Tag Archives: healthcare

Hospital imitates Monty Python sketch

There’s a story in the news about a woman who dropped dead in the waiting room of a hospital. She slid off the chair and ended up face down in the corner of the room. Nobody else in the room did anything. It was 45 minutes until another patient drew attention to the corpse. There’s video.

Maybe I’m fooling myself, but I’d like to think I’d have at least called out "Hey, you in the corner, face down on the floor, are you OK?"  And maybe if there hadn’t been a response I’d have, oh, perhaps got off my ass for a couple of minutes and found someone appropriate to inform about the situation.

Then again, it was the psych ward. Maybe things work differently there.

Google Health has launched

From the contract you have to agree to:

When you provide your information through Google Health, you give Google a license to use and distribute it in connection with Google Health and other Google services. However, Google may only use health information you provide as permitted by the Google Health Privacy Policy, your Sharing Authorization, and applicable law. Google is not a "covered entity" under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and the regulations promulgated thereunder ("HIPAA"). As a result, HIPAA does not apply to the transmission of health information by Google to any third party.

And it’s still solving the wrong problem.

USA! #1!

The Observer:

A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population — the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit’s streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.

Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages.

Even families with two working parents are often one slice of bad luck – a medical bill or factory closure – away from disaster. The minimum wage of $5.15 (£2.95) an hour has not risen since 1997 and, adjusted for inflation, is at its lowest since 1956. The gap between the haves and the have-nots looms wider than ever. Faced with rising poverty rates, Bush’s trillion-dollar federal budget recently raised massive amounts of defence spending for the war in Iraq and slashed billions from welfare programmes.

[...]

Dealing with poverty is not a viable political issue in America. It jars with a cultural sense that the poor bring things upon themselves and that every American is born with the same chances in life. It also runs counter to the strong anti-government current in modern American politics.

c.f. The Onion, which makes the same point rather more briefly.

I want to believe

They say John Kerry is a master of debating skills. I believe it. I know he is, because watching the first presidential debate I actually found myself wanting to believe him, to trust him. He said some great things, and for a moment I actually believed that he might act on his promises.

And then I remembered the well-documented lies and U-turns that have made up his career, and I thought “No, you can’t believe him. I know you want to believe that he really thinks the Iraq war is wrong, I know you want to believe that he’ll pull us out of it…but dammit, that’s only been his clearly articulated position since last week.” Before that, of course, his position was that it was quite legitimate for the USA to invade a country that presented no threat to it, on the grounds that it might one day be a threat. Yes, Kerry felt it was a perfectly acceptable war—he just felt he’d have done a better job of it than Bush.

But that position failed to resonate with anyone who might actually vote for him, so like so many times in the past, Kerry slowly shifted to something more popular. Which is why I can’t let myself believe anything that comes out of his mouth; it’ll be as big a disappointment as Bill “NAFTA and no healthcare” Clinton.

Of course, I’d still have to hold my nose and vote for him, because Bush has been a colossal fuck-up on every level, is promising more of the same, and means it. I’ll take someone who might potentially do almost anything, over someone I know for sure will do the wrong thing. If you have to play Russian Roulette, play it with a revolver, not a shotgun.

But of course, that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Every time the DNC supporters accost me in the street, it’s all I can do to avoid subjecting them to a lengthy rant which wouldn’t do any good. And it doesn’t make any difference anyway, because there’s no democracy here, I can’t vote.

Failures of the Free Market: US healthcare

One of the things that continues to amaze me about the US is that Americans seem to believe they have the best healthcare in the world.

Truth is, Americans have the most expensive healthcare in the world. A few of them have excellent healthcare, but most get the kind of treatment you’d get in a third world nation.

Bloated, blue-collar Americans—gorged on diets of fries and burgers, but denied their share of US riches—are bringing the nation’s steady rise in life expectancy to a halt.

Twenty years ago, the US, the richest nation on the planet, led the world’s longevity league. Today, American women rank 19th, while males can manage only 28th place, alongside men from Brunei.

These figures are blamed by researchers on two key factors: obesity, and inequality of health care. A man born in a poor area of Washington can have a life expectancy that is 40 years less than a woman in a prosperous neighbourhood only a few blocks away, for example.

[...]

In another newly published paper, statisticians at Boston College reveal that in France, Japan and Switzerland, men and women aged 65 now live several years longer than they do in the US. Indeed, America only just scrapes above Mexico and most East European nations.

This decline is astonishing given America’s wealth. Not only is it the richest nation, it devotes more gross domestic product ? 13 per cent ? to health care than any other developed nation.

[...]

When the Boston College group compared men and women in America’s top 10 per cent wage bracket with those in the bottom 10 per cent, they found the former group earned 17 times more than the latter. In Japan, Switzerland and Norway, this ratio is only five to one.

Jacobs and Morone state: ’Check-ups, screenings and vaccinations save lives, improve well-being, and are shockingly uneven [in America]. Well-insured people get assigned hospital beds; the uninsured get patched up and sent back to the streets.’ For poor Americans, health service provision is little better than that in third world nations. ’People die younger in Harlem than in Bangladesh,’ report Jacobs and Morone.

—The Observer

This, to me, is another excellent example of the free market failing to do the job. We have a free market in insurance, choice of doctors, choice of drugs, choice of healthcare providers, and people pay their own way—so by the magic of the invisible hand, America should have the cheapest, most efficient universal healthcare in the world, yes? Much better than those state-run bureaucratic socialized European healthcare systems, certainly.

Yet, the reverse is true. America has worse healthcare and pays more for it.

Telephone survey

I took part in a telephone survey the other night. It was someone calling on behalf of BU, getting opinions on medical care and medical coverage in Massachusetts.

I found myself wanting to lie when answering the questions. I’m very aware that as someone with full medical coverage from one of the top HMOs in the country, able to visit the top rated doctors in the state and not worry about money, I’m in an extremely rare position. I hope I didn’t skew the results too much towards “Everything’s just fine”.

Socialist libertarians

The familiar right-wing libertarians stand for individual liberty over collective liberties.

Socialist libertarians stand for collective liberties at the expense of individual liberty.

In case you haven’t noticed, individual and collective liberties often conflict. So the left/right part of the libertarian spectrum depends upon which you think are more important.

For instance, if you would ultimately favor the individual liberty to not pay tax over the collective liberty to get healthcare, you’re a step to the right. If you favor the collective liberty to walk the streets in safety over the individual liberty of anyone being allowed to own a machine gun, you’re a step to the left. If you favor liberty of individual expression over the collective liberty of other people to be able to walk down the street without having their kids exposed to pornographic and violent imagery, you take a step to the right.

(Now, some will no doubt claim that some of these particular examples are false dichotomies; that’s not really the point. The point is, if you fill in your own chosen examples of clashing collective vs individual liberties, which set of liberties you would more often give up?)

It’s tempting to use the word “selfish” to describe the difference more clearly; it wouldn’t entirely be baiting, as followers of Ayn Rand over at the right end of the libertarian spectrum seem to be quite proud to describe themselves that way.

I originally posted this to Usenet. Naturally, a right-wing libertarian immediately followed up stating that there were no left-wing libertarians, by definition.

It’s interesting that while left-libertarians readily acknowledge the existence of right-libertarians, the reverse is not true. Not so long ago, ideological purity was the obsession of left-wing politics, much to its detriment; now it seems that right-wing politics is following the same pattern. I have to wonder how much more luck the libertarian party would have if it could actually unite and be representative of the entire spectrum of libertarian views. It would certainly appeal to me more than the current image of tinfoil-hat-wearing wingnuts with blue faces.