Health Care

  I am seeking any way I can to get the word out about insurance companies giving death sentences to women diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer. I have Horizon Blue Cross and Blue Shield N.J. health insurance. Three and a half years ago (October of 2014) I received a diagnosis of Stage 3 Ovarian Cancer. Ovarian cancer, according to the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, is usually diagnosed after menopause. However, some have been diagnosed as early as their 40’s or 50’s. This is not what you would label an “old person’s disease”. I began treatment with IV chemo, surgery (complete hysterectomy) followed by more IV chemo. By June of 2015 I was in remission.  I was in remission for two years. Two weeks before Christmas in 2017 I was told the cancer was growing. It had now spread to the liver, spleen and diaphragm. My doctors at Cancer Treatment Center of America, Chicago told me my best (and only option quite honestly) is a procedure called HIPEC Surgery. Without this procedure, the cancer will continue to spread. Our insurance pre-certification was submitted and surgery was scheduled for Tuesday, March 20, 2018. On Friday, March 16, after a day of pre-op testing, BCBSNJ notified the hospital the claim was being denied. This was an hour before everything shut down for the weekend. The reason? BCBSNJ is calling it experimental. This procedure was approved by the FDA in 1999. Two appeals have been filed and denied. As an alternative, my doctor wanted to perform surgery to remove the tumors (called debulking). Now we are being told this will not be approved because it was part of the original request for pre-certification. The part of this procedure they are labeling as experimental is a heated chemo placed in the abdominal cavity for two hours. How can they say no to a life-saving operation that has been performed for 20 years?! I have spoken to others who have had the same diagnosis, received the procedure and are living healthy lives today. So yes, there are insurance companies that do approve this. My husband and I are middle class people. He has worked for the same company for 38 years and always thought his insurance would be there when he needed it for either of us. We are currently trying to figure out a way to finance this procedure out of our pockets. BCBSNJ needs to update their coverage!  Please sign my petition and share it. Ovarian Cancer is a devastating disease, but there are procedures that can eradicate it. Insurance companies should be in business to help save lives – not condemn women to a death sentence because of outdated policies!  PLEASE SHARE ....... GET THE WORD OUT AGAINST THESE INSURANCE COMPANY'S.... Thank you!  My friend Joyce started a Fundraiser to help pay for the HIPEC part of the surgery that the insurance wont cover ($35,000). Here is the link. Any thing will help and thank you for sharing this and if you helped with the Fundraiser.    https://www.gofundme.com/lifesaving-surgery-for-janine-may Dec 28, 2018 —  4:40 p.m. Thursday I am amazed that this petiton has had over 20,000 people sign it. This issue is something that stirs many people for one reason or  another. But the situation remains the same.. My good friend Janine is still taking chemo, still fighting for her life and is paying for this surgery and many other medical cost out of her pocket.. I started a GoFundMe campaign for her and to this date there has only been $3, 763 raised.. While I am very grateful for those  who have given (and those who continue to pray for her), that amount falls far short of what is needed. If everyone signed this petition gave just  $5, it would cover more than what has already been spent and keep helping with the ongoing medical expenses.. Please visit the GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/lifesaving-surgery-for-janine-may Thanks, Joyce Couts      

This petition is to each State Attorney General across our nation.   Pharmacy payment processors, the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), like CVS-Caremark, OptumRX, and Express Scripts began mandating patients use their self-operated mail-order system. Patients are finding their safe and preferred option; a local licensed pharmacy has been removed by insurance coverage to save cost. Today, forced mail-order pharmacy risks patients’ lives or adds unnecessary pain and suffering. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and The Justice Department have failed to protect us from the unfair practice of compelling patients to the PBMs’ forced mail-order system. Both of the institutions judged the merger’s effect against competition among other PBMs, never questioning how the merged entities’ actions will affect patients and their communities.  Therefore, patients, physicians, nursing staff, caregivers, and many healthcare professionals are demanding that the Attorney General in each state protect us from corporate abuse of our healthcare system. As health plans merge the suffering of patients is rarely considered.  Regulators cannot stop a merged PBM industry from putting profits before patients thereby disrupting a national healthcare system for the promise of a streamlined one. There are risks associated with medication through the mail.  Lifesaving medications are shipped by common carrier, bypassing the protections afforded by pharmacies and regulated by the Boards of Pharmacy in each state.  Patients are left without the options in their coverage to protect both drugs and disruption.  The medications that were once available in 30 minutes are now 5 to7 days away.  Emergencies are no longer perceived as such.  Currently, PBMs and their mail-order arm are causing life-saving medications and routine prescriptions to be unnecessarily subjected to being: ·         Lost ·         Stolen ·         Damaged ·         Shipped to the wrong address More importantly: A.      During shipping, indiscriminate packaging allows exposure to temperatures outside manufacturers’ safety standards.   B.       When received, no record of a drug reaching temperature threshold is available from the shipper.   C.       When confronting a mail order PBM one encounters blatant denial that patients’ medications could lose potency or be adulterated as stated in the United States Pharmacopeia.   D.      The important face-to-face interaction and consultation with a professional are diminished affecting, the elderly patient, impaired individuals, learning-disabled and non-English speaking patients.  WE BELIEVE LAWS PROTECT THIS GROUP   E.        Delay in discharges from institutions   F.        Increased Emergency Room frequency   G.      Treatments postponed or disrupted   H.      Interruptions in cyclical treatment, chemotherapy   Now we would like every state to consider these issues as a jurisdictional issue to protect the infirm by taking the following steps: Put an emergency government telephone, internet, and social media checkpoint in place to help when someone has registered a complaint with their PBM and is receiving unsatisfactory results. Require PBMs to track temperature oscillations from leaving their mailing point to the opening of the package at the final destination. Require an alternate method to supply drugs to the patient with lost, damaged or destroyed prescriptions in transit at the shipper’s expense. (This may be bought locally for the patient at retail or supplying chemotherapy or anti-rejection medicine directly from a hospital). Pay local pharmacies to remain open.  This is a problem mail order is creating, leaving towns and entire islands no ability no accessible Pharmacist. Promulgate rules and regulations so patients are never locked in or locked out of any pharmacy who meets the criteria to fill a prescription which includes covering drugs at PBM’s own gross professional price, including shipping.  Receiving emergency refills without question, when a PBM cannot or does not supply By signing and sharing you will save lives and reduce unnecessary pain and suffering. Thank you, Loretta Boesing  

If you worked around MILITARY RADAR EVER PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION: My name is Larry Francis. I am a Nike Ajax/Hercules radar system veteran. I worked on one like this one for 3 years and 2 months in the Navy. I am quite sick from my time in the Navy. I have found many studies that have been completed in the last 20 years that contradict the VA's assumption that large, long duration, repeated doses of microwave radiation from a military radar, like the Nike Radar system, has been proven to cause many diseases in humans. The largest study is listed at:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607572/ on the U.S. National Library of Medicine's website. This is one of our countries premier peer reviewed medical research study publishing organizations, where every medical study is rigorously screened by MD's and graduate degreed researchers for accuracy and experimental methodology and the researchers have to be well educated, to get their medical research studies published). It is a meta study and references 128 separate studies that affirm that large, repeated doses of microwave radiation are not only very harmful in many ways, but can be deadly. Also, please read Dr. Cherry's study also: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/24d0/17c463b7b8daaa7b8526cbf3f2e733a0168e.pdf  Please read this meta study and Dr. Cherry's study and change the regulations that the VA uses to decide disability claims for those of us many veterans that have worked on these radar systems and are suffering, have suffered and have died for simply wanting to serve our country. Right now our diseases are not being recognized as being caused by our service in the military and many deserving veterans are being abandoned by our country to suffer in poverty. There were over 2000 Nike Radar sites all over the world and 300 here in the United States with as many as half a million veterans who worked at these bases at any one time. We all have the same diseases.  This petition matters to me also, because I have 24 of the diseases that are listed in the 128 separate studies in the PMC5607572 study. Do you have depression, OCD, glaucoma, sleep apnea, thyroid issues, hearing issues (tinnitus), recurrent sinus infections, GERD, diabetic or pre-diabetic, pituitary gland issues, recurrent bronchitis, spinal issues (like having to has a laminectomy), due to the radar softening your bones, (osteomalacia), scarring of the lungs, or partial collapse of the lungs (bilaterial atelectasis), all of these cause recurrent bronchitis and sinus infections, the radar damages the Alveoli in the lungs, low testosterone, low sperm count, ED, degenerative skeletal disease, arthritis, and the list goes on. Think about this, the radar especially if your radar van was closer than 124 feet from the LOPAR and the HIPAR danger zone was even farther. Did you work on any of the radars, when they were up and running? The vans are made from magnesium and are not a Fadaday shield,  like in your microwave oven at home and therefore offered NO protection from the microwave radiation. Think about a job where you have your left hand in a hole in a microwave oven that comes on every 5 seconds for 1 second (the rotation rate most of the time for the LOPAR was 15 rotations a minute) and you kept your hand in that microwave oven all day, every day, 5 days a week for over three years. Do you really think at the end of the three years your left hand is going to be just like your right hand? No one with any common sense will believe that their left hand would have remained unchanged. But as you know the VA does not deal in common sense. Actually they do deal in common sense, their common sense, their common sense which is to save the US government money over your health a veteran. That is more important to them than you or me are. The VA's job is to provide cover for the sins of the DOD. Think, Atomic veterans, Agent Orange veterans, this is not the first time that the VA refuses to provide disability to veterans who have been in on a large scale hurt by what the DOD did to us and they are unwilling to admit it. Right now, the microwave radiation regulations at the VA (who makes those policies that are then turned in to USC code (administrative law)) are based on two 20 year old DOD studies that say there is no harmful effects of large power (the LOPAR antenna puts out 1 MILLION WATTS, your household microwave oven puts out 1000 watts of microwave radiation), short repeated duration, (LOPAR rotating) microwave radiation doses. That just defies both common sense, and the attached study above and the facts. There have already been over 200 Nike microwave radiation syndrome cases that have made it all the way to a VA law judges and have been turned down by the VA law judges (they have to do by the USC code). I am trying to get the US Code changed, just like for the Camp Lejune, Atomic vets and the Agent Orange vets did. This will take a congressional law to be passed. It will cost the federal government a lot of money, but right now there is a lot of positive sentiment to help veterans at the federal level. We will see if President Trump and Congress is willing to put their actions where there mouths are.           Larry Francis, PhD student, MPA, BAIS P.S. My PhD is in Public Administration, so I have a fair idea how this game is played. It is played with massive veteran social media support and it starts with this petition. Once I get 2000 signatures I will send it to every congressman that is on the VA disability committee and my senators and representatives and President Trump. I have their actual fax numbers. Please sign the petition and get every person you know to sign it. PLEASE FOR ALL OF US!!! P.S.S. I am working on the letter now.  

Thousands of people overdose in the US daily. Many do not survive. There are available treatments for substance use disorders such as methadone and suboxone, which have excellent outcomes. However, in many states, these medications and clinic required counseling are not covered by private insurance or Medicare or Medicaid. These are lifesaving medications and ability to afford them should not be a barrier to obtaining them. On these medications quality of life for the user and everyone around them improves.