The my is in quotes because thankfully this isn't about me, but it is about a friend. One who had a spot show up on her mamogram and the Kaiser person tell her they would "keep an eye on it." Which translated into doing nothing until the next year when it had grown into a large cancerous mass requiring a mastectomy.

Fortunately, after the surgery, chemo and radiation, she appears to be doign well.

It sure is a good thing Kaiser saved that follow up money after the first test, huh?

I thought Kaiser was good about that sort of thing

I don't know if it's endemic, all I know is that in her case the system failed. Even more upsetting that she had the test to detect something wrong, it detected it, and nothing.

And, now, to say something not exactly nice about health insurance companies, but only to point out they aren't the only problem. I have a relative that works in the insurance industry and they are driven crazy by the reluctance of doctors to disclose their prices up front (why should an X-ray cost one person $100 and another $250) and that it's hard to get doctors to honestly rate one another in terms of quality. Having worked in a law firm, I suspect these are fair points only because we basically did the same thing - different clients paid different hourly rates, we wrote off charges for one client and not another, and lawyers don't do a very good job of self-policing either. In most cases, you have to be spectacularly bad to be disbarred.

Another interesting tidbit is that anesthesiologists were being destroyed by high insurance premiums due to lawsuits in, IIRC, the 1980s. They were one of the groups behind tort reform. When tort reform failed in many states, the doctors had to come up with other ways to address their insurance woes. They focused on improving patient safety and lawsuits dropped and so did their premiums:

Anesthesiologists present a remarkable case illustrating how doctors can work to curb malpractice, according to The Wall Street Journal. Concerned about patient safety and malpractice, anesthesiologists have made a systematic effort to improve their performance. The results have been striking, showing that a focus on safety not only significantly improves outcomes for patients but also keeps down malpractice insurance costs for physicians. Anesthesiologists now pay an average of $21,000 a year for malpractice insurance, which is less than what they paid 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, use of devices to alert physicians to potentially fatal problems in the operating room have, over the past 20 years, reduced the number of patient deaths due to anesthesia from one death in every 5,000 cases to only one death in 200,000 to 300,000 cases.

Don't get me wrong, insurance companies still suck and we need single payer or as close to it as we can get. But that's only part of what's wrong with our healthcare system. We also need to improve performance, which will lesson costs to the system.

I got this in my email from my local HR676 group:

John Conyers and other Members of Congress will take to the floor of the House of Representatives Tuesday evening, June 10, to lead a discussion of HR 676, single payer healthcare legislation. HR 676 now has 90 co-sponsors in the House, more than any other health care bill.

Conyers has reserved the time under House Rules known as "Special Orders." Special Orders provide the opportunity for discussion on a specific topic to occur after the last floor vote of the day. Other congressional representatives who will participate in the discussion are Emanuel Cleaver (MO), Nancy Boyda (KS), Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX) and Diane Watson (CA).

The TUESDAY, June 10, session will be covered on C-SPAN, beginning at approximately 9:00 p.m. eastern standard time (EST).