This interview made me cringe quite a few times but it gives food for thought. Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist specialized in HIV/AIDS. She has worked for the World Bank, the WHO, UNAIDS, the CDC, and other organizations. She certainly has claims to the title of expert on HIV/AIDS. She has recently published a new book with a provocative title: The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of Aids (someone knows how to make alliterations!).  Read more 

Since this is Mother’s Day in the US, let’s note that the NGO Save the Children has created an index of the best and worst places to be a mother. Also check out their great multimedia presentation. It’s a great resource. Save the Children based their index on the following criteria:  Read more 

Splashy comments on Harold Pollack’s opinion piece, which disses mandates:

This couldn’t be more wrong:
“The central challenge is to make health insurance affordable and accessible,”

The REAL challenge is to make HEALTH CARE affordable and accessible. Single payer would work just fine.

Let’s keep reminding everyone, health insurance is not the same as health care.

They get it. I’m really proud of them for having such a professional-looking effort put together to go with the results. Those numbers won’t surprise you, Good Reader, but they do make for probing questions for candidates, don’t they? please, don’t tell me whom the unions have endorsed; I honestly don’t know and it has nothing to do with this post. Thank you. And for in discussions with neighbors and coworkers, as we all think about what we are going to do to solve this problem. It’s rather clear it’s going to take the clown squad in the Village a long time just to get on the same page as the rest of us.

Does anyone have any experience with, gosh, I don’t even know if they exist, but I’m thinking of small scale “health care collectives?” The New Depression won’t be like the other one; doctors are too harrassed these days to fall back into the house-calling, country gentleman model. So how do small units of people find ways to work together to improve the quality of the health care they receive? Pressure local governments? Business cooperation? Buying hospitals? Help me out here.

So I’ll spare you the photos. But: I went to the local “asian grocery,” and I bought this pan. A wok, actually. It looked nice and wasn’t completely the ’cheap choice.’ The food and service in this place were good, all the times I’d been there. I live in a university town; lots of Asian seeming folks were shopping there, and all the stuff sold there was labeled in a different language than English. So my thought was: this could be a good place to shop for “asian” cooking supplies.

I wanted to make a beef and water chestnut dish tonight. I used the new wok. It had been oiled, gently washed clean from store-born ick, and heated for the first time to a reasonable temp. I even used a plastic spatula.

Just as the meat cooking was getting done, I noticed something. A long, shiny, two-inch scrape on the floor of the wok. One that left edges of paint, turned back and ready to work into the meat or food cooking in the wok. I was horrified. All I could think of was “poisoned lead paint” and dying children. I also hated myself for the racist reaction I had to pans and kitchen stuff made abroad; I confess that I had one.

What should I do? I’m taking the wok back to the grocer from whom I bought it tomorrow. Should I report it? Them? To whom? How? Again, I keep thinking, “how many of these were sold to the unsuspecting?” What creeped me out was that I realized, had I not been closely paying attention, I could’ve cooked the scraped paint right into the meat and veggies and never noticed (you know how sometimes you only put half the pan of food onto the serving bowl for the table; the rest covers the cooking pan bottom) that the paint had mixed and flaked into the food, and was almost invisible in the dark sauce.

This, by the way, is life in the post-strong dollar economy. A friend of mine who is fluent in the languages of modern China, and who does regular biz in Sh and Bg, told me thusly: “they are keeping the good stuff for sale at home now; America gets the crap.” That seems more or less true to me. You?  Read more 

I don’t have an educated opinion about this class of drugs, and I haven’t read the first part of this series, but most of it sounds about right to me. Mixing for-profit economic models and health care lead to things on the ’market’ of people’s health needs that aren’t actually needed. That’s consumerism, baby! Anyway, this is the part that caught my eye:

Finally — and here is the stunner — it turns out we don’t have any clear evidence that statins help the first group by lowering cholesterol levels. It’s true that they do lower cholesterol, but many researchers are no longer convinced that this is what helps patients avoid a second heart attack. It now seems likely that they work by reducing inflammation. In other words, these very expensive drugs seem to do the same thing that aspirin does. (Are they more effective than the humble aspirin? We’ll need head-to-head studies to find out.)

So I have two questions:  Read more 

Maya at Suburban Guerrilla

This guy in Vegas exposes countless people to disease by ordering the reuse of needles at his clinic and the best he can do is sympathy? I cannot even conceive of any punishment bad enough to make justice.

Review Journal Letters to the Editor

Not long ago, an organization named Keep Our Doctors in Nevada pressured the Legislature into an emergency session and persuaded Nevada citizens to vote for medical malpractice protection, all in the name of a phony “medical malpractice crisis.”  Read more 

Aetna thinks it’s better for their company not to pay for an anesthetist/anasthesiologist’s service during a colonoscopy — and while colon cancer mortality rates have dropped over the past 4-5 years, colonoscopies are the only way of catching this killer early. Can you imagine  Read more 

Unfortunately, none of the leadership of either party seems to have any regular contact with dirty, smelly poor people. There are times when it really frustrates me, to listen to what candidates or pundits say about health care and the reality of it for most people. It’s as if they are speaking another language, they often feel so distanced from where I am and millions like me are. This post isn’t about HRC or BHO per se, so much as it’s meant to contrast with some much wonkery I read both in the blogosphere and the SCLM on the topic of health care. This feels so much more in touch with reality to me. The comments are good too:

Now, I didn’t hear the whole debate, and I’ve been trying to find the plans laid out point by point so that I can examine them more closely–but from what I can find, apparently the plan to make sure everybody is covered is basically the following for both candidates:
1. offer cheap health insurance.
2. give tax breaks so “families” can afford it.

The tricky part comes when it comes to how to actually get people on the programs–and this is the part where my head is exploding because I can’t find any definite information about each candidate. Apparently both candidates would impose some type of ‘fine’ or ‘penalty’ on people who do not buy health insurance once the option is made available–thus universal coverage. At the debate, I couldn’t figure out what Hillary was saying at all, and all I took from Obama is that he will be all about fining parents/penalizing parents if they don’t cover their children.

I found this article, which is from early Feb. and only says what I am saying here–how confusing it all is.

Thus, I will give you my reaction to these proposed ‘fines’ and penalties of parents for not covering their children from a purely uneducated point of view: YOU GOT TO BE OUT YOUR DAMN MIND.  Read more 

Via Atrios: Health Net ordered to pay $9 million after canceling cancer patient’s policy

One of California’s largest for-profit insurers stopped a controversial practice of canceling sick policyholders Friday after a judge ordered Health Net Inc. to pay more than $9 million to a breast cancer patient it dropped in the middle of chemotherapy.

The ruling by a private arbitration judge was the first of its kind and the most powerful rebuke to the state’s major insurers whose cancellation practices are under fire from the courts, state regulators and elected officials.  Read more 

UnitedHealth Poised for 13% Growth Unimpeded by Cuomo

Feb. 21 (Bloomberg) — UnitedHealth Group Inc., the largest U.S. health insurer, is poised to reach its forecasts of 13 percent profit growth this year and next, even after being accused of cheating customers by New York’s attorney general.

Don’t even know where to begin.

Doctors and dollars

Typically, reimbursement rates for out-of-network physicians are based on what is generally accepted as the “reasonable and customary” rates charged by doctors in a a common geographic area. But who determines what is reasonable and customary? The attorney general’s staff is focusing on a company known as Ingenix, which collects data that are used by health insurance companies to determine what is charged in a particular region and how much a company will reimburse out-of-network physicians, based on prevailing rates in that area.  Read more 

Recently I had a passionate discussion with a friend about health care reform. You know where we stand on this blog: It immoral and uncivilized and expensive to have a for-profit health care industry. Everyone should have complete coverage, and it should be paid for from a common fund of taxdollars, paid directly to providers for the widest range of services, at fair rates which encourage the best people to go into health care, and an emphasis should be placed on getting people as much preventative care as possible. Right there, you save billions. I further posit that the elimination of a couple of military boondoggles like Star Wars will fund the start-up of such a program without significant immediate tax increases, although I favor taxing the shit out of health insurance companies and executives too. They are sitting on trillions that people paid for care, and frequently never got.

Now, my friend told me that “we can’t just eliminate insurance companies overnight” and cut them the fuck out of health care altogether. He argued that if we were to do so, millions of investors would lose value in their stock portfolios, not just “investor class” people but municipalities and retirement funds, who are heavily invested in insurance companies. He also argued that many insurance company workers would lose their jobs, and together a quick death to for-profit health insurers, that would mean real economic upset for all.

You can probably guess my reaction.

But I suppose I can see his point, but I think smart policy planners could find a way to offset some of this, and I will even admit that if there is no other way, I support a “phased” withdrawl, in which people are given time to change out their investment portfolios over some period of time. I would also support limited and temporary subsidies to former insurance workers as they train for or look for new jobs. Workers, not golden parachute, billion dollar compensation package-getting execs. They can fuck off and die.

However, you can see why I believe what I do, as you read this bit from Mass doctors, who are at the front of “health care reform.” My guy, Edwards, really blew it by going along with the consultant’s advice and not his wife’s, because people don’t want this kind of “reform.” If he’d been brave enough to say so plainly from the get go, he would’ve done better than he has so far in various races, media blackout or no. Americans are dying, screaming out for real health care reform. Not this shit:

Over 250 Massachusetts doctors have signed an open letter to the country warning that the health reform model enacted by Massachusetts is failing and that a single payer program is the only alternative.

“It is urgent that the rest of the country know that Massachusetts is a living laboratory for the health care reforms being pushed in California and by the Obama/Clinton/Edwards campaigns. Right now the Gov. Romney/Massachusetts’ plan gets a failing grade on the ground,” said Dr.Rachel Nardin, Assistant Professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.  Read more 

I got this in an email from another Black blogger; I haven’t confirmed the victim’s race, but even so, it’s a horrible intersection of several issues we’ve been speaking of lately. And likely, one example of something that happens daily in this country. Here’s the short story:

A man died early this morning after being Tasered by Fayetteville Police Department officers.

The dead man has been indentified as Otis C. Anderson, 36, of the 2700 block of Providence Street in Fayetteville.

One police officer has been place on administrative duty pending the outcome of the investigation. The State Bureau of Investigation has been called in to investigate. Fayetteville police also are conducting an internal investigation.  Read more 

100,000 dead. For no good reason except the executives at Aetna need another home in Gstaad. This number probably doesn’t include people who “have health care” but not the kind that actually provides them with the care that will keep them well. Be proud, America, we’ve slipped to dead last on the list of industrialized nations when it comes to providing citizens health care.

Mandatory insurance won’t cut it. “Working with insurance companines” won’t cut it. The toll of needlessly dead Americans is going to rise, and rise, and rise…all while we spend what could pay for total universal coverage on the sands of Iraq and put in the pockets of the already rich. What will it take? What will finally get people to understand- “profit” and “health care” don’t mix? Ever?  Read more 

Seriously, I don’t get it. Fuck brown, black, poor, vaginal, or post-fetal Americans. If you are sick, you want someone to help you, right? Right?

And then the candidates, including the three out of six wealthy cancer survivors, all agreed that we have the best health care system in the world, people should buy their own policies and if someone doesn’t, he shouldn’t be allowed to be a free rider.

Digby, I just don’t get it. Rather, I do get it, when it comes to Republicans and their corporate media. And Americans, when it comes to racism, hatred of the Other, beautiful brown people or “brown” ideologies. That part I can understand. But giving up civilized standards in health care that keep white southern grannies hale and fed? No, that I don’t get. I thought keeping people like that happy was the whole point of oppression of others.

Civilization: we’ve had it, sustained it, prospered with it. We’re letting it go. Why? I don’t mean just the poor, we’re always fucked in this sense and no one wants to realize that keeping us well and healthy mean greater prosperity for all later. No, I mean for you middle class white folks, who worked so gosh darned hard for the last 100 years to make sure you didn’t live like animals.

Why are you giving that up, again? I don’t grok that at all.  Read more 

And I have to say he sounded great.

One line I especially remember went something like this (he was speaking to a business audience in Cleveland, IIRC):

Universal health care is even good for millionaires. Because chances are, if you’re a millionaire, you’ve got people working for you, and now they’re covered. And your own health care is cheaper too [because of the efficiencies of the program].

He sounded great. I think Hillary’s going to blow it a second time, too.  Read more 

Perhaps you’ve been following recent developments in the battle to give kids some health care. SCHIP is a winner all around, it doesn’t cost too much and it works and kids are healthier and all that liberal crap. And Lane is always worth a read:

To put this into perspective, we’re spending a billion dollars a day on the War in Iraq. In less than a week and a half, we will have spent the entire difference between the two proposals on the War. That is embarrassing. I can’t believe the White House is digging its heels in on this. Further, I can’t believe that they aren’t being publicly flogged by every politician and organization in America.  Read more 

Whatever, Dood. Mandatory insurance plans aren’t “progressive.” As I argued before, it makes little sense to bring us health care “reform” that only chains all of us into a system that is clearly not working. You just love how fair your car insurance is, don’t you? And you’re totally happy with insurance companies telling you what medical care you can have, over the objections of your doctor, right? So of course Hillary’s new plan will bring us a peachy keen and superprogressive Paradise, if we can all just agree that for-profit insurance companies provide the best health care imaginable.

I’m being a tad unfair, this diary is by a supporter and I haven’t read Hillary’s actual plan. But any plan that isn’t “universal single-payer nonprofit” isn’t good enough for me. Period. Edwards and others who want my support should take note.

There’s an old saying in business: “You want it cheaper, faster, and better quality? Pick two, and call me back.”  Read more 

This makes my blood boil:

Eventually the rocket shrapnel was removed from Town’s neck and his ears stopped leaking blood. But his hearing never really recovered, and in many ways, neither has his life. A soldier honored twelve times during his seven years in uniform, Town has spent the last three struggling with deafness, memory failure and depression. By September 2006 he and the Army agreed he was no longer combat-ready.

But instead of sending Town to a medical board and discharging him because of his injuries, doctors at Fort Carson, Colorado, did something strange: They claimed Town’s wounds were actually caused by a “personality disorder.” Town was then booted from the Army and told that under a personality disorder discharge, he would never receive disability or medical benefits.
 Read more 

Just watched the Edwards’ presser.  Read more 

I just got off a conference call with Senator Reid, and his office has given the go ahead to blog on record about what he said. Other bloggers were in on it too, so look around for other reports, as mine is going to be a little strongly worded.

Good news: Harry Gets It. To quote: “The insurance industry is the Enemy.” This was part of his response to questions about health care. Although he won’t oppose it, as it’s “something,” he’s not impressed with Arnold’s bill, because he’s worried about the Mass. example, that is, forcing the poor into plans doesn’t really help anything and in fact hurts those who can’t afford ridiculous premiums. If Harry had his way, people in this country would enjoy “the same plan as [he] has.” Mmmm!  Read more