Health and Sanity category archive

Read the whole thing:

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Delaware, through a third party, has rejected coverage in the last two months for diagnostic heart procedures for at least 11 patients whose doctors felt stress tests were medically necessary, The News Journal has learned.

Froomkin:

That’s because while the health care debate has been raging in Washington, the recession continues to rage everywhere else. And state governments across the country are dealing with massive budget shortfalls by reducing spending on the people who need it most, with health costs a chief target.

The Booman summarizes my reaction so I don’t have to:

Is the bill a piece of (excrement–ed.)? In one sense, yes, yes it is. It’s far short of what we’d do if we had no opposition. We probably could have done modestly better with some more smarts and a little luck. But ‘progressive’ means ‘incremental.’ You make progress, you don’t get everything you want in one fell swoop.

The post I linked to is the first of several thoughtful analyses of this weekend’s events in Congress. You can start with it, then work your way upblog.

Those folks who thought that President Obama couldn’t or wouldn’t play political hardball might should reconsider.

We have rationing. It’s not rationing based on need or any rational measure; it’s rationing based on demand for country-club memberships.

On Feb. 10 — after Blue Cross Blue Shield of Delaware denied coverage three times for a stress test that would have revealed severe arterial blockage — doctors opened Fields’ chest and performed heart-bypass surgery that his cardiologist said almost certainly prevented a massive heart attack and saved his life.

(snip)

Health care reform legislation pending before Congress would not restructure that system, although it could provide more transparency.

The whole article is worth a read.

A related story points out that health insurance premiums have doubled in the last ten years.

The quality of health care sure hasn’t doubled in the last ten years.

Afterthought:

Profiting from misery–>miserable profits.

The system is broken.

A health insurance mandate is hardly single payer, but anything would be better than what we’ve got. And compelling insurance companies actually to insure–that’s a good thing.

Over at the Central Virginia Progressive, Scott Wichman guest-posts some thoughts on the health insurance bill and health insurance mandates. As context, remember that the Regency has tried to outlaw mandates.

Two nuggets from the post:

Yet here is where the insurance industry is freaking out– they will actually have to deliver on their promises, instead of being able to slip out of their responsibilities so callously. If folks on the right are freaking out over the gov’t mandate to buy health insurance, why don’t they protest Car insurance mandates as ‘Tyranny’?

———————

It makes no sense to me that when we send food, supplies, and medical care to a country halfway around the world, we are seen in this country as noble and heroic. If the government offers to do the same thing stateside, is is Tyrranical/Socialist/Fascist and people protest it.

Read the whole thing.

I emailed back, not that I shall get noticed, that he did the right thing. Sometimes, you take what you can get and keep working for what you want.

But you take what you can get when you can get it.

Read more »

Or we shall continue to sacrifice the poor upon the altar inscribed, To Hell with Them.

The states and the federal government share the cost of Medicaid, which saw a record enrollment increase of 3.3 million people last year. The program now benefits 47 million people, primarily children, pregnant women, disabled adults and nursing home residents. It falls to the states to control spending by setting limits on eligibility, benefits and provider payments within broad federal guidelines.

Michigan, like many other states, did just that last year, packaging the 8 percent reimbursement cut with the elimination of dental, vision, podiatry, hearing and chiropractic services for adults.

The story tells of doctors turning away patients, many of whom they have treated for years and some of whom are one treatment from their deathbeds.

H/T Karen for the link.

Another example of how mixing profits and health care leads to no health care. A court case reveals that an insurance company targeted paying customers diagnosed with HIV for cancellation because the insurer didn’t want to live up to its side of the bargain to pay for their health care:

A computer program and algorithm targeted every policyholder recently diagnosed with HIV for an automatic fraud investigation, as the company searched for any pretext to revoke their policy. As was the case with Mitchell, their insurance policies often were canceled on erroneous information, the flimsiest of evidence, or for no good reason at all, according to the court documents and interviews with state and federal investigators.

Read the whole thing.

Remote Area Medical set up free clinics, sort of like fairs. They move into an area for a weekend, solicit medical people to volunteer, and open themselves to the public.

They held one recently out in the Valley of Virginia. People came from as far away as West Virginia (not all that far) and North Carolina (real far):

The organizers said they had 421 people show up for the event. Think about that for a minute. One weekend, in one little pocket of the richest nation in the world, 421 people came to get free health care because they couldn’t otherwise afford it–either because of unemployment, underemployment or lack of good insurance. The fact that we’re letting this happen (and have been letting it happen for decades) is disgraceful, outrageous and morally unconscionable.

What we have is just plain nuts.

Via the Booman Tribune.

Country club memberships (emphasis added):

(President) Obama citied recent massive rate hikes by major insurers, and the advice of investment consultants at Goldman Sachs that customers should buy stock in health insurers because it’s easy money – no competition and no price restraints.

“You see, these insurance companies have made a calculation,” Obama said in prepared remarks released by the White House. “They’re OK with people being priced out of health insurance because they’ll still make more by raising premiums on the customers they have. And they will keep doing this for as long as they can get away with it.”

She divorced her husband of over 40 years because he had Alzheimer’s.

It was the only way, after running through all the family’s savings, to make care affordable for him.

Heath care reform is a matter of morality, not a matter of country club memberships for executives.

Our present system is immoral and forces good people to do immoral things to stay alive.

Meanwhile, back in Massachusetts, Roberta still wrestles with her agonizing decision to divorce her husband so he could qualify for Medicaid. “Married couples risk losing nearly everything when one spouse needs long-term care,” explains Hyman Darling, Roberta’s attorney, “and it shouldn’t be that way.”

Roberta has found some peace in the realization that “marriage means more than a piece of paper.” Her love and devotion to Alex have not diminished; she visits him every day in the nursing home, giving him the latest news about their children and sometimes bringing flowers. Totally incapacitated now, both physically and mentally, Alex will never improve or return home. But Roberta is grateful for the time they do have, as well as the peace of mind that comes with knowing her own future is secure. “I’m grateful I still have my home and enough savings so I won’t be dependent on my children,” she says. “But the real question is, why should health care have to end up in the divorce courts? What kind of a system is that?”

Suit:

A federal suit filed today charges the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania with refusing a patient because he lacked health insurance, causing an extended delay in care and then significant damage to his brain.

(snip)

Medical records at Underwood indicate that at 10:54 p.m., Penn said it would take Murray and began to arrange for a helicopter to transport him, according to the complaint. Then at 11:50 p.m., an Underwood nurse wrote that Y. Joseph Woo, a heart surgeon at Penn, called and said they would not take Murray “due to no medical insurance,” the suit alleges.

From FactCheck dot org. As always, follow the link for the full analysis:

McCain says in a new TV ad: “Let’s give every American family a $5,000 refundable tax credit” to buy health insurance.

Sounds good. But McCain failed to mention how existing employer-sponsored health benefits would be affected.

• Employers could no longer deduct the cost of health plans for their workers, which several experts say is likely to cause companies to reduce or eliminate health benefits for their employees.
• Workers would be taxed on the value of any employer-paid health benefits, partially offsetting the $5,000 credit for those now covered by such plans.

The aim of the McCain plan is to reduce health care costs through increased competition, by encouraging individuals to shop around for health insurance and medical care. There are many who favor such an approach, and we take no position on it one way or the other. But McCain’s simplistic ad misleads viewers by promising to give “every American family” a $5,000 benefit while failing to mention what he would also take away.

As I pointed out shortly after I started this blogging thingee, competition and health care are incompatible. Sick people are just not in the position to shop around for health care. They go where their doctors send them and do what their doctors tell them to do.

This could more properly be called the Rich Insurance Company Preservation Proposal.

God help that the rich should fail to get richer, while the middle class and the poor are still there to get poorer.

And anyone who tells you that middle income families can easily find reasonably-priced health insurance on the open market has never had to pay for his or her own health insurance.

My new health insurance policy that I am happy to have and which, frankly, will never be any use to me unless my son or I end up in the hospital (which means I hope it will never be any use to me) is equal to almost half my mortgage payment PITI–more than half my mortgage payment PI–(30 year straight 5.75%) per month.

Recent history has not been kind to working-class Americans, who were down on the economy long before the word recession was uttered.

The main reason: spiraling health-care costs have been whacking away at their wages. Even though workers are producing more, inflation-adjusted median family income has dipped 2.6 percent — or nearly $1,000 annually since 2000.

Employees and employers are getting squeezed by the price of health care. The struggle to control health costs is viewed as crucial to improving wages and living standards for working Americans. Employers are paying more for health care and other benefits, leaving less money for pay increases. Benefits now devour 30.2 percent of employers’ compensation costs, with the remaining money going to wages, the Labor Department reported this month. That is up from 27.4 percent in 2000.

From the Nieman Watchdog:

In recent years several hundred emergency departments (EDs) closed around the U.S., while the total number of patient visits soared. A 2008 study showed waits to see the ED physician increased 36% between 1997 and 2004. The government’s answer: cut funding for urban hospitals, where waits are longest.

Best health care in the world.

Yeah.

Right.

One of the myths propounded by those who oppose any change to the current broken system of health care in the United States is that “we have the best health care in the world.”

We don’t. It’s, like, what? 37th, I think.

Daniel DiRito deconstructs the “best health care in the world” claim over at ASZ.

Providing health care and the profit motive, incompatible. We need to move to a system with a goal of providing health care, not a goal of enriching CEO’s and salespersons (emphasis added):

One of California’s largest for-profit insurers stopped a controversial practice of canceling sick policyholders Friday after a judge ordered Health Net Inc. to pay more than $9 million to a breast cancer patient it dropped in the middle of chemotherapy.

(snip)

State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner applauded the judge, saying “health insurers simply cannot hold out the promise of insurance for their consumers and then snatch it away just when people need it most. That is illegal, immoral and will not be tolerated.”

Earlier, Health Net had defended its actions, saying it never would have issued Bates a policy in the first place if she had disclosed her true weight and a preexisting heart condition on her application.

Bates said a broker filled out the application while she was styling a client’s hair on a busy day in her shop. She said she answered his questions as best she could.

Bates said she already had insurance and wasn’t in the market until the broker came by and told her that he thought he could get her a lower monthly premium if she switched to Health Net.

At the arbitration hearing, internal company documents were disclosed showing that Health Net had paid employee bonuses for meeting a cancellation quota and for the amount of money saved.

“It’s difficult to imagine a policy more reprehensible than tying bonuses to encourage the rescission of health insurance that keeps the public well and alive,” the judge wrote.

Via Atrios.

After 6 agonizing months of trying to find out what is wrong with our health care system, why we pay twice as much as the rest of the rest of the world but are only ranked 37th in overall care by the world health organization, why 47 million Americans lack any health insurance at all, why the leading cause of bankruptcy has become unpaid medical bills (75% of these people had insurance when they first got ill), why health care costs rise every year at a much higher rate of inflation than any other item in our economy, even than energy and after realizing that all these trends will continue in the future and may get worse, I have come to the conclusion that health care does not belong in the free-market system.

I am not a socialist.

I love the free market system; it has kept all other goods and services within reach of almost all working Americans

Are there 47 million Americans who cannot afford car insurance or the Internet or cable t.v.?

No, because none of the afore-mentioned have doubled in the past 8 years.

One argument that is often voiced in health care’s defense is that new technology has forced prices to rise.

I cannot buy into that, because there has been or should have been other innovations that should have offset that.

All areas of our economy have adopted new technology, but have not had prices soar like health care.

Others mention expensive litigation, but litigation totals only 2% of the total.

Not being able to sue for malpractice would not solve the problem.

The problem is that basically health care is the only area of the free market system where you cannot shop for price.

No one clips coupons or shops the yellow pages for best price for care when they get sick; they just want to get well.

Health care providers can charge any fee they chose, and so they do.

I spent 40 years managing furniture stores.

How wonderful it would have been to have no price comparison to contend with!

I could have tripled my mark up and retired in ten years.

One thing we have found out early in the free market system is monopolies are dangerous to the health of our economy. If one sector, especially a staple like health care, takes too big a piece of the pie, the whole pie is in trouble.

The only solution, as distasteful as it may seem, is some type of European or Canadian plan that covers every one.

Otherwise, there is nothing in our future but pain and suffering.