offers little protection," he added.

And why is that? Because if you do get sick and need significant treatment, odds are your policy will simply get cancelled. According to the report, a quarter of people lose their insurance coverage immediately when they suffer a disabling illness, and another quarter lose it within the first year. Insurance companies (or employers who offer their own plans) save money by dropping you if you're too expensive.

Critics of reform scream about the possibility of rationing health care under a single-payer system, but the reality is that we already have rationing. Insurance companies protect their profits by dropping folks who need expensive care, or putting artificial limits on how many days you can spend in the hospital, how many times you can visit a doctor, or even annual caps on how much they'll spend for your care. All of those things that the Fox News crowd warn us could happen under "Obama Care" are exactly the things we have right now.

Facts Still Not Covered By Copyright

Sports reference publishing -- and all journalism, for that matter -- is made possible by the legal principle that facts can't be copyrighted. It's a principle that was upheld by the Supreme Court with their Feist ruling in 1991, and again this summer in the Major League Baseball v CBC case.

The issue was put to the test again this month in Federal Court, with a pair of documentary filmmakers suing Warner Brothers over their 2006 film "We Are Marshall." The dispute centered on the rights to the story of the tragic 1970 airplane crash that killed 37 members of Marshall University's football team and the school's remarkable efforts the following year to rebuild the program. Deborah Novak and John Witek argued that the studio's film stole their work with by retelling the story which they documented in their Emmy award winning 2000 film, "Ashes to Glory."

U.S. District Court Judge Gary Allen Feess dismissed the case on Monday, delivering a lengthy opinion which concluded: "Though the two works tell the story of the Nov. 14, 1970, airplane crash, that event, and the events that preceded and followed, are all matters of public record which cannot be copyrighted." He went on to write: "Even though the two works have the same story as their subject, they are not substantially similar as the phrase is used in copyright jurisprudence."

In an excellent post at the TechDirt blog, Mike Masnick discusses the impact the ruling may have on the strange practice of movie studios "buying the rights" to someone's story.

There's really no legal reason for them to do so -- as you can't copyright factual information. Anyone can make a movie based on a true story without purchasing any kinds of rights. Now, there may be some business reasons for doing so. Licensing the story from either those who were involved or who initially reported on it may allow you to have those people more involved in making the movie itself (though, that could just be handled by hiring them to advise, rather than "licensing" the story). Still, it did seem odd that it was so common for true stories to be "sold" this way.

High Court Upholds Right to Use Sports Data

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck a blow against Major League Baseball and the Players Association in their heavy handed efforts to assert control over the use of baseball statistics. The two entities had argued that they owned the rights to the use of their playing statistics, and that companies who used them to run fantasy baseball leagues had to pay a licensing fee. A lower court had ruled against MLB, and by refusing to hear an appeal, the Supreme Court upheld that ruling.

The Court has already ruled pretty clearly on the central issue in this case: that factual information could not be protected by copyright. That 1991 decision (Feist v Rural Telephone) was fought between the publishers of competing phone books, but it has made a major impact in the field of sport reference publishing. It's made it possible for me to publish the kinds of books and websites I've worked on for the past decade, and it's helped spawn all kinds of great new research by making the raw data more widely available.