health insurance
revere | February 23, 2009DemFromCT continues his public health series over at DailyKos, thus also continuing to make my early week blogging easier. This week is a brief look at this year's flu season, already in full swing, including what is happening in pediatric deaths from flu. He follows this with another interview, this time the American Lung Association's Director, National Advocacy, Erika Sward. Topics are timely: SCHIP (the Children's Health Insurance bill, just signed into law) and tobacco control.
These topics are intimately connected. Children are harmed by second hand smoke and are the next generation of…
ddobbs | February 9, 2009The Times' Economix blog has a good post by Alan Krueger on the need toinclude patients' lost time in estimates of health-care costs.
After waiting more than an hour in a doctor's waiting room, a friend of mine once presented his doctor with a bill for his time..... Although it doesn't currently enter into our national statistics, the time that patients spend getting health care services should be reflected in the way we calculate America's national health care expenditures.....Time spent interacting with the medical system could be used for other activities, like work and leisure. Moreover…
sb admin | November 22, 2008For many Americans, it's open enrollment time, the period your employer give you to make changes in your health insurance coverage. You may not understand your insurance very well, but you have to understand this one important fact: your health care providers know even less about your insurance than you do. Most doctor's offices have a sign that says something like, "Your insurance is your business." There is know way for your doctor's office to know all the details of all the different insurance plans.
Each state has different rules, and each part of the country differs in what kind of…
grrlscientist | September 22, 2008tags: socialized medicine, uninsured Americans, health care policy, election2008, politics
I have a confession to make: I am an American who has no health insurance, and I have been so ever since my postdoctoral funding ended four years ago. But I am not alone: according to the most recently available statistics, somewhere between 45-47 million Americans are living without any sort health care coverage, and every year, more and more working adults and families join the ranks of the uninsured. Shockingly, according to the Urban Institute's estimate, 22,000 Americans actually died in 2006…
revere | August 31, 2008The folks at ScienceDebate2008 pushed hard during the primaries to have the candidates address science policy. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum from Scienceblogs The Intersection were among the leaders in this movement. They didn't succeed in getting a debate then, but now with the field down to the finalists, they have received a response from Barack Obama to 14 questions culled from over 3400 submitted by the 38,000 signers of the ScienceDebate initiative (we were proud to be among them; they include nearly every major American science organization, the presidents of nearly every major…
revere | March 21, 2008They say politics makes strange bedfellows, so now that John McCain and Joe Lieberman are in bed together I hope they screw each other's brains out. John McCain may have sparked a little lover's spat yesterday when he encouraged Americans to go to Canada to buy lower priced drugs, something Joe Lieberman (the Senator from Big Pharma) looks on with horror. I sure don't object, but some McCain's other health care ideas strike me as politically suicidal (of course it also doesn't both me if he sends himself down the toilet, either):
John McCain is bolstering his reputation as a maverick by…
revere | March 7, 2008The Medicare Drug Prescription debacle ("Part D") was supposed to keep drug costs down by introducing competition. Write this bigger and you have John McCain's health care plan. But back to Part D. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the lobbying group for geezers like me that I resigned from because they backed this same Plan D some years ago, has now found that under the intense competition, prices for oldsters like me have risen double the rate of inflation since the program went into effect:
The increase in average prices paid by wholesalers and direct buyers was the…
revere | February 24, 2008Stories about insurance companies denying coverage are all too common (what kind of world is this, anyway?). But yesterday's story that a big insurer would have to pay for it is a surprise (what kind of world is this, anyway, that this is a surprise?):
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.
The ruling by a private arbitration judge was the first of its kind and the most powerful…
revere | February 10, 2008There is so much crap written in US media about alleged fatal flaws of the Canadian system of universal health care that it could be used to fertilize the crops of US agribusiness for a year. One apparent myth is that Canadians hate their system and that it results in long waits and unsatisfactory service. The province of British Columbia surveyed its citizens twice on how they feel about one of the most important aspects of the system, the Emergency Room (for American readers: before you read the results ask yourself how satisfied you were with your last trip to the ER):
The survey was…
revere | January 9, 2008Last Saturday night Mrs. R. and I voluntarily subjected ourselves to four hours of political debates, two involving aspirants for the presidential nomination of the Republican party and two hours for the Democrats. Bad karma? Anyway, for the record, the Democrats won both debates, their own and the Republican debate. In particular, listening to the know-nothing Republicans "debate" health care reforms amongst themselves was laughable since they unanimously agreed that black was white, in this case, that the US had the "best health care in the world." Virtually everybody knows this is false so…
revere | December 27, 2007If you have heart disease or diabetes and you are uninsured you are worse off than those who are insured by several measures. Those are the kinds of health conditions that usually worsen with age, too, so you would expect this to be a bigger problem for the uninsured near elderly. But they don't worsen for this group because when they hit 65 in the US they are no longer uninsured: they have the near universal health insurance coverage called Medicare, and as a result their health improves. Those are among the findings in a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by a…
revere | December 24, 2007We've discussed the scandal over the use of Avastin and Lucentis for wet macular degeneration several times (here, here, here). If you've missed it, here's the gist. Avastin is a drug approved to treat colon cancer. It works by choking off blood vessels to the tumor. It turns out, however, that a tiny dose of the same drug, when injected into the eye can also stop the uncontrolled growth of blood vessels behind the retina that produces a leading cause of blindness in the elderly, macular degeneration. The good news is a compounding pharmacy can take the large dose in the Avastin package and…
revere | November 4, 2007Australia has a National Health System and, according to some of its doctors, it is crumbling. Aha, say the foes of American Universal Health Care, "I told you so." And I'll have to admit, they did. Fair is fair. So where is Australia's health system heading?
Australia's public health system is crumbling, leading the country toward a US-style privatised health model, doctors say.
Doctors Reform Society national president Con Costa wants federal Health Minister Tony Abbott to say whether he believes it is better to privatise the health system. (Sydney Morning Herald)
John Howard, the George…
grrlscientist | September 21, 2007tags: health insurance, medicine, Families USA report, medicaid
I haven't had health insurance since the middle of 2004. Since 2004, I have held numerous part-time temporary positions, and I was employed for one full year as a full-time professor of anatomy & physiology at a local university, yet even then, I still wasn't provided any health insurance. Further, I was unable to afford health insurance on the wages I was paid as a full-time "temporary" professor (nevermind that I can barely afford peanut butter and jelly as a PT temp). I am still uninsured, but now I am mostly unemployed…
revere | July 26, 2007You can't count on defenders of US health care for much, but you can always count on them to allege that in Canada and other "socialized health care" systems there are long waits for elective surgery. Wait times for a hip replacement in Canada have been alleged as long as 6 months, although I don't know if that is generally true or not. Whatever the wait times, most Canadians seem satisfied. From Statistics Canada:
The results for 2005 indicate that waiting for care remains the number one barrier for those having difficulties accessing care. Median waiting times for all specialized services…
revere | July 25, 2007The cliché that when life hands you a lemon, make lemonade wasn't meant to cover the case where a nation's politicians refuse to deal with the lemon that is its health system. There are now a lot of stories in the news media about the catastrophe that is US health care, but few of them get beyond the superficial. So the story of 12 year old Wesley Arnold is typical. Instead of the dismaying and pathetic story it is it is written to be heartwarming:
There's really not much a 12-year-old can do when he finds out his dad has cancer - or is there?
Wesley Arnold decided he was going to help out…
revere | July 16, 2007Many Republicans and most Democrats in Congress seem to agree on at least one thing: President Bush is full of crap. Not about Iraq. Virtually all Republicans disagree with the rest of us on that. No, what they agree on is that the federal government should expand, not deep six, the Children's Health Insurance Program. 7.4 million children were covered at one time or another last year but it will expire on September 30. For 6 months a bipartisan group in the Senate Finance Committee has been crafting a compromise bill to cover the 8 million children in the US with no health insurance at all.…
revere | July 13, 2007Michael Moore, whose movie on US health care, Sicko, is said to be a devastating indictment of said system (haven't seen it yet), had a bit of dust up recently with CNN's health correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. You can see it on the video linked below. Here's the scenario. With Moore as an upcoming guest of Wolf Blitzer (one of the least bright of the low wattage dimbulbs the network barfs up nightly), CNN runs a Gupta "fact check" of the movie which largely confirms Moore's facts but alleges minor discrepancies which Gupta characterizes as "fudging the facts." The odd thing is that Moore is…
revere | June 19, 2007It's a myth that's hard to bust. The one that says the United States, the country that spends more on health care than any other, has the best medical care in the world to go with it. It hasn't been true for a long time. It doesn't. But it is part of the core belief of most Americans. I wonder who benefits most from that falsehood? But to the facts:
As early as 2000, the World Health Organization made the first attempt at ranking all the world's healthcare systems. The U.S. came in 37th out of 190 nations in the provision of healthcare. (France, according to the June 2000 report, was first.)…
revere | April 18, 2007The jury is still out on the value of statins in H5N1 (see posts here and here). But these drugs seem to have many beneficial effects and are taken by a huge proportion of the at risk population to lower their cholesterol. But a new study suggests not as many are taking them as want to or might. The barrier is money.:
Many patients taking statins to lower their cholesterol stop taking the drugs because of co-payments and shared drug costs, a new study found.
These drugs, which have been shown to prevent heart attacks, should be fully covered by insurance, said study lead researcher Dr.…