We're Short On Livestock

Let's see....Mr. Yenta spent one full week in the hospital. He had an MRI, EKG, ultra sound and probably some  other tests. His regular doctor called in a cardiologist and a neurologist. And now he says he needs a different ultra sound and at least one more specialist. The pharmacist is seeing a lot of us. Now I'm supposed to go for an x-ray of a problem area and pretty soon the doctor is going to notice that I'm late getting a mammogram. After checking with the very handy chicken converter it seems clear to me that if we didn't have insurance we'd have to buy the farm.

New One On Me

I don't know if this one is going around. I heard it in the local drug store, not the media. I walked in while one of the pharmacists, the counter clerk and a customer were discussing yet another reason that Health Care reform is no good. Not enough Primary Care Physicians. The pharmacist wondered  with 32 million more people in the system who would take care of them? The counter clerk said it wouldn't matter because it would take six months to get an appointment. The customer said it was scary, was what it was. Just scary. 

Scarier than having a huge portion of our population without access to health care? Scarier than being priced out of the insurance market? I guess that was the idea. 

The Misinformation Age

I followed a link on Facebook and got drove through a backwater on the Information Superhighway.  Even the name of the group is born of delusion - 304,059,724 against Obama's Healthcare takeover. A question for physics majors out there -  Does ignorant really travel faster than informed or does it just seem that way?

The Dumbest Contention Of Them All?

Image via Wikipedia

The Take - Washington Post

....former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrichsaid Obama and the Democrats will regret their decision to push for comprehensive reform. Calling the bill "the most radical social experiment . . . in modern times," Gingrich said: "They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years" with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

Well, let's take a look at where the similarities lie.

• A. Both are monumental and contentious pieces of legislation that change the social contract between the government and the people. Check
• The Democratic Party is a big tent coalition with diverse major factions. Check
• Two of the largest of the Democratic factions are pro-labor New Dealers and conservative Dixiecrats. Oh, wait just a minute on that. 

The latter started moving to the Republican party after the aforementioned Civil Rights and the GOP finished the job by appealing directly to them in what we all recall as the Southern Strategy. And the modern Democratic equivalent of those people would be? Who among the Democratic Party gathers at night in hoods  to burn a caduceus on the lawn of the wrong sort of health care consumer? I'm thinking that's not really such a faction in the party these days.

Proud to be an American

OK, not as proud as if we had single payer, but this is such a sweet moment. And to the racist, willfully ignorant teabaggers out there - well, you'll benefit, too. And that's as it should be. I guess.

Hardball WTF Moment of the Day

Image by seiuhealthcare775nw via Flickr

There were a lot of them today. It would have been hard to choose which was the most bewildering bit of conversation but then there was THE moment. It was about the presidential press conference, health care reform and the public option. They played a quick clip of Jake Tapper asking Obama what would become of his promise that the insured portion of the American people wouldn’t have to change their plan to a public option if they didn’t want to in the event that the public plan was a good deal and employers decided to switch to it. Yeah, what then? Then they played a small portion of the president’s reply.

"When I say if you have your plan and you like it, ... or you have a doctor and you like your doctor, that you don't have to change plans, what I'm saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform," the president said.

At that point, Tweety, Chuck Todd and another head on the screen whose name I don’t recall right now generally agreed that Obama got caught a little on that answer. Actually, the only way Obama got caught short is in that he probably still can’t believe people who get paid huge sums of money to report are asking such stupid, stupid questions. Sure, he should know by now, but it’s still hard to wrap your head around it.

I’d just like to know who these people have been working for for the last couple of decades. When both Mr. Yenta and I had jobs with private, for profit companies we had our health insurance changed almost every year – and rarely for the better from where we sat. The same thing has happened to almost everyone we know, too. When I started working at my present place of employment it was a little different. There were about five plans to choose from. Now there are two. In these instances the insurance companies dropped us. Not enough people on some of the plans to make it worthwhile to insure our aging workforce. Of the two that remain, one of them has been taken over by another company and it’s hard to find specialists that take it. That’s the one I have and I’m not complaining. I’m not even complaining that they declined to cover a medication that was prescribed to me this week. Hasn’t been out long enough to be on their list. The co-pays are low, though, and at least we have insurance. With Mr. Yenta’s medical expenses that’s the most important thing to us. We’ll cope with the rest.

If Jake Tapper, Chris Matthews, Chuck Todd or the other head on the screen think for a moment that most Americans really have choice when it comes to health insurers they need to get in touch with reality. When they’re at a presidential press conference they’re asking questions for all of us. They should ask smarter ones.

 

DIY – Diagnose It Yourself

The story of Jessica Terry diagnosing her own ailment in AP science class says a lot about how smart Jessica is, but I have to wonder how smart her doctors are. Or are we just a little too reliant on tests that aren’t 100% reliable?

For eight years, Jessica Terry suffered from stomach pain so horrible, it brought her to her knees. The pain, along with diarrhea, vomiting and fever, made her so sick, she lost weight and often had to miss school.

During a science class, Jessica Terry, 18, discovered a tell-tale granuloma in her own pathology slide.

Her doctors, no matter how hard they tried, couldn't figure out the cause of Jessica's abdominal distress.

Here’s the thing. Without any particular expertise or even aptitude for things medical I read that first sentence and thought it sounded like Crohn’s, which was that granuloma proved it to be. I’d never heard of a granuloma. I just have one friend – count ‘em – one – who has Crohn’s and those are her symptoms. By now I know people with all kinds of other gastrointestinal disorders too, but none of the symptoms seem to be exactly the same as Crohn’s, especially over such a long period of time. Seems to me that since Crohn’s is very serious  condition and, if left untreated, it can be fatal they might have wanted to make that leap and see if she responded to treatment. Of course, treatment for that particular disease is nothing to take lightly, so it’s understandable that they wouldn’t have jumped right in. But eight years? Have we gotten to the point in the CYA department where doctors don’t so much diagnose as just test?

I don’t mean to be all cranky about what’s supposed to be a good news kind of story and I have nothing against doctors or the medical profession in general. I’m very grateful for what ours have done for us over the years. It’s just that it seems that if you’re having a side effect that isn’t written about or a symptom that doesn’t produce a test result, sometimes they kind of stop paying attention. I see this happening a lot and I saw it with my mother as she aged. So this is more of a reflection and wondering if things are more this way now that so much testing is available or if it’s nothing new at all.

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This Is Unbelievable

Well, it's not really unbelievable but I wish that it was a lot harder to believe. Writechic Press has been devoting a lot of her blog to helping with one particular person's battle to receive lifesaving medical care. This most recent roadblock is just the latest news read backward to learn more.

And if anyone ever again says to you that - A. "People don't die from lack of health care in this country" or B. "Universal health care will lead to rationing and waits for care", you should probably just spit in his eye.

Fred Barnes Makes Case for Single Payer

I never thought I’d be saying thanks to Fred Barnes, but, hey, life is full of surprises. I’d pretty much given up on single payer health insurance for the foreseeable future, but Fred Barnes has given me new hope in his article, The Liberal Dream Agenda.

Health care. President Obama is fond of saying his plan allows people to choose between the health insurance they get through their employer and a government program currently limited to federal workers. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? It's not. Rather, it's the path to a single-payer health care system--the kind Obama has said he prefers but isn't actually proposing.

His program would have the distinct advantage of not having to make a profit. So it would always be able to offer greater benefits at lower cost (with taxpayers taking up the slack when it lost money). Businesses would have an incentive to increase co-pays and trim benefits and, in effect, encourage employees to switch plans. And if employer-paid benefits are taxed, as administration officials have suggested, the incentive steering workers to the government program will be irresistible.
(Emphasis mine)

This is exactly what we’ve been saying like forever. A layer of profit in between the health care provider and consumer is just driving costs up with no real benefit to society as a whole. Now, no liberal that I know of wants to see employer-paid benefits taxed. That would be a huge hit for employees who get benefits now, and one that most us couldn’t afford, but if it were a single payer system, with all of us paying into it through progressive taxation, that’d be peachy.

"There won't be any private sector [in health insurance]," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell says, should government-financed insurance be available to everyone. "It's a fast track to single payer." There's an additional fear. The stimulus bill set aside $1.1 billion to research and compare medical treatments and drugs, raising the prospect that government programs would pay for some treatments and medicines but not others and thus open the door to rationing.

“…a fast track to single payer.” Your mouth to God’s ears, Senator. Now, about that rationing. Does he mean a situation like my friend (and boss) ran into a week or so ago? Her doctor thought she should have an MRI before he went on to treat a painful condition she’s developed. It’s in the area of the neck and doctors like to be sure before messing with the neck or spine. Things can go wrong if you’re just kind of guessing and we have these amazing tests now and everything.  Her insurance company said “No” to the MRI. She can fight it and she might win. But for now, no MRI. And she chose the insurance plan, of the ones we offer, that comes with higher co-pays for her, because it covers more and is accepted by more health care providers. That plan costs our organization over $1600 per month for a family plan. Less, of course, for singles and for couples, but still not affordable by middle class people. And that’s the group rate. So, it seems to me that what we’re doing is paying outrageous sums of money for something that, in effect, is not one bit better than rationed care.

It’s not every day that you find such a compelling case for a liberal agenda item at the Weekly Standard, but this makes up for a lot.