Posts Tagged ‘Healthcare’
Factbox: Has Obama delivered on his 2008 campaign promises?
President Barack Obama said at a fundraiser in California this week he has kept 60 percent of his 2008 campaign promises.
Here are some of his major promises made on the campaign trail in 2008 and where they stand:
* CLOSING GUANTANAMO BAY – Obama said he would shut down the facility set up by President George W. Bush to be the central prison for terror suspects in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks…
* END COMBAT MISSIONS IN IRAQ BY AUG. 31, 2010 – “Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end,” Obama said early in his presidency…
* REPEAL DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL – Last December, Obama signed legislation repealing a military policy that banned gays from openly serving in the armed forces. The policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” had been signed into law in 1993 under President Bill Clinton…
* UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE – In March 2010, Obama signed into law a bill to overhaul the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry. This followed months of wrangling and political standoffs with Republican lawmakers, who vehemently opposed the most sweeping social policy legislation in decades…
* FINANCIAL REGULATION – While running for president, Obama promised to rein in Wall Street forces and their risky practices that pushed America into its worst recession in decades…
* REPEAL BUSH TAX CUTS – As a presidential candidate, Obama vowed to oppose Bush-era tax cuts for wealthy Americans…
* IMMIGRATION REFORM – Obama’s 2008 election victory can be partly attributed to a huge turnout of reliably Democratic Hispanic voters drawn by his promise to deliver immigration reform that would allow millions of illegal immigrants a path to U.S. citizenship…
* ISRAEL-PALESTINE – In foreign policy, Obama pledged to set in motion a diplomatic push to achieve a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state of Israel…
RTFA – and judge for yourselves.
Hospital privacy curtains prove to be laden with germs
The privacy curtains that separate care spaces in hospitals and clinics are frequently contaminated with potentially dangerous bacteria, researchers said in Chicago this week.
To avoid spreading those bugs, health care providers should make sure to wash their hands after routine contact with the curtains and before interacting with patients, Dr. Michael Ohl…said at the 51st Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
“There is growing recognition that the hospital environment plays an important role in the transmission of infections in the health care setting and it’s clear that these (privacy curtains) are potentially important sites of contamination because they are frequently touched by patients and providers,” Dr. Ohl told Reuters Health.
Health care providers often touch these curtains after they have washed their hands and then proceed to touch the patient. Further, these curtains often hang for a long time and are difficult to disinfect…
Tests detected Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, including the especially dangerous methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), as well as various species of Enterococci — gut bacteria — some resistant to the newer antibiotic vancomycin.
The researchers used additional tests to identify specific vancomycin and methicillin-resistant strains to see whether the same strains were circulating and contaminating the curtains over and over.
The study found significant contamination that occurred very rapidly after new curtains were placed…
“The vast majority of curtains showed contamination with potentially significant bacteria within a week of first being hung, and many were hanging for longer than three or four weeks,” Dr. Ohl noted.
“We need to think about strategies to reduce the potential transfer of bacteria from curtains to patients,” he added. “The most intuitive, common sense strategy is (for health care workers) to wash hands after pulling the curtain and before seeing the patient. There are other strategies, such as more frequent disinfecting, but this would involve more use of disinfectant chemicals, and then there is the possibility of using microbial resistant fabrics. But handwashing is by far the most practical, and the cheapest intervention.”
How about reinstating the traditional hospital laundry? That’s gone by the boards in many hospitals. Outsourcing to save money and keep the beancounters on the board of directors happy.
Hospitals are supposed to be about healthcare, right?
He robs a bank of $1 to get health care in jail
A 59-year-old man has been jailed in Gastonia, N.C., on charges of larceny after allegedly robbing an RBC Bank for $1 so he could get health care in prison. Richard James Verone handed a female teller a note demanding the money and claiming that he had a gun, according to the police report.
He then sat down and waited for police to arrive. “… I say, ‘I’ll be sitting right over here, on the chair, waiting for the police,’” Verone told reporters, recalling the June 9 robbery in an interview from Gaston County Jail.
And wait for the police, he did.
“He’s sitting on the sofa as you walk in the front door,” the bank teller said in a 911 call.
Police arrested Verone where he sat. He was unarmed.
Verone said he asked for $1 to show that his motives were medical, not monetary, according to news reports. With a growth in his chest, two ruptured disks and no job, Verone hoped a three-year stint in prison would afford him the health care he needed.
“I’m sort of a logical person and that was my logic, what I came up with,” Verone told reporters. “If it is called manipulation, then out of necessity because I need medical care, then I guess I am manipulating the courts to get medical care.”
Oh. No one else noticed we live in a nation that guarantees better health care for criminals than ordinary citizens?
Our politicians live like the economic royalty they ape and prance and dance for. They’re afraid to lift the cap from SSA taxes, afraid to ask for simple human responsibility from anyone earning more than $106K per annum. Afraid to ask for equitable real taxes from corporate barons.
Our fear-driven politicians will not notice the passing of a poor man like Richard James Verone through their banking system, jail system – anymore than any other small creature invading their palaces for a moment or two.
Thanks, Helen
Medical tourism wins devoted American fans
As an example…
Paul Hambleton didn’t know what to do. He was uninsured, hurting, and facing a $30,000 bill to fix his torn-up knee.
So after researching his options, the owner of a valet-parking firm in Henderson, Texas, came up with an inspired solution. He got treated at a luxury facility, by doctors trained at top institutions, and enjoyed a sunny getaway at the same time, all at a fraction of the cost.
Of course there was a hitch: He had to go abroad. After checking out a number of local hospitals in Texas, Hambleton ended up heading across the border, to a facility in Monterrey, Mexico. The entire cost, including airfare: under $6,000.
“I was treated like a billionaire,” says the 52-year-old, who even squeezed in a couple of rounds of golf during his trip. “I had a Baylor-trained surgeon, a personal nurse the entire time, stayed at a top hotel, and had the best chicken enchiladas I’ve ever had. If I had my choice, I’d never go to an American hospital again.”
More Americans than ever are following Hambleton’s logic, and forgoing their local General Hospital in order to travel to places like Thailand, India, or Costa Rica for medical tuneups. More than half a million Americans every year, in fact, who are seeking out everything from dental work to cosmetic surgery to heart stents and hip replacements. It’s called “medical tourism,” and it amounts to a $40-billion annual business…
“It’s a lunatic statement, to say that there’s no quality healthcare overseas,” says Josef Woodman, author of the book Patients Beyond Borders. “For baby boomers who are in financially challenging circumstances, there’s a lot of choice out there now.”
The savings can be significant. Angioplasty that can cost up to $43,000 in the U.S. costs $4,700 in India, or $7,300 in Malaysia, according to data compiled by patientsbeyondborders.com. And in terms of amenities, hospitals like the famed Bumrungrad in Bangkok put their cash-strapped American counterparts to shame…
RTFA for details, anecdotes. I have peers among the grayheads in my family whose regular doctor and dentist are in Mexico. If they can time things appropriately their annual escape via 5th-wheeler to America’s southern border for the winter includes time set aside for medical and dental work on the Mexican side of that border.
Cripes – at least one of our “family” dentists belongs to the American Dental Association and has the contract for dental work for schoolchildren – of the town on the US side of the border.
Doctors turning Left on universal healthcare
Republican Congressional Troika
With Republicans in complete control of Maine’s state government for the first time since 1962, State Senator Lois A. Snowe-Mello offered a bill in February to limit doctors’ liability that she was sure the powerful doctors’ lobby would cheer. Instead, it asked her to shelve the measure.
“It was like a slap in the face,” said Ms. Snowe-Mello, who describes herself as a conservative Republican. “The doctors in this state are increasingly going left.”
Doctors were once overwhelmingly male and usually owned their own practices. They generally favored lower taxes and regularly fought lawyers to restrict patient lawsuits. Ronald Reagan came to national political prominence in part by railing against “socialized medicine” on doctors’ behalf.
But doctors are changing. They are abandoning their own practices and taking salaried jobs in hospitals, particularly in the North, but increasingly in the South as well. Half of all younger doctors are women, and that share is likely to grow.
There are no national surveys that track doctors’ political leanings, but as more doctors move from business owner to shift worker, their historic alliance with the Republican Party is weakening from Maine as well as South Dakota, Arizona and Oregon, according to doctors’ advocates in those and other states.
That change could have a profound effect on the nation’s health care debate. Indeed, after opposing almost every major health overhaul proposal for nearly a century, the American Medical Association supported President Obama’s legislation last year because the new law would provide health insurance to the vast majority of the nation’s uninsured, improve competition and choice in insurance, and promote prevention and wellness, the group said.
No surprise to me. RTFA for details – for, more often than not, enlightened self-interest is re-entering American politics.
Doctor says he can’t find anyone to take over his practice
A former president of the Maryland State Medical Society, Dr. Sroka has practiced family medicine for 32 years in a small, red-brick building just six miles from his childhood home, treating fishing buddies, neighbors and even his elementary school principal much the way doctors have practiced medicine for centuries. He likes to chat, but with costs going up and reimbursements down, that extra time has hurt his income. So Dr. Sroka, 62, thought about retiring.
He tried to sell his once highly profitable practice. No luck. He tried giving it away. No luck.
Dr. Sroka’s fate is emblematic of a transformation in American medicine. He once provided for nearly all of his patients’ medical needs — stitching up the injured, directing care for the hospitalized and keeping vigil for the dying. But doctors like him are increasingly being replaced by teams of rotating doctors and nurses who do not know their patients nearly as well. A centuries-old intimacy between doctor and patient is being lost, and patients who visit the doctor are often kept guessing about who will appear in the white coat…
Yup. Let’s address law and healthcare legislation and ignore the number of greedy buggers whose choice to enter medicine is grounded almost exclusively on income vs. effort.
Indeed, younger doctors — half of whom are now women — are refusing to take over these small practices. They want better lifestyles, shorter work days, and weekends free of the beepers, cellphones and patient emergencies that have long defined doctors’ lives. Weighed down with debt, they want regular paychecks instead of shopkeeper risks. And even if they wanted such practices, banks — attuned to the growing uncertainties — are far less likely to lend the money needed…
Of course “fewer unnecessary tests” is also a crock as anyone who has investigated rising medical costs should know. Cripes, I’ll even include an anecdote. In a good deal of pain on a weekend, I went to a private emergency clinic. After batteries of tests including a skull X-ray they gave me painkillers and suggested I see my regular doctor on Monday. The bill to Medicare, my supplemental insurance and me was over $800.
My doctor resolved the cause as a previously unexperienced allergy – treated with OTC medication, by the way. He chuckled over the private emergency clinic as “they certainly know how to manage their profit centers”.
England is healthier than the US
People living in England enjoy better health than Americans, despite less investment in healthcare, research published in the US has revealed.
Across all ages, US residents tend to fare worse in terms of diabetes, high cholesterol and heart disease markers, data on over 100,000 people show…
The reason remains a mystery, says the US team…
Not a mystery if you pay attention to the bullshit cranked out by our bought-and-paid-for politicians.
Despite the greater use of health care technology in the US, Americans receive less preventive health care than their English counterparts…
But despite looking, the researchers did not find any real evidence that differences in obesity, alcohol consumption or physical activity were to blame.
Smoking may be a factor, but Dr Melissa Martinson and colleagues doubt it because even younger Americans who have not yet been exposed to decades of tobacco smoke appear to be in worse health than English counterparts.
And although a larger share of Americans are uninsured or under insured compared to populations in England or other European countries, even groups with good access to health insurance experienced worse health than people in England…
A spokesperson from the Department of Health said: “The NHS offers care free to all at the point of use and based on need.
“Whilst in some areas our outcomes may be favourable compared with those in the US, we are still clear that we have a long way to go before we achieve outcomes comparable with the best performing health systems.
“That is exactly why we are modernising the NHS.”
My mates in the UK complain about the NHS even more than their peers – and my friends – in the GWN complaining about Health Canada.
But, when push comes to shove and you compare what you get for what you pay – we’re screwed to the wall of deceit and deception Made in the USA by Congress, healthcare conglomerates and the holy sepulcher of our insurance giants.
We have succeeded in modernizing little or nothing.
Talk doesn’t pay – psychiatry relegated to pill-pushers
Alone with his psychiatrist, the patient confided that his newborn had serious health problems, his distraught wife was screaming at him and he had started drinking again. With his life and second marriage falling apart, the man said he needed help.
But the psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Levin, stopped him and said: “Hold it. I’m not your therapist. I could adjust your medications, but I don’t think that’s appropriate.”
Like many of the nation’s 48,000 psychiatrists, Dr. Levin, in large part because of changes in how much insurance will pay, no longer provides talk therapy, the form of psychiatry popularized by Sigmund Freud that dominated the profession for decades. Instead, he prescribes medication, usually after a brief consultation with each patient. So Dr. Levin sent the man away with a referral to a less costly therapist and a personal crisis unexplored and unresolved.
Medicine is rapidly changing in the United States from a cottage industry to one dominated by large hospital groups and corporations, but the new efficiencies can be accompanied by a telling loss of intimacy between doctors and patients. And no specialty has suffered this loss more profoundly than psychiatry.
Trained as a traditional psychiatrist at Michael Reese Hospital, a sprawling Chicago medical center that has since closed, Dr. Levin, 68, first established a private practice in 1972, when talk therapy was in its heyday.
Then, like many psychiatrists, he treated 50 to 60 patients in once- or twice-weekly talk-therapy sessions of 45 minutes each. Now, like many of his peers, he treats 1,200 people in mostly 15-minute visits for prescription adjustments that are sometimes months apart. Then, he knew his patients’ inner lives better than he knew his wife’s; now, he often cannot remember their names. Then, his goal was to help his patients become happy and fulfilled; now, it is just to keep them functional.
I hold no brief for Freudian analysis; but, what I’ve learned over time about psychotherapy – especially in a clinical environment – leads me to conclude this is just one more modality, one more method of treating human ills that is being crushed into a tidy little profit center by hospital corporations, insurance companies and medical associations that are little more than trade groups and lobbyists.
Keep the patient functional enough to work for a living! Screw any core needs they or their family may have! Ignore whatever potential for a life that satisfies personal needs and goals – as long as the individual remains a productive member of society.
RTFA for details. Decide who is worthy of more contempt. Corporate medicine or the politicians taking a payoff as obedient toadies?
Trustfunder charged over death threats
A 32-year-old man from Palm Springs, California, was arrested Wednesday on federal charges of threatening U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Washington, in two profane phone messages to McDermott’s Seattle office.
The messages were left, according to court records, as Congress was debating a tax and unemployment insurance bill that was eventually passed and signed into law on December 17…
Charles Turner Habermann is charged with threatening a federal official in two voicemails on December 10, according to the complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Seattle. That charge carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, prosecutors said.
In the first voice message, a man authorities identified as Habermann threatens to kill McDermott, his friends and family.
“I’ll round them up, I’ll kill them, I’ll kill his friends, I’ll kill his family, I will kill everybody he (expletive) knows.” Habermann allegedly said in the voicemail message, according to an affidavit filed in federal court by FBI special agent Dean W. Giboney.
“I’d like to remind you McDermott that if you read the constitution all the money belongs to the people. None of it belongs to government,” Habermann allegedly said in the voicemail, according to the affidavit…
Habermann told agents that he never had any intention of hurting anyone because he had too much to lose, referring to a $3 million trust fund, the affidavit said.
This lout received a warning earlier in 2010 for threatening a state legislator…”about the current federal health care bill…how Habermann was ‘very well off’ and did not want to support immigrants and Latinos.”
What a wonderful guy.
Budget analysts point out Republican hypocrisy
Republican efforts to scrap President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform took a hit on Thursday when budget analysts said repeal would add billions of dollars to the federal budget deficit.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated overturning the reform signed by Obama last year would add about $230 billion to the deficit by 2021 and result in 32 million fewer people having health insurance.
That was a blow to Republican campaign promises to slash the federal budget deficit…
“The Republicans have to understand that the healthcare bill is not going to be repealed,” Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid told reporters.
“We’re willing to work in any way that’s constructive in nature to improve the healthcare delivery system for our country,” he said. “But repealing healthcare? They should get a new lease on life and talk about something else…”
In a preliminary estimate, the CBO said repealing the healthcare overhaul would increase the federal budget deficit by roughly $145 billion by 2019. That figure would rise to about $230 billion by 2021, it said.
Republicans have never let fact, reality, honesty or the needs of the American people get in the way of ideology dedicated to the wealthiest class of business owners this planet has ever supported.
They aren’t about to start, now.
