A Basic Misdiagnosis On Health Care

My Dad worked hard his entire life, helping to put me and my sisters through college. But a stroke left him paralyzed on one side of his body, unable to speak and barely able to walk let alone continue to work. The insurance company refused to pay for the necessary speech therapy that might have helped my Dad talk again.

So I understood the pain of a woman who attended a town hall meeting hosted by Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

As you’ll see in the video she pleads with Coburn to help her husband, who she says suffers from traumatic brain injury. It’s difficult to listen to her words amidst the sobbing, but it is clear that her husband’s insurance company has denied him some type of coverage.

The senator, who is also a physician, tells her, “Yeah, we’ll help. The first thing we’ll see what we can do individually to help you through our office. But the other thing that’s missing in this debate is us, as neighbors, helping people that need our help. The idea that the government is the solution to our problems is an inaccurate, a very inaccurate statement  . . . ”

So he both told her that the government isn’t the answer and invited her to his government office. That’s confusing enough, but what’s more perplexing is that Coburn seems to be telling the woman to go beg her neighbors for help.

Neighbors might be able to bring that weeping woman a casserole or maybe even press a few dollars into her hand. But neighbors most likely wouldn’t be able to provide her husband with the proper rehabilitation, no more than I could have given to my Dad.

And why presume that the neighbors are in a better position than she is? Nearly 50 million American citizens don’t have health insurance.

Sixty-two percent of all bankruptcies filed in 2007 were linked to medical expenses, according to a nationwide study released in June by the American Journal of Medicine.

One aspect of the health debate that is under-discussed has been how the people who seem fine with the status quo actually are carrying an unseen load — they’re paying for the doctor and hospital visits of the people who don’t have insurance. It’s not some faceless corporation, or some accounting write-off but dollars out of the pockets of regular working families.

According to a Families USA report released earlier this summer, a regular family with health insurance pays an additional $1,000 annually in premiums to recompense for health care for those without coverage. An individual with private coverage also pays an additional $370 a year. The experts who study the system call it cost-shifting. All the uninsured sick people need to know is that they won’t be turned away from the emergency room; all the working insurance card-carrying population may know, or at least think about, is that their out-of-pocket costs are going up.

People are drowning under mounting health care costs and a faltering economy.

Is it the government’s job to make things better?

Click to finish reading. 

Thieves In the Temple

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	Andre Eggelletion

What the average person does not know about the directors of our monetary policy, the Federal Reserve, is the fact that there is absolutely nothing "Federal" about the Federal Reserve System, and neither does it have any "Reserves." Eggelletion describes how the average American taxpayer struggles financially, because the important decisions about the economy are made not by elected officials, but by a group of businessmen out for profit. "Thieves in the Temple" is a must read for every thinking American.

Income Inequality Is At An All-Time High

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/14/income-inequality-is-at-a_n_259516.html
Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression.

Administration Official: "Sebelius Misspoke." - The Atlantic Politics Channel

http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/08/administration_official_sebelius_misspoke.php
not so fast, my friend! Administration Official: "Sebelius Misspoke." - The Atlantic Politics Channel

An administration official said tonight that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius "misspoke" when she told CNN this morning that a government run health insurance option "is not an essential part" of reform. This official asked not to be identified in exchange for providing clarity about the intentions of the President. The official said that the White House did not intend to change its messaging and that Sebelius simply meant to echo the president, who has acknowledged that the public option is a tough sell in the Senate and is, at the same time, a must-pass for House Democrats, and is not, in the president's view, the most important element of the reform package.

A second official, Linda Douglass, director of health reform communications for the administration, said that President Obama believed that a public option was the best way to reduce costs and promote competition among insurance companies, that he had not backed away from that belief, and that he still wanted to see a public option in the final bill.

"Nothing has changed.," she said. "The President has always said that what is essential that health insurance reform lower costs, ensure that there are affordable options for all Americans and increase choice and competition in the health insurance market. He believes that the public option is the best way to achieve these goals."

A third White House official, via e-mail, said that Sebelius didn't misspeak. "The media misplayed it," the third official said.

Appearing on Face the Nation, press secretary Robert Gibbs said that fostering competition and choice were non-negotiable, but the specific mechanism designed to do so was up for discussion. That's been interpreted as a signal that the White House is getting behind the idea of adding publicly owned health cooperatives to the menu of choices that consumers without insurance will recieve. Still, this isn't exactly a walk-back -- the White House, Gibbs included, have mused favorably about the co-ops before.

On Saturday, Mr. Obama defended the public plan before an audience in Colorado Springs. At the same time, he said that the government option was not the single critical element of reform, pointing instead to the provisions preventing insurance companies from discriminating against people, requiring them to offer plans to everyone, and capping premium increases.


"The public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it. One aspect of it," Obama said.

This has been a refrain the White House has used for weeks, but not until Saturday did Mr. Obama voice it so explicitly.

The perception that the White House had backed away from the public plan has roiled many prominent Democrats, who took to their blogs, and to Twitter, to protest.

This is gonna get ugly

Sicko

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Documentary

Okay, so I know it is a somewhat old movie, but I just saw it for the first time thanks to Cyd and Nubian Graphics.

This is perhaps one of the best movies to watch if you really want to understand the pitfalls of health care. So, some of you may have a problem with Michael Moore. So what? It's about the U.S. health care system, not the man who made the movie.

Moore travels to several other industrialized nations, including France and Canada, to document the way health care works. He even travels to Cuba by boat, taking Americans in need of care, with him.

Why is our health care system so jacked up? What does socialist medicine really look like? And why do we hate the French so much? Probably because the government there pays for patient advocates to do laundry, clean and cook dinner for new mothers after they give birth. I know I'm hating on the French right now!

I'm not arguing that we have a French-made health care system, I'm just saying you should watch this movie and then evaluate the U.S. health system. Maybe it will give you ideas of how to make it better.