Walking Tall – How New Prosthetics Are Changing The Game
05/09/2012 06:24 AM CDT
According to the Department of Defense, 1,453 service members have lost limbs since the start of the wars in 2001. Of those, 82% were lower extremity injuries. In spite of this, some wounded warriors are not letting their lack of limbs slow down their stride…literally. Thanks to some advancements in technology, some of these injured [...]
News release: "Facts and Figures, an annual report released by the Alzheimer’s Association, reveals the burden of Alzheimer’s and dementia on individuals, caregivers, government and the nation’s healthcare system."
In her Washington Post column, Kathleen Parker became the latest conservative media figure to falsely claim the Senate bill "expands public funding for abortion." In fact, the bill bans federal funding for abortion except in cases currently allowed under the Hyde amendment: rape, incest, and conditions that endanger the life of the pregnant woman.
Read More
http://mediamatters.org/research/201003240004?lid=1103827&rid=43709343
Two years after her husband’s death, Amanda Bennett’s cover story examines the costs of keeping one man alive
By Amanda Bennett, with Charles Babcock
It was sometime after midnight on Dec. 8, 2007, when Dr. Eric Goren told me my husband might not live till morning. The kidney cancer that had metastasized almost six years earlier was growing in his lungs. He was in intensive care at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and had begun to spit blood.
Terence Bryan Foley, 67 years old, my husband of 20 years, father of our two teenagers, a Chinese historian who earned his PhD in his sixties, a man who played more than 15 musical instruments and spoke six languages, a San Francisco cable car conductor and sports photographer, an expert on dairy cattle and swine nutrition, film noir, and Dixieland jazz, was confused. He knew his name, but not the year. He wanted a Coke.
Should Terence begin to hemorrhage, the doctor asked, what should he do?
This was our third end-of-life warning in seven years. We had fought off the others, so perhaps we could dodge this one, too. Terence’s oncologist and I both believed that a new medicine he had just begun taking, Pfizer’s (PFE) Sutent, would buy him more life.
Keep him alive if you can, I said.
Terence died six days later, on Friday, Dec. 14.
What I couldn’t know then was that the thinking behind my request—along with hundreds of decisions we made over the years—was a window on the impossible calculus at the core of today’s health-care dilemma. Terence and I were eager to beat his cancer. Backed by robust medical insurance provided by a succession of my corporate employers, we were able to wage a fierce battle. As we made our way through a series of expensive last chances, like the one I asked for that night, we didn’t have to think about money, allocation of medical resources, the struggles of roughly 46 million uninsured Americans, or the impact on corporate bottom lines.
Terence’s treatment was expensive. The bills for his seven years of medical care totaled $618,616, almost two-thirds of which was for his final 24 months. Still, no one can say for sure if the treatments helped extend his life.
Over the final four days before hospice—two in intensive care, two in a cancer ward—our insurance was billed $43,711 for doctors, medicines, monitors, X-rays, and scans. Two years later the only thing I can see that the money bought for certain was confirmation he was dying. Along with a colleague, Charles Babcock, I spent months poring over almost 5,000 pages of documents collected from six hospitals, four insurers, Medicare, three oncologists, and a surgeon. Those papers tell the story of a system filled with people doing their best. Stepping back and looking at that large stack through a different lens, a string of complex questions emerges.
31% FOR PAPERWORK
Health-care costs represent 17% of today’s U.S. gross domestic product. Medicare devotes about a quarter of its budget to care in the last year of life, according to the policy journal Health Affairs. Yet as I fought to buy my husband more time, it didn’t matter to me that the hospital charged more than 12 times what Medicare then reimbursed for a chest scan. It also didn’t matter that UnitedHealthcare (UNH) reimbursed the hospital for 80% of the $3,232 price of a scan, while a few months later our new insurer, Empire BlueCross & BlueShield, paid 24% for the same test. And I didn’t have time to be thankful that the insurers negotiated the rates with the hospital so neither my employers nor I actually paid the difference between the sticker and discounted prices.
Looking at that stack of documents, it is easy to see why 31% of the money spent on health care went to paperwork and administration, according to research published in 2003 in the New England Journal of Medicine. That number has stayed the same or grown since then, says Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the study.
continues on the web….
To read the complete story visit Bloomberg Business Week
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_11/
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/opinion/24reich.html?pagewanted=print
By Robert B. Reich
ROBERT B. REICH, A PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC POLICY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, and a secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, is the author of “Supercapitalism.”
February 24, 2010
Berkeley, Calif. — My health insurer here in California is Anthem Blue Cross. So far, my group policy hasn’t been affected by Anthem’s planned rate increase of as much as 39 percent for its customers with individual policies — but the trend worries me, as it should everyone. Rates are soaring all over the country. Insurers have been seeking to raise premiums 24 percent in Connecticut, 23 percent in Maine, 20 percent in Oregon and a wallet-popping 56 percent in Michigan. How can insurers raise prices as much as they want without fear of losing customers?
Astonishingly, the health insurance industry is exempt from federal antitrust laws, which is why a handful of insurers have become so dominant in their markets that their customers simply have nowhere else to go. But that protection could soon end: President Obama on Tuesday announced his support of a House bill that would repeal health insurers’ antitrust exemption, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled that she would put it toward an immediate vote.
This is promising news. Forcing insurers to compete for our business would do at least as much good as the president’s proposal to give the federal government, working with the states, the power to deny or roll back excessive premiums. The fact is that half of the states already have the power to approve rates and they don’t seem to be holding insurers back much….
Regardless of what happens at the White House’s health care meeting on Thursday, we’ve got to make sure health insurers compete for every one of our dollars. First chance I get I’m going to find another health insurer here in California — unless Anthem has such a lock on the market I can’t find a better deal.