Healthcare, health policy, cognitive science. , and the path to Universal Healthcare..
Over at DailyKos, DrMatt has collected a nice selection of anecdotes for my collection.
I have some more from Doctors for Amercia I’ll try to post later today…
I will be on KDKA Radio Pittsburgh tonight (Thursday Aug 13) at 9 PM with conservative talker Mike Pintek.
You can listen live at www.kdkaradio.com
Cheers,
The Associated Press: Long lines as free health care offered in LA area:
The Los Angeles event marks the first time Remote Area Medical has provided such medical care in a major urban area. The medical group typically serves patients in rural parts of the United States and travels to underdeveloped countries.
The piercing sound of teeth being drilled and scraped echoed up to the rafters where the Los Angeles Lakers once played to the roar of capacity crowds. Mobile health trucks provided other medical examinations, and tables full of donated eyeglasses were available to those who had eye examinations done.
Since 2000, The Forum has been owned by Faithful Central Bible Church, which donated the use of the facility for a week. The medical professionals volunteered their time and covered their own liability. Cash and services were donated by local hospitals, health systems and charitable groups.
Tennessee-based RAM’s founder Stan Brock said he helps organize 30 to 40 such health care events a year, with a total of 567 events held to date, adding: ‘We just wish we could do more.’
‘This need has existed in this country for decades and decades,’ said Brock. ‘The people coming here are here because they are in pain.’
The event came at a time when the national debate over President Barack Obama’s health reform plan has boiled over at town hall meetings, with opponents sometimes shouting down Democratic members of Congress who favor the program.
Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., told a cheering crowd of volunteers and medical professionals at The Forum that she would continue to advocate for health care reform because ‘we can do a better job of providing health care to those who desperately need it.
Let’s see, 567 events times maybe 500 people each, how many anecdotes is that?
A reality check on a reality check:
Still, I found Holmes tale both compelling and troubling. So I decided to check a little further. On the Mayo Clinic’s website, Shona Holmes is a success story. But it’s somewhat different story than all the headlines might have implied. Holmes’ ‘brain tumour’ was actually a Rathke’s Cleft Cyst on her pituitary gland. To quote an American source, the John Wayne Cancer Center, ‘Rathke’s Cleft Cysts are not true tumors or neoplasms; instead they are benign cysts.’
There’s no doubt Holmes had a problem that needed treatment, and she was given appointments with the appropriate specialists in Ontario. She chose not to wait the few months to see them. But it’s a far cry from the life-or-death picture portrayed by Holmes on the TV ads or by McConnell in his attacks.
In Senator McConnell’s home state of Kentucky, one out of three people under age 65 do not have any health insurance. They don’t have to worry about wait times for hip or knee replacement or cancer surgery — they can’t get care. The median household income in Kentucky is $37,186 — not quite enough for the $97,000 bill at the Mayo Clinic. CNN didn’t mention that in its ‘Reality Check.'”
“The scare ads and op-ed pieces featuring Canadians telling us American how terrible their government health-care systems have arrived – predictably.
“There’s another, factual view – by those of us Americans who’ve lived in Canada and used their system.
“My wife and I did for years, and we’ve been incensed by the lies we’ve heard back here in the U.S. about Canada’s supposedly broken system.”
Read on…
HEALTH CARE: If This Is An Emergency, Please Press “Can’t Afford It” New America Blogs:
From the New America Healthcare Blog …
“Imagine being sick enough or hurt enough to rush to an emergency room—and then leaving without getting the recommended tests or treatment because you can’t afford it.
“Doctors have a name for those discharges—’Against Medical Advice.’ It seems to be happening more often, both in the ER and in the rest of the hospital as health costs rise and insurance coverage falls.
“MSNBC interviewed several doctors and patients about how the economy is affecting emergency care. A patient with acute appendicitis needing emergency surgery who waited for his mother to drive him to the hospital so he wouldn’t have to pay for an ambulance. A patient with an infected kidney stone. People with chest pains who were not in the throes of a life-threatening heart attack that very minute but who couldn’t or wouldn’t follow up to find out what the pains signaled. A 31 year old knocked unconscious in a bike crash, who asked about the cost of the recommended follow up, only to be told by the ER doctor, that she was ‘a physician, not an accountant.’ Declining treatment, he still got a $600 bill.”
There’s more at New America and at MSNBC…
I would only add this, from a wise NY Times reader:
Mr. Krugman rightly notes that emergency room care cannot substitute for health insurance since the cost will be billed directly to the patient.
There is another reason emergency rooms cannot provide adequate health care. Emergency rooms are for emergencies. They can treat a patient in a diabetic coma, but they cannot provide continuing help in managing diabetes. They can treat a full-blown asthma attack, but they cannot provide the medications needed to manage asthma daily.
They can treat a woman who has gone into early labor, but they cannot provide prenatal care.Emergency rooms cannot offer any help for managing Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or cancer. On a more basic level, they cannot provide eyeglasses, hearing aids or dentures.
Republican claims that no American is without access to health care because “you can just go to an emergency room” are openly false as well as appallingly callous.
With Son in Remission, a Family Struggles to Find Coverage – NYTimes.com:
“Now the Walkers face the possibility that Jake will no longer be seen at Houston’s renowned M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, which they credit for his remission.
“You realize how vulnerable you really are,” said Ms. Walker, who exhibits the maternal ferocity of a black bear. “You just — not give up — but you just feel that you’re at a loss, that you’re at your wits’ end. I ask myself, ‘Do I really have to lose my home to save my son’s life?’ ”
Neither of the Walkers has been able to land a job with the kind of large group coverage that would disregard Jake’s health status. His cancer history effectively makes him uninsurable on the individual market. He is too old to qualify for Medicaid as a child, and it is virtually impossible in Texas to qualify as an able-bodied adult.
Because the Walkers own their modest house, they have been told they do not merit other government assistance. With little predictable income beyond Ms. Walker’s $688 unemployment check every two weeks, the family cannot afford the state’s high-risk insurance pool or continuation coverage through the federal Cobra law.
To date, Jake’s treatment has cost nearly $2 million. Almost all of it has been paid by Cigna under a preferred-provider family policy that Ms. Walker paid $426.28 a month for through DHL, the troubled shipping company where she worked as a billing agent.
Until last fall, Mr. Walker was the co-owner of a business that supplied DHL with trucks and drivers, but it too fell victim to downsizing. The feed store, the last in an area where suburbs are swallowing ranchland, has been losing money.
What has made the Walkers feel most helpless, though, is that their son has been left so exposed, after all he has endured.
“Your job as a parent is to protect your children at any cost,” Ms. Walker said. “I really felt like I had let him down.””
At the beginning of the article, Mrs. Walker’s salary was noted to be $37,000. She paid, out of that, $426 a month for her health insurance (admittedly, pretty darn good insurance given the expense of Jake’s treatment). $426 x 12 = $5112 per year bringing her salary down almost 14%, not counting the subsidy on the employer side, probably close to another $5K.
The economic costs are brutal enough, but the fear, uncertainty, and skimping on care (prescriptions, skipping office visits, etc.) are just not acceptable in the richest country in the world.
The Globalist Global Health — What Obama Can Learn from European Health Care (Part I):
“Imagine a place where doctors still do house calls. When I was visiting my friend Meredith, living in the small rural town of Lautrec about an hour’s drive outside Toulouse, France, one day she was stung badly by a wasp, causing a sizable and painful swelling on her hand.
“She called her doctor, and to my great surprise within 15 minutes he had shown up at her door — the famous French doctor’s house call. I couldn’t get over it. “House calls in the United States went out when Eisenhower was president,” I told her, shaking my head.”
Part Two of this article is here.
“The first overriding difference between U.S. and European healthcare systems is one of philosophy. The various European healthcare systems put people and their health before profits — la santé d’abord, “health comes first,” as the French are fond of saying.
“It is the difference between health care run mostly as a non-profit venture with the goal of keeping people healthy and productive — or running it as a for-profit commercial enterprise. “
And this section is well said:
Unlike single-payer Britain or Sweden, other nations like France, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium have figured out a third way, a hybrid with private insurance companies, short waiting lists for treatment and individual choice of doctors (most of whom are in private practice).
This third-way hybrid is based on the principle of “shared responsibility” between workers, employers and the government, all contributing their fair share to guarantee universal coverage.
Participation for individuals is mandatory, not optional, just as it is mandatory to have a driver’s license to drive a car.
These healthcare plans are similar to what Massachusetts recently enacted — but with two essential differences. First, in France and Germany, the private insurance companies are non-profits. Doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals are paid well, but you don’t have corporate healthcare CEOs making hundreds of millions of dollars. Generally speaking, the profit motive has been wrung out of the system.
The second key difference is in the area of cost controls. In France and Germany, fees for services are negotiated between representatives of the healthcare professions, the government, patient consumer representatives and the private non-profit insurance companies.
These are a nice pair of articles to send to people who need a basic primer on what “socialized medicine” really is, rather than what the Right wants you to think it is.
Cheers,
A friend sent me this piece from the WSJ from the seriously delusional Fraser Institute (whom I may have to give their own subject tag at this point, but I’ll stick them in with the Right Wing Noise Machine for now). My reply:
I love how these people love to site anecdotes. I note they never site the horrible anecdotes from the US.
I have some collected here: http://cmhmd.blogspot.com/search/label/%22Anecdote-Off%22
The first entry on my blog in my “anecdote-off” section is from a BBC documentary on US healthcare from January.
Have fun. See how many anecdotes you can count in this brief half hour program. I think there are at least a thousand if you count all those poor people at the RAM Medical program. But there are stories every bit, actually worse, than any Canadian anecdote I’ve ever seen.
Keep scrolling down, you’ll get the idea. If you are uninsured in America, you may as well be in Cambodia until you’re sick enough for the ER.
Oh, and hip replacements in the US do have a short waiting time, thanks to OUR single payer system, Medicare, which is funded well enough to make it so,
And finally, the Fraser Institute is full of poopy-heads, and dishonest ones at that. 😉
I love you, but aren’t you seriously tired of being systematically manipulated by Fraser, Heritage, Club for Growth and the rest of the noise machine?
Cheers,
The episode is entitled “What Now, Mr. President?” Sadly, there is probably nothing you didn’t already know in here, but it is a good program to share with your friends who still beleive in the Best Healthcare in the World(TM) myth.
Has a section on RAM Medical, which “60 Minutes” covered last year, as well as a section on wealth disparity, health care lobbying, drug pricing, and a few striking anecdotes, if you like that sort of thing. (Getting chemo in a tent, begging for Tennessee Medicaid toive a liver transplant, and thousands seeking help at RAM.)
Medical Debt Is a Growing Worry, for Those With Insurance and Without – washingtonpost.com:
“‘People who are underinsured end up facing almost identical problems as the uninsured,’ said Karen L. Pollitz, director of the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University. ‘The difference is, they paid for the privilege.’
“Medical debt is likely to figure prominently in the looming national debate over reforming health care.
“Jim Eyler, 57, of Westminster, Md., says he needs help. The cement company manager said he spends about 33 percent of his take-home pay on unreimbursed medical bills, many connected with the advanced breast cancer his wife has been battling since 2005. ‘I keep wondering, where’s the money going to come from?’ he asked.”
More anecdotes here, of course, but the larger point is that our current cost structure is unsustainable.