The New York Times Sunday had this headline on this article: www.nytimes.com/…
While the government reported Friday that unemployment was at its lowest point in more than a decade, the health care industry has been an engine for much of that hiring, adding jobs at more than three times the rate of the rest of the economy since 2007.
Nor is the growth limited to hospitals. With help from the vast expansion of Medicaid enrollment that began three years ago, nursing homes, outpatient centers and medical labs have also grown, turning a fragmented industry into a strong political force.
I want to note that these are quotes fromthe article in this morning’s Times, but at least in New Orleans where I returned for six months after an absence of 18 years and after living in Massachusetts for the that period. I found that the city was flourishing. especially around the Ocshner hospitals and their branches. I found that the health care services offered were easy to access, comfortable. Waiting times were short. Certainly shorter than in Cambridge or Boston and seemed to me (no expert as to why) to be the result of sufficient personnel to handle each and every department and each patients’ care every step of the way. This results in these personal comforts for me. a. I go to the hemotology department for my check up (I have a rare but fairly mild bone marrow cancer, which, if treated will not endanger my longevity).
My appointment is for one hour before the doctor ( a cheerful young women named Laura Finn) sees me. I go straight to the lab across the lobby from the bone marrow center. I don’t have to wait longer than ten minutes. There are sufficient personnel, Phlebotomists and lab technicians so that everyone is served quickly. They take my blood and I go and sit in the waiting area for the bone marrow group. Often I wait with five or six people. The are Black, they are white, they are italian and Indian. They are clearly upper class whites, with that stature that forever in your family wealth gives you. They come only accompanied by a spouse or grown kid. Sometimes people come in wheelchairs and face masks, with caretakers. But note, not only the wealthy ones, also poor old people, black and white because, medicaid pays for that kind of caretaking.
I could give many examples from my own as I tend to do things like fall when I run, etc so I require stupid old lady care as well. But the next example is for my husband who fell off a ladder in our kitchen a month ago and of course wouldn’t go to the doctor until Sunday when he was in so much pain, well, suffice it to say, he finally told me he needed help. I had caught out of the corner of my eye a sign that said Appointments could be made for the ER with minimal waiting. I called( after we were told that the hospital my husband had gone to earlier in our stay had no such service and could nto even tell us the waiting time in the ER. But Ocshner was clear. This was a service for people who had a need for urgent care but not emergency care. We called and went and were taken in 25 minutes, and he was treated and released with a personally fitted brace after they determined that he had an intact fracture of two vertebrae.
I live the other half the year in Cambridge MA and go a variety of hospitals for one thing or another. In no case is the waiating time less than half and hour or forty five minutes and no one has the kind of efficiency i experienced in New Orleans.
Let me make my point clear for this sectioon of the diary. Full staffing means effective care. I am 75 and a half years old. i have never received the benefits of full staffing before in my life. That is the change that Obamacare has wrought. and wrought in a city that fate and rotten policy has bitch slapped over and over again in the past.
The Times article continues: Health Care Job gains Offset Manufacturing’s decline. In other words the health care Act was already doing what the orange hair promised to do.
Moreover, in a recovery plagued by uneven growth and widening income inequality, the sector has been a reliable source of steady gains. Health care now equals almost one-fifth of gross domestic product, up from 13 percent in 2000, and it is poised to leapfrog retailing and leisure and hospitality as the second-largest source of overall employment, after professional and business services, accounting for one in eight private sector jobs.
Furthermore, Loss of health insurance works like this. You lower subsidies for coverage, for example for the 1.8 million people who receive those subsidies in Florida alone, that cuts what they can pay for other goods and services.
I am nervous about taking large piece of text from the Times article but it is certainly worth a read. It concludes with the following.
Atlantic Health System in Morristown, N.J., which benefited from the expansion of Medicaid and the falling number of people without insurance, faces the possibility of losing $65 million a year in revenue.
The system’s chief executive, Brian Gragnolati, talked to his staff on Thursday about the possible impact of the House bill. “What I worry about in our organization is how are we going to lean into the changes we need to make while we have this uncertainty hanging there,” he said.
But Mr. Gragnolati also worried about the health bill’s potential effects on patients, some of whom have gained access to care for the first time. “What is going to happen here is when people don’t have access now to care, they will go back to the emergency departments for their primary care, waiting and waiting and waiting” to get a condition treated, Mr. Gragnolati said. “I just feel like we’re going back in time to a place where we were a decade ago. It’s an absolute shame.”