Health

Ron Wydons Better Health Care

V Diane — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:58:03 -0400

Ron Wydon recently had a funny video (as he termed it) on his new plan for "Better Health Care) and here is my reply to his video:

That plan is unworkable, does not save people's money, does not include
> retired people (who would pay for their plans? And who would pay back the
> government for all the corporations charges for plans and drugs? Doesn't
> the government have a clue as to how much we citizens are getting ripped off by these corporations? Diane

Single payer health care

crash660333 — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 22:35:06 -0400

I urge us all to steer the health care debate towards HR 676, a bill brought forth by Rep. J. conyers of Michigan. It's a single (non profit) payer system that will take all the profit driven corporations out of the health care business. Pleas look it up and tell me your thoughts.

mike c

mansfield oh

Source of funding for SCHIP

kwahlf — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:34:53 -0400

Please read this link first- it sounds like a good cause for children's healthcare.
What they don't tell you is the source of funding, not taxes across the board,
no- only taxes on tobacco.
This is dishonest and deceiving.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/929095116?z00m=9863588

This is a copy of the response I sent
after receiving this link in an e-mail.

Dear Breeana,

I am for universal healthcare for all,
including uninsured children.

However,I will not support any more legislation
that puts the burden of funding solely on the backs of tobacco users.

Yes, it is very easy to target smokers and others who use tobacco.

But that doesn't make it right.

Californians have had their tobacco taxes increase prices by 130%.
Enough is enough!
The last attempt to increase tobacco taxes in CA failed
to pass last November.
Maybe the voters are trying to say something here.

Everyone should be contributing to this healthcare initiate, not just one group
who is vilified.

Sincerely,

kwahlf

PS- The source of funding for this should be disclosed. Few, if any voters
know where this is coming from.

The AFL-CIO's Unhealthy Health Care Advocacy

davidswanson — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 13:17:14 -0400

The Boston Globe gets it. The AFL-CIO, even after its members' responses at its presidential candidates debate in Soldier Field, even after this event at the Machinists Union does not. The AFL has launched a campaign in favor of "universal health care" that spells out goals only one presidential candidate supports. But the AFL says it won't back a particular "plan" or a particular candidate. OF COURSE it won't. It will back whoever the corporate media tells it to back. But "plans" that keep the private insurance companies in place do not provide what the AFL is asking for. Only single-payer does that. Only Dennis Kucinich supports it.

The Boston Globe Is Right on Health Care

davidswanson — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 20:45:21 -0400

Kucinich Is Right on Health Care
By Derrick Z. Jackson, The Boston Globe

Dennis Kucinich rarely gets much airtime in Democratic presidential debates. That was underscored recently when ABC's George Stephanopoulos called on him in an Iowa forum to talk about God. Kucinich said, "George, I've been standing here for the last 45 minutes praying to God you were going to call on me."

With poll numbers at 1 or 2 percent, the Ohio congressman is the nudge kicking at the knees of the Democratic Party to offer more than incremental change. He deserves more attention than he gets. On healthcare, he says what Americans believe, even as his rivals rake in contributions from the industry.

In a CNN poll this spring, 64 percent of respondents said the government should "provide a national insurance program for all Americans, even if this would require higher taxes," and 73 percent approve of higher taxes to insure children under 18. Those results track New York Times and Gallup polls last year, in which about two-thirds of respondents said it is the federal government's responsibility to guarantee health coverage to all Americans.

Such polls allow Kucinich to joke that, far from being in the loony left, "I'm in the center. Everyone else is to the right of me." More seriously, in a recent visit to the Globe, he accused the other Democratic candidates of faking it on healthcare reform.

"One of the greatest hoaxes of this campaign - everyone's for universal healthcare," Kucinich said. "It's like a mantra. But when you get into the details, you find out that all the other candidates are talking about maintaining the existing for-profit system."

Kucinich quoted the 2003 study published by the New England Journal of Medicine that found that 31 percent of healthcare expenditures pay not for actual care but for administrative costs. That compares with only 16.7 percent in Canada. Administrative and clerical employees make up 27 percent of the healthcare workforce in the United States, compared with 19 percent in Canada.

"With 46 million Americans without any health insurance at all and another 50 million underinsured," Kucinich said, "isn't it really time to look at the other models that exist that are workable for all the other industrialized nations in the world? When you think about it, the only thing that's stopping us is the hold that the private insurers have on our political system ... corporate profits, stock options, executive salaries, advertising, marketing, the cost of paperwork ..."

The hold of the healthcare industry on the top candidates is already apparent. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the top recipient of campaign contributions so far from the pharmaceutical and health products industry is Republican Mitt Romney ($228,260). But the next two are Democrats Barack Obama ($161,124) and Hillary Clinton ($146,000). The top recipient of contributions from health professionals is Clinton ($990,611). Romney is second at $806,837, and Obama third at $748,637.

The top recipient of cash from the insurance industry, which includes health insurers, is another Democrat, Connecticut's Christopher Dodd, at $605,950. Romney and Republican Rudolph Giuliani are second and third, with Clinton and Obama fourth and fifth. Even though Obama is in fifth place, he still has collected $269,750 from insurance companies.

In a category that is relatively small in money thus far, but huge in terms of healthcare morality, Democratic presidential candidates occupy four of the top six spots in receiving money from death-dealing tobacco companies. After Giuliani's $69,500 from tobacco companies, Dodd has received $45,400, Clinton $32,300, Romney $31,400, Obama $7,885, and Democrat Joe Biden, $4,000.

When the top Democratic candidates take tobacco contributions, it is hard to see them truly believing, as Kucinich says, that healthcare "is the single-most important domestic issue ... a defining issue in the presidential race."

The top recipient from lobbyists by far is Clinton at $406,300. She is still so badly smoldering from the torching of her healthcare efforts as first lady that she recently asserted to the National Association of Black Journalists, "I have never advocated socialized medicine. That has been a right-wing attack on me for 15 years."

The irony, as Kucinich critically points out, is that Americans are so burned from for-profit healthcare, that they want the government to guarantee coverage. "If people clearly understood that by going to vote on Election Day they would create conditions where they would have health coverage," Kucinich said, "if you could communicate that message, you wouldn't have to talk about anything else."

Single Payer Health Care Explained By a Presidential Candidate

davidswanson — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 12:52:01 -0400

Michael Moore Discusses Health Care on NOW

davidswanson — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:27:12 -0400

PREVIEW:

FULL VIDEO

Let’s Go Crazy: The Decline in US Mental Health under Bush

Heather Wokusch — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 11:26:36 -0500

Factors linked with mental illness (including poverty, homelessness, violence and social uncertainty) have run rampant during the Bush years while psychological treatment options have disappeared.

Nowhere has this trend been more prevalent – and more heartbreaking - than with Katrina survivors and veterans of Bush’s wars.

Suicide levels in the Big Easy soared 300% in the four months following Katrina, and hurricane-related mental disorders remain widespread today. Yet with hospitals still shuttered and psychiatric clinics closed, those suffering from chronic mental illnesses or post-Katrina depression and post-traumatic stress disorder have few options. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found that while 26% of respondents reported at least one family member needing mental health support following Katrina, less than 2% was receiving any.

New Orleans’ mental health crisis exacerbates its already debilitating crime rate, with police reporting a 15% higher incidence of psychiatric-related emergency calls than before Katrina. But instead of receiving treatment, many of the mentally ill end up in local prisons – a trend repeated across the country.

In Florida, for example, over 250 prisoners who should have been transferred to state mental hospitals languish in prisons unequipped to handle their special needs. As The St. Petersburg Times reported last month, mentally-ill inmates "play poker with ghosts, climb the bars like bats or dump their lunch trays into the toilet and eat the food like soup. They will slam their heads against the wall, slice themselves with razors or plunge head-first off their bunks onto the concrete floor." With no psychiatric beds available due to funding cutbacks, inmates charged with only misdemeanors end up deteriorating in jails one Floridian official called "a dumping ground for the mentally ill."

Veterans face a similar lack of support. An estimated one out of every five service members returning from Iraq suffers from psychological problems and, with a backlog of 400,000 cases, the Department of Veterans Affairs has proven incapable of handling the deluge. Veterans subsequently have to wait an average of five and a half months for an initial decision on disability benefits and an appeal can take years.

That’s not supporting our troops.

The number of veterans trying to get mental health support doubled to 9,103 between October 2005 and June 2006. The Government Accountability Office recently found, however, that most who show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are not referred for treatment, no doubt due to the VA’s lack of capacity to meet demand.

Considering that combat PTSD can take years to surface and that over a million troops have been deployed, it’s safe to say the US will soon be facing a mental health crisis of ominous proportions.

After the Vietnam War, tens of thousands of veterans either committed suicide, became drug addicts or ended up on the streets. Today, the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans reports that almost 200,000 veterans are homeless each night, roughly one in three adult homeless males. Half of today’s homeless vets suffer from substance abuse problems and 45% from mental illness. Yet the administration continues to fund military escalation instead of providing them with shelter and treatment.

The psychological needs of active-duty service members have also been ignored. A tragic example is Steven Green, the former Army private charged in the March 2006 murder of an Iraqi family and the rape/murder of their 14-year-old daughter. In December 2005, Green had tried to get help from an Army Combat Stress Team in Iraq, claiming that he was enraged and wanted to kill Iraqi citizens. Doctors diagnosed Green with "homicidal ideations," gave him a psychoactive drug, told him to rest – and sent him back to fight. It took Army mental health officials a full three months to contact Green again (over a week after the family had been murdered) due to reports he had thrown a puppy off a roof and set its body on fire.

It’s safe to say that many other US service members are like Green, walking time bombs in desperate need of psychiatric care they may never receive.

Bush has, unfortunately, been pro-active in one mental health area: the push for mandatory screening of US citizens. In April 2002, Bush set up the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, ostensibly to "eliminate inequality for Americans with disabilities" but whose recommendations include broad-based mental health screening for US adults/children and the prescription of psychoactive medication. Civil rights advocates fear the disturbing implications of comprehensive mandatory psychological testing and therapists question the Commission’s emphasis on psychiatric drugs over other forms of therapy.

Put bluntly, big-donor pharmaceutical companies are slated to profit at the expense of US citizens’ rights.

David Oaks, Director of the advocacy group MindFreedom International, had this to say about the administration’s screening plans: "President Bush wants to test all Americans for 'mental illness.' We demand that President Bush start with himself first. We will provide the mental health professional to do the screening." Virginia-based physician Patch Adams even volunteered to screen Bush, adding, "He needs a lot of help. I'll see him for free."

The National Alliance on Mental Illness recently conducted an analysis of mental health care systems across the US, incorporating factors such as infrastructure and information access. The national average grade was D, a shameful record for such a wealthy nation. Factoring in the long-term psychological implications of Bush’s ongoing military adventurism, the future looks even worse. That is for everyone but pharmaceutical companies.

Action ideas:

1. Visit the National Alliance on Mental Illness site (www.nami.org) for information on everything from "Public Education and Information Activities" to "Advocacy on Behalf of People Living with Mental Illness." Find out how your state ranks on mental health care and consider signing up for their fundraising walks. Also check out the terrific MindFreedom International site (www.mindfreedom.org) dedicated to "defending human rights and promoting humane alternatives in mental health."

2. Urge your congressmembers to provide more mental-health support to those hit by Katrina.

3. Learn about the plight of homeless veterans at the National Coalition of Homeless Veterans site (www.nchv.org), which offers legislation information, support for homeless veterans and service providers and opportunities to get involved.

Heather Wokusch is the author of The Progressives’ Handbook: Get the Facts and Make a Difference Now, Volumes 1 & 2 and her site is www.heatherwokusch.com.

Lethal Drug Restistant Pathogen In US Hospitals Linked To Injured Soldiers Returning From Iraq

Chris Elliott — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 03:52:09 -0500

Doctors are becoming increasingly worried about a number of mysterious deaths in US hospitals, and now a link has been found with wounded soldiers returning from Iraq.

A new drug resistant form of a known pathogen has been discovered that is killing wounded soldiers at an alarming rate.

The bacterium known as Acinetobacter Baumannii has been traced from the US medical facilities in Baghdad, the hospital ship Comfort, the US military hospital in Germany and so on to hospitals in the US. Cases have also been identified in British and Canadian hospitals where wounded soldiers have been treated.

Wired magazine reports on the new life threatening problem doctors and soldiers are facing.

[Note the report is 4 pages long and as I can only post a little here do check out the link, it’s well worth reading. I will not add my own opinions on this topic as my knowledge of medicine is very limited but having read it, I feel it needs wider awareness]

The Invisible Enemy In Iraq
By Steve Silberman
02:00 AM Jan, 22, 2007

Forerunners of the bug causing the military infections have been making deadly incursions into civilian hospitals for more than a decade. In the early 1990s, 1,400 people were infected or colonized at a single facility in Spain. A few years later, particularly virulent strains of the bacteria spread through three Israeli hospitals, killing half of the infected patients. Death by acinetobacter can take many forms: catastrophic fevers, pneumonia, meningitis, infections of the spine, and sepsis of the blood. Patients who survive face longer hospital stays, more surgery, and severe complications.

Nevertheless, the bug makes an unlikely candidate for the next mass plague. It preys exclusively on the weakest of the weak and the sickest of the sick, slipping into the body through open wounds, catheters, and breathing tubes. Colonization poses no threat to people who aren't already ill, but colonized health care workers and hospital visitors can carry the bacteria into neighboring wards and other medical facilities. Epidemiologist Roberta Carey at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls acinetobacter the Rodney Dangerfield of microorganisms: "It doesn't get a lot of respect because it's not out there bumping off normal, healthy people." But lately the bacteria has been getting its due, because it is rapidly evolving resistance to all of the antibiotics that used to keep it in check.

Continues

A veterans' activist named Kirt Love helped Marcie create a Web site to raise public awareness of the outbreak, which launched in 2004 at www.acinetobacter.org. Email started pouring in. "After speaking with other family members at Brooke, I discovered that almost all of their sons and daughters, husbands and wives, had tested positive," wrote the mother of one infected soldier. Another message read: "An apparently healthy civilian registered nurse working in the ICU at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda has a life-threatening acinetobacter infection - Are other workers within the same environment equally at risk?"

Continues

As the bacteria spread through hospitals in the US and Europe, the DOD worked overtime to keep a lid on the rumors. In a PowerPoint presentation about acinetobacter and pneumonia delivered at the US Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, a slide labeled "How to handle the press" read: "Don't lie. Don't obfuscate. Don't tell them any more than you absolutely have to."

Additional References

http://www.acinetobacter.org/

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwR/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5345a1.htm

http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/biowissenschaften_chemie/bericht-24693.html

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/500681

Why Should Life Or Death Be Decided By Income?

Bob Geiger — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 10:33:02 -0500

"Does this sound more like your husband?" asked the neurosurgeon, as my very-worried wife was escorted into the hospital's operating room in November of 2004. "Yes," she tearfully replied, as she walked in on a somewhat lucid discussion about medical tort reform that I was having with the man who had very possibly just saved my life -- a conversation I would not have been capable of having a half hour before.

In the previous 20 minutes or so, the neurosurgeon had drilled a hole straight through my skull and drained what looked like about a beer can's worth of blood that was exerting enormous pressure on the left side of my brain. An acute subdural hematoma, in clinical speak. The previous seven to ten days remain a blur – over two years later – as I was, functionally speaking, out of my mind during that period.

Perhaps mercifully, the 2004 presidential election fell right in the middle of my pre-surgery blind-spot, so I have no recollection of the day 60 million people, more brain damaged than I was at the time, voted for George W. Bush.

But fortunately, the symptoms of what we at first thought was a sinus infection – debilitating headaches, dizziness, slurred speech and spontaneous nausea -- became so profound that my sinus doctor ordered a full brain MRI. The test revealed a giant blob of blood on my brain and I was rushed into emergency surgery.

With a flawless procedure performed by a well-known brain surgeon and an exceptional ICU staff, I was released in only three days and was quickly on the road to what has been a full recovery.

"Do people still die from a subdural hematoma?" I asked one of the nurses, while still in my ICU bed. "Yes," she replied. "Just not people like you." When pressed for what she meant by that statement, she said "People with good health insurance, who can afford a neurosurgeon from Scarsdale don't die from these as much."

That comment has stuck with me and, as I researched the subject further, I found that a large number of people do indeed still die from the inability to easily obtain a 20-minute surgery, a procedure that has become a simple, routine operation for all neurosurgeons.

With a new Democratic Congress about to broach the subject of some degree of universal health care -- and with Republicans undoubtedly poised to remain as steadfastly hostile to the issue as they have for decades -- this becomes a very personal issue as I ask what seems to me to be an obvious question: Why should anyone die because they're not like me?

I'm inherently worth no more as a person than any other husband, father and friend and yet, in the case of a medical crisis like mine -- and more recently, South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson's condition -- the ready accessibility of an emergency procedure can be the difference between life and death.

In one of the richest countries in the world, death should not be the penalty for having no health insurance. Yet, 47 million Americans still have no basic coverage and too many of those would die for lack of the same short procedure I so easily received.

Americans of all political stripes like to think that we are a caring, humane society and yet the essence of pure physical survival is not fully endorsed as a right in our society.

With so many Americans lacking basic health insurance and any Democratic proposal due for a tooth-and-nail fight from the Republican party, we are once again faced with a societal turning point where we must question how good a people we really want to be. It's not enough to wave American flags, sport patriotic bumper stickers on our cars and loudly proclaim our nation as the greatest country on earth. We must actually be great to say we truly are an exceptional standard by which the rest of the world should be measured.

Of the 28 primary industrialized nations, the United States is the only one not offering some form of health-care safety net for all its citizens. Twenty-six of those countries have single-payer universal health care systems, while Germany has a multi-payer system like President Clinton proposed for the United States in 1993. America now offers nothing.

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has proposed the Healthy Americans Act that, according to Wyden, will guarantee, "health coverage for every American that is at least as good as Members of Congress receive and can never be taken away.”

How that legislation will do in the next Congress is unknown. In the absence of such a system, it is tacitly implied that the only way to get good basic health insurance is to get a job that will provide it and, if you can't swing that for you and your family, tough luck. That's certainly been Bush's take on the subject and, since he became president, almost eight million more Americans have no medical coverage.

That is not the stance of a civilized nation. My personal story highlights but one example of maladies for which cures exist but that either no care at all or a significant delay in receiving treatment may mean you die. Think of what it says about us that any husband, wife, mother, father, child or friend should ever be taken from their world because they live in a culture where they are not wealthy enough to be allowed to live.

How many families have been destroyed spiritually because of a needless death or financially ruined because the mere act of staying alive has drained their life savings?

Governing is about choices. And right now, the Bush administration is choosing to wage a war in Iraq that is nearing a price tag of $360 billion. Initiatives like Wyden's have, in previous Republican-controlled Congresses, been destined to go down in flames in favor of this pointless war and yet more tax cuts for people who do not need them.

Conservatives like to talk about self-reliance and how we should all pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. That's certainly what many of us have endeavored to do with our lives. I have good health insurance because I went into the military, got the G.I. Bill and worked my way through college. That education has afforded me a nice life and, my more conservative acquaintances have said, the right to have more of everything than the people who currently have so little.

But they are heartless and they are wrong.

In our society, failing to hold that brass ring should mean you drive a lesser car or take modest vacations – not that the last expense your family incurs on your behalf is for your funeral.

You can read more from Bob at BobGeiger.com.