tagged w/ Health Care
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"The Obama administration cut a major planned benefit from the 2010 health-care law on Friday, announcing that a program to offer Americans insurance for long-term care was simply unworkable.
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The program was to be entirely self-financed with the premiums participants paid. Obama officials said that presented them with a problem: If they designed a benefits package generous enough to meet the law’s requirements, they would have had to set premiums so high that few healthy people would enroll. And without a large share of healthy people in the pool, the CLASS plan would have become even more expensive, forcing the government to raise premiums even higher, to the point of the program’s collapse.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/white-house-kills-long-term-care-program/2011/10/14/gIQAVZLYkL_story.html"The Obama administration cut a major planned benefit from the 2010 health-care... more
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Every 14 minutes one American is killed by prescribed painkillers and psychiatric drugs. The number of "anxious" people or prescription tranquilizers taken by "anxious" people for "anxiety" has jumped 286 percent between 2000 and 2009, and should reach 341 percent by the end of 2011. Really. The prescription of stimulant drugs, amphetamines and methyl-phenidate -- Adderall and Ritalin -- has skyrocketed. The U.S. now consumes 86 percent of these drugs worldwide. The prescribing of painkillers, the leading killer, has also risen dramatically, 328 percent, during this same time period. Vicodin kills the most pain and people, and is the single most prescribed medicine on the face of the earth.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ronald-ricker/doctors-drug-dealers_b_987271.htmlEvery 14 minutes one American is killed by prescribed painkillers and psychiatric... more
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When audience members at recent Republican presidential debates cheered executing 234 people in Texas and letting the uninsured die from lack of medical care, it raised questions about the hypocrisy of conservative Christians and small government Tea Party libertarians in the Republican Party as I show in this video.
The clips I use of Bill Maher come from HBO's September 16, 2011, broadcast of "Real Time with Bill Maher", longer clips of which are currently available on YouTube at http://bit.ly/p3NUCa and at http://bit.ly/oPFlwJ
The clip I use of Brian Williams asking Gov Rick Perry about his 234 executions in Texas comes from MSNBC's September 7, 2011, broadcast of the "GOP Debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library" available online at http://on.msnbc.com/qeq8po
The clip I use of Wolf Blitzer and Texas Rep. Ron Paul discussing the uninsured comes from CNN's September 12, 2011, broadcast of the "CNN Tea Party Republican Debate" available online at http://bit.ly/oQLTDa
The clips I use of Stephen Colbert come from a longer segment of the September 13, 2011, broadcast of "The Colbert Report" available online at http://bit.ly/ReaperVP
"I like how this Cat put this video together, I hope you folks find a minute to check it out..." =)When audience members at recent Republican presidential debates cheered executing 234... more
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Posted on 09.21.11
By Eric W. Dolan
Categories: Activism, Featured
During a rally at Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said that Americans were engaged in one of the greatest political struggles the country had ever faced.
“On one side, we have the wealthiest people in America who have never ever had it so good,” he said. “On the other side, what we are seeing is 16 percent of our people unemployed, and 46 million Americans who are living in poverty and that number is growing every single day.”
“So the issue we have to determine right now is whether that capitol, that government,” Sanders continued, pointing towards Washington, D.C., “is there to represent all of the people, and not just the wealthiest and most powerful.”
The senator added the U.S. should have a single-payer health care system.
http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/09/bernie-sanders-we-are-in-one-of-the-greatest-struggles/
"A true patriot. Thanks Senator Sanders."Posted on 09.21.11
By Eric W. Dolan
Categories: Activism, Featured
During a rally... more
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8 months ago
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India holds a dubious distinction of the highest death rate for children under five and the highest maternal deaths in the world. It has a shortage of 2.6 million health workers, according to a new report released by Save the Children, an international NGO. The report by Save the Children India said that at 900,000 a year, India has the largest number of newborn deaths and is among five countries that account for more than half of the world’s 3.3 million newborn deaths. The others are Nigeria, Pakistan, China and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This falls way below the World Health Organization health worker threshold of 2.3 health workers per 1000 people. Seven Indian states rule the charts for this unfortunate cause and...Read more here-
http://www.iblog4acause.com/2011/09/26-million-health-workers-shortage-in.htmlIndia holds a dubious distinction of the highest death rate for children under five... more
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Back in 1980, just as America was making its political turn to the right, Milton Friedman lent his voice to the change with the famous TV series “Free to Choose.” In episode after episode, the genial economist identified laissez-faire economics with personal choice and empowerment, an upbeat vision that would be echoed and amplified by Ronald Reagan
But that was then. Today, “free to choose” has become “free to die.”
I’m referring, as you might guess, to what happened during Monday’s G.O.P. presidential debate. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether “society should just let him die.”
And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”
The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.
Now, there are two things you should know about the Blitzer-Paul exchange. The first is that after the crowd weighed in, Mr. Paul basically tried to evade the question, asserting that warm-hearted doctors and charitable individuals would always make sure that people received the care they needed — or at least they would if they hadn’t been corrupted by the welfare state. Sorry, but that’s a fantasy. People who can’t afford essential medical care often fail to get it, and always have — and sometimes they die as a result.
The second is that very few of those who die from lack of medical care look like Mr. Blitzer’s hypothetical individual who could and should have bought insurance. In reality, most uninsured Americans either have low incomes and cannot afford insurance, or are rejected by insurers because they have chronic conditions.
So would people on the right be willing to let those who are uninsured through no fault of their own die from lack of care? The answer, based on recent history, is a resounding “Yeah!”
Think, in particular, of the children.
The day after the debate, the Census Bureau released its latest estimates on income, poverty and health insurance. The overall picture was terrible: the weak economy continues to wreak havoc on American lives. One relatively bright spot, however, was health care for children: the percentage of children without health coverage was lower in 2010 than before the recession, largely thanks to the 2009 expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip.
And the reason S-chip was expanded in 2009 but not earlier was, of course, that former President George W. Bush blocked earlier attempts to cover more children — to the cheers of many on the right. Did I mention that one in six children in Texas lacks health insurance, the second-highest rate in the nation?
So the freedom to die extends, in practice, to children and the unlucky as well as the improvident. And the right’s embrace of that notion signals an important shift in the nature of American politics.
In the past, conservatives accepted the need for a government-provided safety net on humanitarian grounds. Don’t take it from me, take it from Friedrich Hayek, the conservative intellectual hero, who specifically declared in “The Road to Serfdom” his support for “a comprehensive system of social insurance” to protect citizens against “the common hazards of life,” and singled out health in particular.
Given the agreed-upon desirability of protecting citizens against the worst, the question then became one of costs and benefits — and health care was one of those areas where even conservatives used to be willing to accept government intervention in the name of compassion, given the clear evidence that covering the uninsured would not, in fact, cost very much money. As many observers have pointed out, the Obama health care plan was largely based on past Republican plans, and is virtually identical to Mitt Romney’s health reform in Massachusetts.
Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.
And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.
Are voters ready to embrace such a radical rejection of the kind of America we’ve all grown up in? I guess we’ll find out next year.
http://t.co/YSqD7kb6Back in 1980, just as America was making its political turn to the right, Milton... more
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In voting, in the British House of Commons, for the third reading of Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill last week MPs voted to replace the National Health Service (NHS) as a public service with a system of competing businesses – foundation trusts, social enterprises and for-profit corporations.
The government's claim that the Bill does not mean privatization is plainly specious: the truth of the matter is to be found in what Lansley's health minister, Lord Howe, told a meeting of private health businessmen on the day the Bill was approved. He said it presented ‘huge opportunities’ for the private sector, and noted that commissioners of health care would be barred from favouring NHS providers. The truth is also to be found in the government's leaked plans to hand over the management of NHS hospitals to private companies, and in the current and promised large-scale opening up of NHS work to ‘any qualified provider.’
Lord Howe reiterated Tony Blair's dictum that it doesn't matter who provides care, so long as it is free to the patient. What this does is to treat as irrelevant everything that follows from introducing market dynamics. The basic fact about health care is that high quality care depends on a sufficient ratio of skilled staff to patients, whereas in the long run profits can only be made by reducing the skill-mix (to lower the wage bill) and cutting staff ratios.
The resulting decline in care quality is already evident in privatized long term care and home care, and is now beginning to be seen in community health services and GP services. Once NHS trusts have to compete with for-profit companies they will be forced to follow suit.
The erosion of quality will be reinforced by two other powerful factors: a) the cuts being imposed in the NHS budget, leading to the withdrawal of some services and the scaling back of others; and b) rising costs due to marketization. The costs of market-based health care – from making and monitoring multiple and complex contracts, to advertising, billing, auditing, legal disputes, multi-million pound executive salaries, dividends, fraud, and numerous layers of regulation – will eventually consume 20 per cent or more of the health budget, as they do in the United States. Neither the Care Quality Commission nor NHS Protect (the former NHS Counter-Fraud Unit) is remotely resourced enough, or empowered enough, to prevent the decline of care quality or the scale of financial fraud that the Bill will introduce.
Declining Quality, and Lengthening Wait Time
The effect will be that people with limited means will be offered a narrowing range of free services of declining quality, and will once again face lengthening waits for elective care. To get high quality and more comprehensive care people will have to pay for private insurance and private care, if they can afford to. More and more NHS hospital beds will be occupied by private patients, further reducing the resources available for free care. Fixed personal budgets, like those already given to people for social care, are to be introduced for a growing range of chronic conditions, allowing those with resources to top up their allocations while leaving the rest to make do with ‘basic’ NHS provision.
None of this is wild speculation. It is either already happening or announced or readily foreseeable on the basis of current policy. To deny that the Bill means privatization and the end of the NHS as a comprehensive service equally available to all is like denying that the earth is round......
Continue at:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26563In voting, in the British House of Commons, for the third reading of Andrew... more
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What you saw tonight is something much more sinister than not having a healthcare plan. It’s sadism, pure and simple. It’s the same impulse that led people in the Coliseum to cheer when the lions ate the Christians. And that seems to be where we are heading — bread and circuses, without the bread. The world that Hobbes wrote about — “the war of all against all.”
http://veracitystew.com/2011/09/13/gop-death-applause-like-romans-cheering-lions-to-eat-christians/What you saw tonight is something much more sinister than not having a healthcare... more
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It is important that non-violence be used in this fateful revolution and that there be a revolution because these ageless human issues cannot be addressed by conventional means.It is important that non-violence be used in this fateful revolution and that there be... more
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From omnivore to vegan: The dietary education of Bill Clinton
By David S. Martin, CNN
August 18, 2011 7:15 a.m. EDT
CNN...
Editor's note: Tune in as Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the signs, tests and lifestyle changes that could make cardiac problems a thing of the past on "The Last Heart Attack," Sunday 8 p.m. ET.
[Click on photo to watch video.]
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(CNN) -- By the time he reached the White House, Bill Clinton's appetite was legend. He loved hamburgers, steaks, chicken enchiladas, barbecue and french fries but wasn't too picky. At one campaign stop in New Hampshire, he reportedly bought a dozen doughnuts and was working his way through the box until an aide stopped him.
Former President Clinton now considers himself a vegan. He's dropped more than 20 pounds, and he says he's healthier than ever. His dramatic dietary transformation took almost two decades and came about only after a pair of heart procedures and some advice from a trusted doctor.
His dietary saga began in 1993, when first lady Hillary Clinton decided to inaugurate a new, healthier diet for her husband. In a meeting, she asked Dr. Dean Ornish to work with the White House chefs, who were accustomed to high fat, French cuisine.
"The president did like unhealthy foods, and we were able to put soy burgers in White House, for example, and get foods that were delicious and nutritious," said Ornish, director and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California. Other new menu items included such healthy fare as stir fry vegetables with tofu, and salmon with vegetables.
Even with the revamped White House menu, Clinton battled his weight throughout his two terms as president. At his annual physical in 1999, the White House physician noted the president had put on 18 pounds since a checkup two years earlier. The prescription: refocus on exercise and a low-calorie diet.
Clinton didn't know it, but weight was not his biggest health concern. The 42nd president has a family history of heart disease, and plaque was building up in the coronary arteries leading to his heart, undetected by White House doctors.
In 2004, less than four years after leaving office, the 58-year-old Clinton felt what he described as a tightness in his chest as he returned home from New Orleans, where he was promoting his memoir, "My Life." Days later, he underwent quadruple bypass surgery to restore blood flow to his heart.
"I was lucky I did not die of a heart attack," Clinton told CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta. After the surgery, the former president cut down on his calories and lowered the cholesterol in his diet, but his heart troubles were not over.
Last year, the former president went to Haiti to support the relief efforts but he felt weak. When he returned home, he learned he needed another heart procedure: two stents to open one of the veins from his bypass surgery, which had become, in Clinton's words, "pretty bent and ugly."
Ornish recalls meeting with Clinton a few days after his angioplasty. "I shared with him that because of his genetics, moderate changes in diet and lifestyle weren't enough to keep his disease from progressing. However, our research showed that more intensive changes change actually reverse progression of heart disease in most people."
"I told him, 'The friends that mean the most to me are the ones that tell me what I need to hear, not necessarily what I want to hear. And you need to know your genes are not your fate. And I say this not to blame you but to empower you. And I'm happy to work with you to whatever extent you want,'" Ornish recalled. They met a few days later, he said.
"I essentially concluded that I had played Russian roulette," Clinton said, "because even though I had changed my diet some and cut down on the caloric total of my ingestion and cut back on much of the cholesterol in the food I was eating, I still -- without any scientific basis to support what I did -- was taking in a lot of extra cholesterol without knowing if my body would produce enough of the enzyme to support it, and clearly it didn't or I wouldn't have had that blockage. So that's when I made a decision to really change."
The former president now says he consumes no meat, no dairy, no eggs, almost no oil.
"I like the vegetables, the fruits, the beans, the stuff I eat now," Clinton told Gupta.
The former president's goal is to avoid any food that could damage his blood vessels. His dietary guides are Ornish and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn Jr., who directs the cardiovascular prevention and reversal program at The Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute. Both doctors have concluded that a plant-based diet can prevent and, in some cases, actually reverse heart disease.
"All my blood tests are good, and my vital signs are good, and I feel good, and I also have, believe it or not, more energy," Clinton said. His latest goal: getting his weight down to 185, what he weighed when he was 13 years old.
Clinton is trying to spread his newfound zeal for healthy eating to children. The Clinton Foundation has teamed up with the American Heart Association and is helping 12,000 schools promote exercise and offer better lunches so decades from now, today's children will not face the same heart troubles he has.
"It's turning a ship around before it hits the iceberg, but I think we're beginning to turn it around," Clinton said.
.From omnivore to vegan: The dietary education of Bill Clinton
By David S. Martin,... more
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The latest from Lee Camp. He's both mad and funny, and the mad part is more than justified.The latest from Lee Camp. He's both mad and funny, and the mad part is more than... more
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"Republicans, Conservatives and Tea Partiers united, saying Socialized Health Care would wreak havoc on our economy. They proceeded to deem President Obama as an evil Socialist trying to turn this country into an evil-Marxist-Maoist-Communist [just fill in the blank] entity, but the following countries have socialized medicine and they have an AAA status with Standard & Poor’s.
Now that the USA no longer has a stellar AAA status, all remaining countries with AAA ratings have socialized medicine."
http://freakoutnation.com/2011/08/06/s-all-of-which-have-socialized-health-care/"Republicans, Conservatives and Tea Partiers united, saying Socialized Health... more
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Now that all the hoopla has calmed down about health care reform, I thought it was a good time to revisit it less all the emotion. I really wanted more out of this than we got, but we did get some good things.Now that all the hoopla has calmed down about health care reform, I thought it was a... more
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As with all life essential needs, citizens have the right to collective bargaining and self provisioning without having to pay for corporate fat cat big salaries, boards of directors, investor dividends, and corporate's traditional huge subsidies to corporate lobbyists and legislators who act against us. If we can fulfill our needs better and cheaper than commercial interests can, then we are entitled to do just that, without making others rich at our expense! Meeting life's essential needs, food, water, shelter, energy, and health care should not be subject to the uncertainties and vagaries of capitalist interests. Capitalism is more appropriate in non life essential commodities and services such as recreational clothing, automobile choices, restaurants, sporting goods and activities, ... If we eliminate corporatocracy from food, water, energy, and health care, we can collectively, through our representative government, provide ourselves with those needs in the best quality at the best price.
"Right-wingers, insurance companies, and other opponents of health care reform in the United States are always looking for ways to blame the government for the failures of our health care system. But the simple truth is that they have it backwards: our problems with health care are firmly rooted in the private sector. That is why the average high-income country – where government is vastly more involved in health care – spends half as much per person on health care as we do, and has better health outcomes."
"The most effective way to insure everyone and make our health care system affordable would have been to expand Medicare to everyone, while beginning the process of reducing costs through negotiation with, and restructuring incentives for, the private sector. The private insurance companies use up hundreds of billions annually on administrative costs, marketing, and other waste – which is what you would expect from companies who maximize profit by insuring the healthy and trying to avoid paying for the sick."
"We also spend nearly $300 billion on pharmaceuticals each year, most of which is waste due to the patent monopolies of pharmaceutical companies. We could eliminate most of this waste through further public financing of pharmaceutical research, with new drugs sold as low-cost generics. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation in the Senate to realize these savings."
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/problems-of-us-health-care-are-rooted-in-the-private-sector-despite-right-wing-claimsAs with all life essential needs, citizens have the right to collective bargaining and... more
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WWH – More and more we see the news coming out about the injustice in the American way. We hear how the cards are stacked against the average Joe as they struggle to pay their mortgage, rent, put food on the table, pay for healthcare and the gas to get to workWWH – More and more we see the news coming out about the injustice in the... more
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It’s me, Jillian. Hope you are listening, because I need for You to hear me. I know that I have sinned. I know that as a woman, I am not smart enough to make decisions about my health care or my body. I can spell ‘uterus’, but am certainly not intelligent enough to know what a uterus is. I have a uterus, but I am not sure what it is designed to do. I have other female body parts, but am not capable of determining how to best care for those parts.It’s me, Jillian. Hope you are listening, because I need for You to hear me. I... more
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52% of kids in foster care are being prescribed dangerous and deadly psychiatric drugs. Many are on cocktails of prescribed drugs, including antipsychotics and antidepressants with documented side effects of diabetes, stroke, mania, psychosis, tumors, coma, suicide and death.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1lFZw3jm5c&feature=channel_video_title52% of kids in foster care are being prescribed dangerous and deadly psychiatric... more
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