Remember when Rick and the boys told us that we had to pass tort reform ? One of the reasons was that we were losing doctors and could face a crisis. This , of course , was a standard Perry lie. (See here).
The truth is , under our present Health Care system, we can't get doctors to service rural areas. There is in fact, a shortage, nationwide of primary care physicians, not just in Texas . The reasons are complex, but not hard to understand. There is no glamor in providing medical care in remote areas of West Texas. There is no easy access to the latest cutting edge medical technology. You will not get rich, you will not find it easy to pay your medical education loan.
Here is what one study found:
The impact of educational loan burden on housestaff career decisions. The past decade has seen declining interest in primary care medicine and a dramatic increase in the cost of a medical degree. Seventy-nine percent of housestaff in an internal medicine residency program responded to a survey to determine whether medical school loan burden was related to career choice in a primary care field or specialty area. Overall mean indebtedness was $45,185 (median $40,000). Thirty-eight percent of residents with debts < $40,000 chose a career in primary care, compared with 10% with debts > $40,000 (chi square = 9.44, p < 0.01). Fourteen percent of those with debts < 40,000 and 59% with debts > $40,000 stated that financial conditions had a moderate to marked impact on their career decision making. Excessive loan burden has a significant influence on residents' career decision making and a negative influence on choosing careers in primary care internal medicine
In 1984, 87% of public medical school students graduated with medical school debt, and the median amount for those who had debt was $22,000. For private medical schools, 90% had debt, and the median amount was $27,000 (Figure 2 and Figure 3). While the fraction of 2003 graduates who have medical school debt has declined to 85% for public school medical students and 81% for private school medical students, the median amounts for those who have debt have enormously increased, to $100,000 and $135,000, respectively.
All this might seem academic if troubling. When I read the following, I was lead to wonder how much impact this program has and will continue to have not just whether we have doctors in rural Texas/America, but on what price we must pay , quality and competence.
Nurse to Stand Trial for Reporting Doctor The hospital administrator, Stan Wiley, said in an interview that Dr. Arafiles had been reprimanded on several occasions for improprieties in writing prescriptions and performing surgery and had agreed to make changes. Mr. Wiley, who said it was difficult to recruit physicians to remote West Texas, said he knew when he hired Dr. Arafiles that he had a restriction on his license stemming from his supervision of a weight-loss clinic.
I have been feeling overwhelmed and bummed out over the past month or so, between my job, my debate team travels and the news on health care reform.
Just when I think it can't get any worse, it does. Let me be clear, I am a realists. I knew Obama was not the second coming of FDR, I knew he was a centrists, compromiser with delusions of bipartisanship. In fairness I underestimated the bipartisan part.
So, when the line out of the White House came down as make the deals, get it done, I was not totally surprised. Health care reform is and always was a high stakes gamble that had to be done first and had to succeed, however success finally is defined. That means even if we must take a quarter of a loaf and call it a feast, we have to do it.
Here is what I mean. The Democrats have spend so much time and effort on this issue that failure is NOT an option if they wish to keep the Republican maniacs from taking over the asylum. If you think Republicans are obstructionist now, wait till they send health care reform down in flames and they use this defeat to gain traction in the mid terms.
But wait , you say, the public wants health care reform, surely they will be punished if they end up killing it!
(Wonder who the Texas members of the group are. ;) - promoted by boadicea)
Never heard of them? Here's your chance.
A previous group, "Billionaires for Bush" (they were covered quite a lot during the last two elections) was started by a group of actors & artists who enjoy the challenge of playing the characters to the hilt, and love a little street theater. They were around NYC when I was there and I loved their antics. They have re-grouped and become "Billionaires For Wealthcare", pretending to be rich people and mix right in at right-wing rallys, with song, dance and signs, mocking winger positions with satire.
He has since, apologized. Sadly, this comment was probably the most cogent response the Republicans had for Obama's speech this night. Their "reponse" from some random doctor from Louisiana , the fake "alternative" papers they were waving around were, by comparison hollow shams. In other words, the claim that Obama is lying is at least an honest if baseless critique.
By the way, this from Political Wire comments section:
Reaction to Obama's Speech...Joe "You Lie" Wilson seems to have sent the base over the edge. His opponent Ron (?) Miller's campaign fund got $16,000 richer in the last two hours....
Over on my Face Book page, someone started a discussion about what we are calling the object of our debate over Health Care. A Face Book poll asks me if I am in favor of government assisted Health Care. Someone had objected that supporters should not get involved with the poll and particularly SHOULD NOT TRY TO DEFEND "GOVERNMENT" HEALTH CARE.
I thought about it and I think they are right. I have written before about "framing". To some all such talk is pure semantics. If you are of this school, pass on, nothing to see here.
If you are not, consider my response in that thread and make up your own mind. I wrote this:
The question indicates that what obama is seeking is government health care. The assisted does not help that much. What we end up discussing is , do you want government (think big bad bureaucrats, red tape, incompetent. etc.)[running your health care].
A better question might be this: Do you support publicly assured access to health care? This gets up talking about our common obligation to each other to provide fair and equitable access.If the discussion touches on government involvement, it is now one component of the discussion, not the only one. There is NO presumption that the government will be providing my health care.
This all may sound like hair splitting, but given the complexity of health care reform, the frames and impressions left by the words we began to use as shorthand for the problem can matter.
That is my two cents, at least.....
Let me add that I tested this framing yesterday when I was approached by a supporter of the other side during a public demonstration.
Just as during the campaign, malicious emails are being sent, especially to the elderly....
The Sojourner Website is warning its readers about this piece of fear mongering trash. Its heading is "SENIOR DEATH WARRANTS"
Let me give you the highlights:
The actress Natasha Richardson died after falling skiing in Canada . It took eight hours to drive her to a hospital. If Canada had our health care she might be alive today.
[snip]
In England anyone over 59 cannot receive heart repairs or stents or bypass because it is not covered as being too expensive and not needed
[snip]
Obama wants to have our health care like Canada's and England's
[snip]
[quoting Tom Daschle, attributing the "part of the bill that calls for it to him" the email concludes that the proposal :]
includes provisions for extensive rationing of health care for senior citizens.
[snip]
We better have our funerals paid up, may be needing it sooner rather than later with no Dr's on our side to keep us healthy.
FAIR DISCLOSURE: THE GRAPHIC IS FROM A DIFFERENT PIECE OF E-MAIL, but I suspect, from the same anonymous lying thugs as the more "pure" scare mail I discuss....
Unlike some of these steaming piles of cyber-crap, this is entirely fact free. FactCheck tries to untangle the lies:
There's an article in Fort Worth Star Telegram today about legislation that is being proposed.
At least three proposals filed in the Legislature would take Texas off the hook for a variety of medical blunders - called "never events" - such as operating on the wrong person, leaving a foreign object in a patient or amputating the wrong limb.
Sounds good. Right? We don't want our taxpayer money wasted? But, let's think this through.
The 6-year-old Southeast Texas girl lay on the operating table while the doctor used a heated instrument to cauterize incisions from her tonsillectomy. What happened next was life-altering.
Pure oxygen from a tube had built up in her throat. It instantly caught fire, searing her larynx, vocal cords and lips, her mother said.
After the girl was treated in the hospital intensive care unit, officials tried to bill the family's insurance for the burn care.
"Once the insurance came back and said, 'No, you all are at fault,' they had to eat the bill," said her mother, Miranda Granger.
Here's how it happens in real life. You go back to the hospital six months later, a year later, 4 years later, for treatment due to chronic issues resulting from burns to your larynx or some other chronic issue resulting from a medical mistake. They say, "your insurance won't cover this visit". We already have this system. It's called worker's comp, otherwise known as "if you get hurt at work, no doctor will see you. You are SCREWED".
They have a neat idea in the auto insurance industry called "No fault insurance". Isn't it time that we started looking at "no fault insurance" for health care? The bottom line is whether you are sick or you are injured or you just need a checkup, whether it happened as an accident during surgery, or you fell off the trampoline, or strained your back at work, you need to see your doctor. You need treatment. While you are standing there in pain, you don't need to referee a boxing match between the owner of the property where you were injured, your employer, your insurance company, the hospital, and whoever else wants to join the party. It has already gone beyone crazy. Individual citizens are being treated as if we have a office with a staff of 20 to fill out paperwork and make phone calls. WELL, WE DON'T!!! We need one entity who is responsible for health care coverage.
If we keep passing legislation that passes the buck for healthcare from one entity to another, eventually, every one of them will all claim that they have some legislation that exempts THEM from covering our healthcare. What that means in real life is "I'm sorry. The doctor can't see you. He doesn't handle worker's comp cases. He doesn't handle medical mistakes. Our office isn't "set up to handle those claims".
If we're all just going to have to pull out our pocketbooks and pay for everything ourselves, why don't we just get rid of health insurance companies and for-profit hospitals and set up a national healthcare system. Then, every citizen will be covered all the time, and we won't have to spend so much time and money arguing over who is going to pay. Then, we'll know it's fair, because we all pay into the system, and we're all covered.
Seems Texas Republicans are more than willing to stuff our children's cash down the pockets of war merchants and sleazy campaign contributing contractors than to vote for a fully funded program to provide more Texas children health care.
Attention all you lonely men out there: a woman in Seattle who is desperately looking for you. Not exactly the best catch you say? Bald? Almost 60? That's ok! Jeanne Sather of Seattle is looking for a more meaningful relationship.
The only catch? You have to be Canadian. And why are American men not good enough for Jeanne? Because Jeanne Sather was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998 and although she's fought the disease bravely for almost 10 years, it's the out of control American healthcare system that's killing her.
Sather's medical treatments cost $300,000 a year of which she still pays over $20,000 a year for.
Sather's post has raised a firestorm both here and in Canada (they are worried she wants to take advantage of their system), but she made the post as a political statement about the state of the American healthcare system.
"Since my cancer metastasized, I've been on a two-year plan: I make plans for my life two years at a time," she writes in her blog. "When I get to the end of those two years, I make plans for the next two. No saving for retirement here. My life is all front-loaded with the good stuff happening in the here and now."
Sather doesn't believe she'll make it to 60. Maybe 55. But not 60.
Pathetic. It's a sad day for the country when American women are advertising for Canadian men just to get medical treatment. And I don't blame her frankly. We need Universal Medical Care.
The Children's Health Insurance Program is that rarest of government creations -- a joint federal-state effort that actually works to reduce the number of uninsured children in our country. No wonder Congressional leaders are trying to expand it -- and the White House is trying to dismantle it.
The question for us is this: will our Congressman join the bi-partisan effort to strengthen CHIP? Or will he stick with the short-sighted ideological opposition of the Bush Administration and leave millions of children without health insurance?
There are many lies being spread about Michael Moore's film "Sicko" which may have kept you from seeing the documentary that indicts the $2 trillion American healthcare system. If so, you are missing a movie that many critics are calling "incredibly persuasive", "right on target", "100 percent accurate," and "overwhelming."
It's the mainstream media inlcuding conservatives from Faux News and CNN and apolitical bioethicists who have been disgusted by the greed corrupting their profession.That's right. Despite all the negative press, especially surrounding Moore's visit to Cuba with three 9/11 rescue workers, the same mainstream media which ravaged Moore's politically charged "Fahrenheit 9-11" is raving about Sicko.
The politically broad support for the film is partly due to the fact that the film is largely apolitical and free of the head-on confrontations Moore's famous for. In fact, outside a key scene in which Moore tries to get three rescue workers into Guantanamo Bay, Moore seems to go out of his way to avoid controversial confrontations.
As with any Michael Moore film, you're going to have a bias and you will probably hear many myths. Drop them all. In Sicko, the previously "polarizing" Micheal Moore did the unthinkable and created a film that all Americans regardless of political affiliation can rally around.
