Single Payer

Recent Activity

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  Single signed the petition | about 1 year ago

  Demand Legal Compliance in US Workplaces
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  Single signed the petition | over 2 years ago

  No "Get Out of Jail Free" Card for Private Insurance Companies
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  Single signed the petition | over 2 years ago

  Tell the Senate the Health Co-Op Is a Cop-Out
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  Single signed the petition | over 2 years ago

  Have a Hearing on Single-Payer in the Senate
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  Single commented on the article | over 2 years ago

  A Very, Very, Very Fine House Bill

  Sounds pretty crappy to me. Sorry but if priority truly were health CARE and cost SAVINGS, they'd lose the BS and simply CBO score HR676 and get it done. Waxman's entire district in LA is fervently for single payer (and they are in his office day and night harrassing him on it) so he might want to start looking around for another job pretty soon.

  
  

  Given the number of us who are over 50 and without work and are low income, this is as dismal as I thought it would be.

  
  

  I've voted in many elections but I had some hope with this last one. That hope is pretty much gone and I've returned to how I saw things before - which is that money will ALWAYS ALWAYS out trump lives.

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  Single signed the petition | over 2 years ago

  Healthcare-NOW
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  Single signed the petition | over 2 years ago

  Condemn the Killing of Dr. George Tiller
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  Single commented on the article | over 2 years ago

  As Expensive As We Want It to Be

  Many can easily dispute "it worked very well". It worked so well for the industry that just the top 7 insurers made over $12 billion in profit for 2007 (that's NET) and it worked "so well" that many people just dropped coverage altogether because the premiums got just too high (thus giving us the 46 milliion uninsured today).
  Nona, if you knew how much it cost to manage the claims we have to file for the over 1500 different insurers (all requiring different coding and then some), you would perhaps understand better why MDs have to charge sometimes what seems ridiculously high prices for even a simple office visit. An office often employs more clerical staff to deal with insurance claims than it does actual medical practitioners like nurses and MDs. 
  Even if you disallowed every person to have anything beyond a yearly checkup and forbid them to have any testing for anything other than cholesterol and Aids, the amount of $ required to file that paperwork and manage those claims would cancel out any of the supposed savings in your private insurance scheme. 

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  Single commented on the article | over 2 years ago

  As Expensive As We Want It to Be

  Hmmm... I too had debilitating back problems with a herniated disk, degenerated disk, collapsed disk, and another disk with problems. I was told that surgery was an OPTION but the standard is to try all of the other options first. 
  When I hear stories like this, having worked for MDs, I wonder always whether the interpretation of what the MD said was "my MD wants to operate" vs. "my MD said surgery was an option but first we're going to try x and let's give that a go and if that doesn't work, we'll try y, etc. etc. etc.". Again, having worked for MDs, I think people freak out and stop listening and don't hear the part where the MD states the options and says what option you are presently on.
  Operating "on sciatica" though doesn't sound quite correct. Did your MD actually say that or did they say that they RX'd operating on your spine to deal with a disk that was putting pressure on the nerve or ???
  Again, there is a lot that's missing in these stories. For example, the surgery isn't sucessful stories don't mention the studies which show that surgery that is NOT followed up with the required PT is indeed not successful and virtually all MDs do a course of PT first before moving to surgery.
  I'm glad you got help but I think it is very important that we don't say what we thought we heard from the MD vs. what they actually said.

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  Single commented on the article | over 2 years ago

  As Expensive As We Want It to Be

  I don't totally buy Gawande's reasoning/observations here. Gawande is an ER physician, I believe and doesn't have adequate experience and knowledge, for example, of some of the ailments he speaks of.
  I have first hand experience with this as both patient and working for providers. Here's an example I take from my own life. When my hand went into uncontrollable spasms, I ended up at the hand specialist (after other visits to PCPs who routinely told me I did not have cts, threw cortisone at it, and told me to moderate activity, etc. - all of which I did). Hand specialist did those nerve conduction tests FIRST rather than simply operate or throw more expensive drugs at the problem. As a result, we knew that surgery and the follow up PT (the latter of which is usually not RX'd and is seen as "unnecessary" in spite of the studies which show that successful resolution of CTS surgery comes down to whether or not the patient receives and adheres to follow up PT) was the only thing left. Thank God Medicare allowed for this. I had surgery on both hands, followed by intensive PT until I was in reasonable shape, and I am pain-free and near-fully functioning today. In Gawande's world, probably that is seen as unnecessary and I hold that this is largely because in his world, he is primarily concerned with emergency stuff vs. getting people to be functional (i.e., survival vs. functional).
  The DEXAs he mentions also as fluff - I remember when the MDs who specialize in bone diseases such as osteoporosis had to work hard to get the industry to allow women who were not yet in their 40s but showed symptoms that suggested stress fractures or had risk factors for osteoporosis to get regular DEXAs. Until that got permitted, we had more women who were breaking more bones (and THAT is expensive). Same thing happened with mammagrams - lots of noise from people like Gawande arguing AGAINST regular mammagrams for women who were younger. How many women had to go undiagnosed with a growing breast tumor as a result of this supposed plethora of testing by the supposed greedy physicians.
  I have worked for many MDs managing claims and what not. By far, the majority are definitely NOT "gold diggers" prescribing unnecessary tests to make more $$. As a matter of fact, 1 of my own physicians who has enabled me to function without pain from debilitating arthritis is a leading researcher out of Stanford and he worries right now that somebody with an attitude like Gawande is going to start telling him he can't prescribe this or that for his lupus patient or the other patient that came across the country to see him because nobody else had been able to treat them effectively. 
  Getting away from this cheaper is better idea where the blame is placed on physicians for prescribing allegedly unecessary treatments is the reason why so many dissatisfied patients leave the Kaiser system and give Kaiser a bad rap (I was one of those patients and I and my entire family were raised in Kaiser and I cared for family who died in the Kaiser system as well as lived and died in the Canadian system).
  This focus on the supposed "unnecessary" procedures, et al is a ruse and a way of avoiding the real elephant in the room. We all know what it is - it's an industry that takes now more than 1/3 of every healthcare dollar for its profit and CEO compensation pkgs that rival AIG's.
  Leave the MDs alone. Yes, there are a few bad apples who are only in it for the $ but that percentage is ridiculously low compared to the real culprit. 
  The solution to the cost problem is crystal clear. Get rid of the private insurers and leave life and death decisions in the hands of MDs and their patients. Only a single payer publicly funded healthcare system can provide that kind of care. That is what we need and, given we already have it in the form of Medicare, YES WE CAN move to a single payer system.