Why American Medical Care is better than the UK's National Health Service

Feb 10, 2009 - * PUBLIC POST * Since I'm home this morning I'm scanning some headlines, and when you follow a link from a link, etc., sometimes you run into some interesting stuff. I stumbled across this sad story, and I honestly believe this would not have happened in the US. Yes, we know that American medical care is expensive, in part because they run a lot of "unnecessary" tests. - 7 Comments

Obamacare...a personal look.

Oct 25, 2009 - I am going to give you my personal look at Obamacare from a perspective which may seem a bit strange but in reality it should be alarming.  The interesting thing is that most of all of my childhood I went without even some of the basic things people assume most everyone has.   The only healthcare I had as a child was Medi-cal...which is the program upon which Obamacare was designed.     My father worked several part-time jobs as well as his full-time job as a Baptist minister.  He did everything possible to provide for us, worked his fingers to the bone and still managed to comfort the people in our church and help them deal with their own problems.  Not once did any congregation we served bother to possibly consider that making sure the minister and his family had any healthcare or even some of the basic necessities in life was one of their priorities. They did however call at any time of the day or night for his help and he was there for them.    Sometimes our whole family was there for them.  I was a very experienced babysitter, cook, and housekeeper before I was even 11.  This is not bitterness I speak from---it is my attempt at revealing to you that many who are among the uninsured are hardworking people often working in service-oriented positions which simply aren't offered healthcare.   So....let me get back to Medi-cal......the mentor of Obamacare.  When I hear people on the Obamacare bandwagon I think they probably don't really understand what they are supporting.   Many have never been on medi-cal. - 4 Comments

From The New York Times health section

Dec 15, 2008 - DOCTOR AND PATIENT Where Have All the Doctors Gone? By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D. - 14 Comments

medical innovation and health care costs

Oct 01, 2009 - Does High-Tech Medicine Mean Higher Health Care Costs? A new report finds that medical innovation boosts life expectancy, but doesn't cost more Ronald Bailey | September 29, 2009 "About half of all growth in health care spending in the past several decades was associated with changes in medical care made possible by advances in technology," declared a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report last year. "Health care economists attribute about 50 percent of the annual increase of health costs to new technologies or to the intensified use of old ones," writes bioethicist Daniel Callahan in his new book, Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System. - 3 Comments

U.S. Fears Iraq Won't Keep Up Rebuilt Projects

Nov 21, 2009 - BAGHDAD — In its largest reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan, the United States government has spent $53 billion for relief and reconstruction in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, building tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges. But there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people. The projects run the gamut — from a cutting-edge, $270 million water treatment plant in Nasiriya that works at a fraction of its intended capacity because it is too sophisticated for Iraqi workers to operate, to a farmers’ market that farmers cannot decide how to share, to a large American hospital closed immediately after it was handed over to Iraq because the government was unable to supply it with equipment, a medical staff or electricity. - 11 Comments

Mary Landrieu sold her vote on health care for $100 million it appears.

Nov 20, 2009 - ABC News' Jonathan Karl reports: What does it take to get a wavering senator to vote for health care reform? Here’s a case study. On page 432 of the Reid bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for “certain states recovering from a major disaster.” The section spends two pages defining which “states” would qualify, saying, among other things, that it would be states that “during the preceding 7 fiscal years” have been declared a “major disaster area.” I am told the section applies to exactly one state: Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill. - 2 Comments