healthcare
mikethemadbiologist | June 19, 2009If you support a public option for healthcare reform, there's a campaign going on right now to get senators to commit in writing to whether or not they support a public option (Chris Bowers has more details). You should also write your president--I've heard rumors that, even though a huge majority support a public option, the White House is getting astroturfed (besides, Obama talks pretty, but action has been thin on the ground--let's 'encourage' him). Here's what I wrote to our president:
Dear President Obama,
Recently, you announced your support for a public option for healthcare. I urge…
mikethemadbiologist | June 11, 2009Since I got in late last night from a microbiome-palooza, I'm outsourcing today's post to Bill Moyers, who discusses the (repeated) downfall of single-payer healthcare:
mikethemadbiologist | June 5, 2009Even I am speechless over this. You know those terrorists captured a couple of weeks ago in NYC? It appears that at least one of them was motivated by trying to pay for a brother's liver transplant:
"My insurance wasn't good enough," said Lord McWilliams, 20, who has a deadly liver disease.
His brother, David Williams, wanted money "to speed up the process," McWilliams said. "Medicaid only goes so far."
He dismissed as "crazy" federal accusations that Williams was a Jew-hater who wanted to wage jihad.
McWilliams said the FBI informant who lured his brother and three other hapless petty…
denialism | June 4, 2009We're starting to hear about how Obama intends to implement healthcare in this country.
President Barack Obama says he's open to requiring all Americans to buy health insurance, as long as the plan provides a "hardship waiver" to exempt poor people from having to pay.
Obama opposed such an individual mandate during his campaign, but Congress increasingly is moving to embrace the idea.
In providing the first real details on how he wants to reshape the nation's health care system, the president urged Congress on Wednesday toward a sweeping overhaul that would allow Americans to buy into a…
denialism | May 28, 2009The question has come up again and again in our discussions on health care in the US and around the world, why does it cost so much more in the US when we get so much less?
The drug companies and their lobbyists are already out in force trying to make sure their pocketbooks aren't hit by the inevitable reforms that are coming. In particular they insist drugs aren't the problem in the US, it's administrative costs! I would tend to disagree.
Based upon my experience working in the sytem, the main causes of excess costs I would hypothesize are the following (in order of importance):
An…
mikethemadbiologist | May 27, 2009Without getting into the pros and cons of traditional marriage ceremonies, I think most people would probably agree that eloping in order to get better healthcare insurance probably does little to support the supposed sanctity of marriage. Let me explain.
A colleague and her fiancé will be married in a few months in a nice traditional wedding ceremony--you know, the kind of thing conservatives are vigorously defending from The Freedom-Hating Homofascist Hordes. Currently, they both have separate health insurance: hers is a pretty good plan, and his is miserable, but it's all he gets with…
thusspakezuska | May 22, 2009In response to my recent post on being mauled by the PA at my annual gyn exam, reader Danimal was moved by my saying this
I say if it hurts, you should feel free to yelp. And no doctor or PA should be shushing you. I am ashamed to say that when my PA shushed me, I let her make me feel embarrassed, and I actually apologized to her. That is just messed up.
to comment thusly:
You disappoint me Zuska. On the bloggesphere you have no problem barfing over someones shoes, usually when appropriate, including mine. Yet here it was entirely appropriate, yet you did not. Come on, you can do better.…
mikethemadbiologist | May 18, 2009Probably not. But genes linked to a high risk of breast cancer? You betcha.
ScienceBlogling Rebecca Skloot has a very good piece about the lawsuit brought by the ACLU against Myriad, the company that owns the patent for the 'breast cancer genes' BRCA1 and BRCA2 (she provides some more background here).
To me, the really galling thing is that Myriad didn't discover these genes, publicly funded research did. The goal of that research is not to enrich patent holders, but to improve human health for society as a whole. The patent drives up diagnosis costs by preventing anyone else from…
mikethemadbiologist | May 17, 2009At some point, the debate over healthcare is really going to heat up. Sure as shit, we'll start hearing about long waits in other countries, 'rationing', and other tales (I put rationing in scare quotes because the U.S. rations healthcare: if you're lower-middle class, you don't have it). With that, I bring you this post by John Aravosis, who recounts his experience--and why, I think, we need a public option for healthcare:
As I've written before, in detail, my prescription drug coverage is a joke. Blue Cross hasn't increased my drug coverage in 14 years - I have the same $1500 limit I had…
mikethemadbiologist | May 13, 2009A recent PLoS Medicine paper suggests so:
Everybody likes something free, and free prescription drug samples are no exception. Patients love to receive them, and doctors feel good about handing them out. The practice of providing free drug samples is based on the tacit assumption that "sampling" does much more good than harm. In two separate news releases within the past year by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the trade organization that represents the country's largest and leading drug companies, a senior vice president claimed that free samples improve…
mikethemadbiologist | April 23, 2009In light of the April 15 protests, I think this chart by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities which describes the federal budget is appropriate:
You'll notice that the largest component of the budget is defense spending (it narrowly edges out Social Security), and unlike Social Security, there is no designated revenue stream (which incidentally has a surplus). Any discussion of budget balancing that does not consider defense spending is simply not serious. The other thing to note is that this does not include tax expenditures, the largest being the employer healthcare tax deduction…
mikethemadbiologist | April 2, 2009Isn't that like "Pedophiles for Childrens' Welfare?" From The Nation, your healthcare has a new special friend:
....Rick Scott is the man who best embodies the spirit of the current conservative opposition. The name may not exactly be a household word, or it may ring a faint bell, but Politico recently reported that the millionaire Republican would be heading up Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR), a new group that plans to spend around $20 million to kill President Obama's efforts at healthcare reform.
Having Scott lead the charge against healthcare reform is like tapping Bernie Madoff…
mikethemadbiologist | March 21, 2009By way of Jesse Taylor, imagine that you had $16,000 of bills due to an appendectomy:
If it's not paid in fourteen days, it'll go to collections. (Keep in mind that my yearly budget, courtesy of the law school, is a little over $15,000.)
I call the hospital, and am told that the claim was submitted to my old insurance company and denied because I was not covered on the date of service. I cannot do any sort of low-income write-off plan unless I cancel my health insurance and am denied from both Medicare and Medicaid. Even then, it's conditional.
I call the insurance company and was told…
mikethemadbiologist | March 2, 2009A recent article that examined the relationship between antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance in Finland made me realize one very sad fact: what is easy to do in Finland is nearly impossible in the U.S. because we lack a national healthcare system (note: I'm not talking about how healthcare is paid for which is an argument about reimbursement, but a uniform system of record keeping and informatics protocols).
Consider this from the introduction (italics mine; citations removed for clarity):
According to current Finnish care recommendations, the first-line antimicrobial agents for the…
denialism | February 26, 2009And I breathe a sigh of relief. Working nights my schedule is a tad goofy, but I wake up today to see this guy describing the changes in the new budget:
This is Peter Orszag the new director of the Office of Management and Budget. He is a nerd and I instantly like him. I was not surprised to find he used to be a blogger.
It was especially refreshing because for too long our government has been run by this guy:
In particular I agree with their emphasis on health care as a necessary element for creating a viable modern economy. America has to compete with other countries that provide…
mikethemadbiologist | February 23, 2009I think before everyone gets excited about the effectiveness research that was funded in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act--basically, using the scientific method to find out how well different medical treatments work--we need to realize that the medical industry might have scored a coup here (italics mine):
The $1.1 billion earmarked for comparative effectiveness research remained in the bill that President Obama will sign Monday. The House conferees also insisted on keeping the phrase "comparative effectiveness" throughout the authorizing language, removing the Senate's insertion of the…
mikethemadbiologist | February 19, 2009Patients without healthcare make bad self-diagnoses. I'm shocked.
The NY Times has a heartbreaking story about people under 30 who can't afford healthcare. It's pretty horrific: juvenile diabetics who have to switch from insulin pumps to injections (which lowers blood sugar control), a woman who went to the emergency room for 46 hours and wound up owing the equivalent of a year of college tuition, and so on (that I can say "and so on", and you can probably come up with your own examples is indictment enough). But this gobsmacked me:
Ms. Polec's roommate, Fara D'Aguiar, 26, treated her…
mikethemadbiologist | January 23, 2009A few days ago, I discussed the 'doughnut model' of journalistic bias that Jay Rosen described. Thinking about it some more, both Rosen and I got it wrong. Ultimately, the problem isn't that certain views and policies are ruled out of the political discourse (although that is a real problem). The problem is that the type of bias Rosen mentions leads to bad journalism.
Before I get to that, if we're attempting to convince journalists that they need to be more responsible regarding the public discourse, well, good luck with that. Appealing to the national political press corps for better…
mikethemadbiologist | January 13, 2009...or dead. Compulsive Centrist Disorder is a malady that strikes many pundits who think that the ideal policy is always between two opposing points of view, even if one of those viewpoints is really fucking stupid. Sadly, Compulsive Centrist Disorder, when applied to healthcare, can harm the health of innocent bystanders (italics original; boldface mine):
Pete Stark's bill, the most left-wing of the lot (it's sort of a "Medicare for many more" proposal) covers the most people....
Stark's is the best again. And yet there's no chance whatsoever that we'll actually do this because his plan,…
mikethemadbiologist | January 6, 2009While others have commented on the gross ineptitude of OSHA, which is charged with worker safety, during the reign of Little Lord Pontchartrain, one point that wasn't raised is that the OSHA fiasco also shows why we need universal healthcare that has government insurance, not private. From the Washington Post article:
Among the regulations proposed by OSHA's staff but scuttled by political appointees was one meant to protect health workers from tuberculosis. Although OSHA concluded in 1997 that the regulation could avert as many as 32,700 infections and 190 deaths annually and save $115…