The health insurance industry is a profit making engine. Its built to take your money, and not provide a service.

Watch, learn, act.

Taken from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4TsaHmtgfA

I was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer less than two weeks ago. I had been suffering some strange symptoms for over half a year, mostly constipation, cramps, and weight loss. It ended up with a day of such extreme abdominal pain that I got my partner to drive me into emerg at the local Hospital. This was late at night and the MD on call said it was likely serious and I needed to be sent to the Hospital in the nearest large city, Victoria, BC. Both helicopters were in use so, since I live on an Island, I was sent over by water taxi, accompanied by two paramedics and my GF.

When I arrived in Victoria, I was given a cat-scan within hours and in surgery immediately after the surgeon had examined the scans. The surgeon cleaned me out of tumours and I was on the mend, or so we thought. Since I had lost about 2/3 of my blood before surgery through slow leaks in my stool, I developed blood clots in my left leg and developed a pulmonary embolism. This required a further week stay in the Hospital. The Doctors and Nurses involved were all incredibly caring, personable and so professional.
I had further setbacks that were drug-related, but finally my last day came. One of my Doctors asked me if I would be willing to inject myself with blood thinner for the next 4-5 days. If so I could go home. He then asked me if I could afford it. I was using a single-use needle-induced blood thinner that my Hospital used as a matter of a budgetary choice (they choose to use a more expensive option than the regular needle or pill). When I asked him what the price of my freedom would be, he said “$15-$25 day.” In the meantime I am switching to pill form.

So, after 11 days I am home, and I will be receiving two visits a week from Home Care, in addition to any further treatment needed, such as chemo and radiation. And all of this cost me nothing, beyond the meds that I am now buying. There was no waiting and no “lottery.” Don’t believe the lies being spewed by the lobbyists.

The basic system here is Canada is that the Federal government collects our taxes and returns a certain amount back to the Provinces to be used for Health Care. The amount is not mandated on the Federal level, but decide on the Provincial level. This is where the potential exists for problems. In my province, for example, the current governing party is the BC Liberal Party who are liberal in name only. They are really conservatives, and in their obsession with not running deficits, they have just made massive cuts to Health Care budgets throughout the Province. The various Health Authorities have had to cut some elective surgeries, such as hip, shoulder and cataract operations until next year.

So you can see from my example that the problem is not with the system, but rests with it’s implementation. I am eternally grateful that I live under the umbrella of my health care system. I am alive, healthy again, and I don’t have to worry about paying a big bill. Isn’t this the way it should be? Isn’t this what everyone deserves?

Sincerely,

Alex Arnet
Salt Spring Island, Canada

From How American Health Care Killed My Father : The Atlantic, by David Goldhill

After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.

Almost two years ago, my father was killed by a hospital-borne infection in the intensive-care unit of a well-regarded nonprofit hospital in New York City. Dad had just turned 83, and he had a variety of the ailments common to men of his age. But he was still working on the day he walked into the hospital with pneumonia. Within 36 hours, he had developed sepsis. Over the next five weeks in the ICU, a wave of secondary infections, also acquired in the hospital, overwhelmed his defenses. My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.

About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform.

It was a heroic story, but to me, it was also deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here’s an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people.

And what about us—the patients? How does a nation that might close down a business for a single illness from a suspicious hamburger tolerate the carnage inflicted by our hospitals? And not just those 100,000 deaths. In April, a Wall Street Journal story suggested that blood clots following surgery or illness, the leading cause of preventable hospital deaths in the U.S., may kill nearly 200,000 patients per year. How did Americans learn to accept hundreds of thousands of deaths from minor medical mistakes as an inevitability?

My survivor’s grief has taken the form of an obsession with our health-care system. For more than a year, I’ve been reading as much as I can get my hands on, talking to doctors and patients, and asking a lot of questions.

Keeping Dad company in the hospital for five weeks had left me befuddled. How can a facility featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment use less-sophisticated information technology than my local sushi bar? How can the ICU stress the importance of sterility when its trash is picked up once daily, and only after flowing onto the floor of a patient’s room? Considering the importance of a patient’s frame of mind to recovery, why are the rooms so cheerless and uncomfortable? In whose interest is the bizarre scheduling of hospital shifts, so that a five-week stay brings an endless string of new personnel assigned to a patient’s care? Why, in other words, has this technologically advanced hospital missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations?

I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.

Like every grieving family member, I looked for someone to blame for my father’s death. But my dad’s doctors weren’t incompetent—on the contrary, his hospital physicians were smart, thoughtful, and hard-working. Nor is he dead because of indifferent nursing—without exception, his nurses were dedicated and compassionate. Nor from financial limitations—he was a Medicare patient, and the issue of expense was never once raised. There were no greedy pharmaceutical companies, evil health insurers, or other popular villains in his particular tragedy.

Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.

These are the impersonal forces, I’ve come to believe, that explain why things have gone so badly wrong in health care, producing the national dilemma of runaway costs and poorly covered millions. The problems I’ve explored in the past year hardly count as breakthrough discoveries—health-care experts undoubtedly view all of them as old news. But some experts, it seems, have come to see many of these problems as inevitable in any health-care system—as conditions to be patched up, papered over, or worked around, but not problems to be solved.

That’s the premise behind today’s incremental approach to health-care reform. Though details of the legislation are still being negotiated, its principles are a reprise of previous reforms—addressing access to health care by expanding government aid to those without adequate insurance, while attempting to control rising costs through centrally administered initiatives. Some of the ideas now on the table may well be sensible in the context of our current system. But fundamentally, the “comprehensive” reform being contemplated merely cements in place the current system—insurance-based, employment-centered, administratively complex. It addresses the underlying causes of our health-care crisis only obliquely, if at all; indeed, by extending the current system to more people, it will likely increase the ultimate cost of true reform.

I’m a Democrat, and have long been concerned about America’s lack of a health safety net. But based on my own work experience, I also believe that unless we fix the problems at the foundation of our health system—largely problems of incentives—our reforms won’t do much good, and may do harm. To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy. We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government’s role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy.

These ideas stand well outside the emerging political consensus about reform. So before exploring alternative policies, let’s reexamine our basic assumptions about health care—what it actually is, how it’s financed, its accountability to patients, and finally its relationship to the eternal laws of supply and demand. Everyone I know has at least one personal story about how screwed up our health-care system is; before spending (another) $1trillion or so on reform, we need a much clearer understanding of the causes of the problems we all experience.

Read the whole story at : How American Health Care Killed My Father : The Atlantic, by David Goldhill

I’ve posted this in a few Health care links:

At the moment the USA pays roughly 15% of its GDP, 5% more than any
other nation, and pays more than DOUBLE the average per
capita for healthcare. How much? DOUBLE This is
extremely wasteful. Universal Health Care makes sense.

The UK enacted health reform in 1948. just after the nightmare of
WWII they were broke. Universal Health Care saves the country money.

The US system in extremely costly and ineffective at delivering
healthcare. It is very effective in transferring money into the pockets
of the Insurance companies and Medical establishments.

World
Health care Organization rankings by performance

1 France
2 Italy
3 San Marino
4 Andorra

5 Malta

6 Singapore
7 Spain
8 Oman
9 Austria
10 Japan
11 Norway
12 Portugal

13 Monaco
14 Greece

15 Iceland
16 Luxembourg
17 Netherlands
18 United Kingdom
19 Ireland
20 Switzerland

..
…. .

37 U.S.A

WHO’s assessment system was based on five indicators:
1. overall level of population health;
2. health inequalities (or disparities) within the population;

3. overall level of health system responsiveness (a combination of
patient satisfaction and how well the system acts);
4. distribution of responsiveness within the population (how well
people of varying economic status find that they are served by the
health system);

5. and the distribution of the health system’s financial burden
within the population (who pays the costs).

World
health care Organization rankings by per capita spending
2001 in $ppp(Medical research spending not included)

1 United States: 4,271
2 Switzerland: 3,857
3 Norway: 3,182
4 Denmark: 2,785

5 Luxembourg: 2,731
6 Iceland: 2,701
7 Germany: 2,697
8 France: 2,288

9 Japan: 2,243
10 Netherlands: 2,173
11 Sweden: 2,145
12 Belgium: 2,137
13 Austria: 2,121

14 Canada: 1,939
15 Australia: 1,714
16 Finland: 1,704

17 Italy: 1,676
18 United Kingdom: 1,675
19 Israel: 1,607
20 Ireland:

America #1 in spending yet #37 in performance. Need more be said?

The
USA pays as much out of the public purse as the average OECD nation,
more than nations like France, Germany, the UK, Sweden, yet unlike the
average OECD nation does not have any form of universal
coverage

On top of the public purse monies the citizens of the US pay ANOTHER
amount of cash, equal to the amount they pay in taxes, from their own
pockets for their personal healthcare.

So the USA pays approx DOUBLE the OECD average and
yet manages not to have Universal Health Care. It’s a hell of an
achievement. How can Americans pay for a Rolls Royce and yet take
delivery of a Chevy with a puncture?

The USA needs to find the solution every other Western nation has
found Universal Health Care free at the point of
delivery.

What hasn’t it?

This is why. The Medical-Industrial Complex has donated $833,259,267
directly to members of Congress. Not counting the huge amounts of money
given to presidential candidates like Obama, McCain and Kerry, the
biggest donations have gone to the 3 worst industry shills who have been
well-paid to make sure there will never be effective, robust health care
reform:

Arlen Specter (R-D- PA- $4,026,933)
Max Baucus (DLC- MT- $2,833,731)
Mitch McConnell (R-KY- $2,758,468)

And when you just go right to Big Insurance, the non-presidential
candidates who got the biggest legalized bribes were the 7 senators who
have been tasked with the job of killing effective health care
reform.

Ben Nelson (DLC-NE- $1,196,799)

Max Baucus (DLC- MT- $1,184,113)
Joe Lieberman (DLC- CT- $1,036,302)

Arlen Specter (R-D- PA- $1,035,530)
Mitch McConnell (R-KY- $929,207)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA- $884,724)

Health
Care In America

A
great resource for checking who’s funding your
politician