This is generally how my morning goes.
I get up. I make the coffee. Brush the teeth. Turn on the Computer. Turn on CSPAN.
Then my dear friend, the surgeon and oncologist calls. By the way, you will finally meet him at YearlyKos. He has agreed to be on the health policy panel.
Register for YKos here: http://www.yearlykosconvention.org/
This saint doctor calls me just about every morning. We talk as he drives to the hospital. We discuss many things, including his professional life. Then the conversation quickly veers into a catalogue of healthcare and insurance atrocities. A seemingly endless saga of insurance company denials, patients with no insurance, and a litany of human tragedies.
Then we puzzle over yet another atrocity in our collapsed system, all those patients who are underinsured. This encompasses just about everyone. Will a certain test, medication or chemotherapy even be covered? Unlikely. He repeats like a mantra that insurance companies across the America are practicing medicine without a license. This is a crime, he reminds me. In the United States insurance companies, with an eye on the bottom line, make the life and death decisions, not the doctors.
It's all pornography, direct from our for-profit healthcare system.
This is what he and all our hero doctors confront every minute of every day.
He receives a call from the hospital and our conversation ends--quickly.
Then I start to read.
I spend my mornings from around 6-9AM reading pornography.
After reading this x-rated material day-in-and-day-out for years now, I have several reactions.
Some days, paralysis sets in, that's usually why you don't hear from me. I simply don't know how to transmit my anger any longer.
The do-nothing political class is all to happy to keep kicking the ball down the field.
Other days, I want to cry. The pain, suffering and death. It's so toxic and lethal--and where is the critical mass? Without an immense show of force from the American people, there will not be any far-reaching healthcare reform.
I take it all very personally. I suppose it's become a crusade for me.
Join me for a moment at my computer and take a look at some pornography.
This is big time AMERICAN PORNOGRAPHY.
CANCELLED:
Health protection yanked:
Jessica Bath claims Blue Shield scoured for reasons to drop her and her son because he needed costly care; the firm says mom left out medical issue on application
Four months after her first son, Jack, was born, Jessica Bath received a letter from her health insurance company, Blue Shield of California, saying she and Jack were no longer covered. Jack was born at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center on April 8, 2003, with a hole in his heart. Bath was counting on Blue Shield to pay for a scheduled surgery to repair it.
Suddenly, both she and Jack were uninsured.
"It was absolutely devastating for us," Bath said. "How were we going to pay for his heart surgery?"
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/...
Here's what happens if you own a small business and God forbid one of your employees gets sick and files an insurance claim.
WORK HARD, AND SAY WHAT, PLAY BY THE RULES?
To understand the challenges of insuring the health of the nation’s work force, consider Varney’s Book Store.
A Portrait of the Working Insured After a long bout with emphysema an employee at Varney’s, a family-owned business in Manhattan, Kan., died several years ago. But for Varney’s health insurer, her legacy lived on.
The next year, 2002, the insurer raised Varney’s premiums by 28 percent — even though most of the other three dozen employees were significantly younger and healthier than their departed colleague, who had been in her mid-70’s. And Varney’s premiums continued to climb.
. . .Such are the challenges for smaller businesses in Kansas and the many other states where laws permit insurers to raise health premiums substantially for small employers when one worker incurs significant medical bills.
And it is why, as state legislatures, Congress and presidential candidates of all stripes debate the growing problem of Americans without health insurance, the struggles of small businesses — which employ about 40 percent of the nation’s work force — are likely to become a central issue. Small-business employees are one of the fastest-growing segments of the nation’s 44 million uninsured; they now represent at least 20 percent of the total, according to federal census data. And even modest-size employers like Varney’s that say they remain committed to providing benefits find themselves wondering how long they can continue.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Let me resurrect the Hillary Clinton quote here, so everyone will remember the deluxe health benefits our public servants give themselves.
Kathy Byars:
Why do members of Congress get the Mercedes of insurance plans and pension plans while many of their constituents are just trying to pay for the basic necessities?
Clinton:
I believe that one of the ways we can get health care for everyone is to open up the federal plan that's available to members of Congress ... to everybody. That would be one way that we could say to you that you have the same right as anybody in Congress
I think it is past time for the Congress to do for everybody else what we do for ourselves.
I believe we can no longer continue with Cadillac policies for people in Congress unless we give other people in America the same policies.
Now this is real pornography. American citizens literally begging lawmakers for access to affordable healthcare after their children die.
Tamika Scott, and 48 million Americans wants to know why the American people don't even have Ford coverage?
MURDER BY SPREADSHEET
Plights of uninsured stir efforts to sway lawmakers
WASHINGTON — Tamika Scott lost her 14-year-old son to cancer on March 1, less than a year after he lost his health insurance and was forced to go on clinical trials.
Within a month of his death, Scott was in the nation's capital telling her story to members of Congress. It was too late to help her son, Devante Johnson, but not the nation's 47 million uninsured, including 9 million children.
"When it touches home, everything changes," says Scott, 34, of Houston. "Then you're ready to change the world."
As Congress and state legislatures grapple this year with how to help the uninsured, lawmakers are increasingly hearing not only from lobbyists and health care advocates but from people who have suffered without insurance.
They are people like Alyce Driver of Maryland, whose 12-year-old son Deamonte died in February from an infection that spread from his tooth to his brain. People like Camilla Tecsy of New York, also 12, who lost health insurance for several months while battling cystic fibrosis. People like Mekeal Cusic of Mississippi, who couldn't get coverage for her 10-year-old daughter Keyonna because of intestinal problems suffered three years ago.
All have been to Washington this spring to personalize an otherwise complex financial issue. "There are heart-wrenching stories that really do rip your heart out," says Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del.
http://www.usatoday.com/...
FOLLOW THE MONEY . . .
K Street just can’t get enough Democrats
Demand for top-flight Democratic lobbyists is outpacing supply, leaving trade groups, associations and firms with holes on their staffs as they try to make inroads to the new majority.
Corporations and other lobbying groups already have shifted their political donations to Democrats, a popular way to make friends on Capitol Hill. But some are finding that the pool of Democratic lobbyists with ties to the key members is running dry.
. . .The changeover in control of Congress has sparked the demand for Democrats after years in which the best jobs on K Street went to Republicans, who until recently controlled the House, Senate and White House.
. . .For Republicans who are looking to move, the market isn’t nearly as hot. But they are still finding work. Adler said aides who specialize in tax or healthcare policy are sought regardless of party.
http://thehill.com/...
And to say this is but the tiniest tip of an iceberg of horrors is the biggest understatement of the last hundred years.
I'll leave you with the dire reflections of Dr. Atul Gewande. Dr. Gewande is a general surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a New Yorker staff writer. He is a guest columnist this month on the editorial page of the New York Times.
Dr. Gewande likens the American healthcare system to a patient who has waited to long to seek treatment. As patient who has waited until . . .it is too late.
You can read his entire bleak assessment for free at this link.
http://greenpagan.blogspot.com/...
AMERICAN PORNOGRAPHY
Can This Patient Be Saved?
As a surgeon, I’ve seen some pretty large tumors. I’ve excised fist-size thyroid cancers from people’s necks and abdominal masses bigger than your head. When I do, this is what almost invariably happens: the anesthesiologist puts the patient to sleep, the nurse unsnaps the gown, everyone takes a sharp breath, and someone blurts out, "How could someone let that thing get so huge?"
I try to describe how slowly and imperceptibly it grew. But staring at the beast it has become, no one buys the explanation. Even the patients are mystified. One day they looked in the mirror, they’ll say, and the mass seemed to have ballooned overnight. It hadn’t, of course. Usually, it’s been growing — and, worse, sometimes spreading — for years.
. . .It’s as true of societies as of individuals. We did not muster the will to reform our long-broken banking system, for example, until it actually collapsed in the Great Depression.
This is, in a nutshell, the trouble with our health care crisis. Our health care system has eroded badly, but it has not collapsed. So we do nothing.
http://greenpagan.blogspot.com/...
This is the American healthcare system. It's pornographic.