Universal Health Care...

[Loismustdie 0]

get everyone to take the money they spend on private health insurance now and send it to medicaid instead? Bill Maher's show talked at length last week about how Medicaid is better at keeping costs down than private insurance companies.

Lol... now there is a zealout for you. He's perfectly o.k. but Rush is somehow slanted?

[Nimue1995 1]

Lol... now there is a zealout for you. He's perfectly o.k. but Rush is somehow slanted?

Lol Maher may be slanted some but Rush is so slanted he's horizontal. ( JK but I couldn't resist)

[85suited 0]

you can have national health insurance...but as long as I am paying for you (I will have my own plan thank you)There are a few rulesYou must be with in your BMI - or your off the planyou must not smoke - or your off the planyou must not do drugs or your off the plan...nothing comes for free... oh wait..This is the government - Do what ever feels good...

[hblask 1]

Bill Maher's show talked at length last week about how Medicaid is better at keeping costs down than private insurance companies.

Bwah hah hah ha ha ha hahhaha ha aha hahaha ahhaaGood one! That's hilarious.(Well, it would be if they didn't flush so much of our money down the toilet).

[Jeepster80125 0]

get everyone to take the money they spend on private health insurance now and send it to medicaid instead? Bill Maher's show talked at length last week about how Medicaid is better at keeping costs down than private insurance companies.

Ask Dr Jeff (or any other docs who post here) how much they enjoys working with Medicaid, getting claims paid, reimbursement rates, etc, then decide if you want to stick to this reasoning that Medicaid is a better alternative to what we've got.

[hblask 1]

Ask Dr Jeff (or any other docs who post here) how much they enjoys working with Medicaid, getting claims paid, reimbursement rates, etc, then decide if you want to stick to this reasoning that Medicaid is a better alternative to what we've got.

I'm sure I've said this on here before, possibly in this thread, but Medicare/Medicaid is what drove my small-town family doctor out of business. He had always charged patients what they could afford, waived debts if necessary, and all with minimal paperwork. He was fine like this for decades.After he retired early, he wrote a book and basically said the paperwork requirements combined with the fact that he couldn't charge more or less than the federal government said was the correct price finally made it not profitable enough for him. This was a guy who had devoted his life to serving this community, and the federal government basically told him he was doing it wrong. So he quit.

[El Guapo 10]

I'm sure I've said this on here before, possibly in this thread, but Medicare/Medicaid is what drove my small-town family doctor out of business. He had always charged patients what they could afford, waived debts if necessary, and all with minimal paperwork. He was fine like this for decades.After he retired early, he wrote a book and basically said the paperwork requirements combined with the fact that he couldn't charge more or less than the federal government said was the correct price finally made it not profitable enough for him. This was a guy who had devoted his life to serving this community, and the federal government basically told him he was doing it wrong. So he quit.

Yes you have, and that is basically what I just posted. One of the doctors that my MIL works with has a Medical only clinic, he sees hundreds of patients a day, just him and one Physicians Assistant. On average he spends less than 5 minutes with each patient, and he will probably close his doors because he averages about $15 per patient on the claims that actually get paid.

[CaneBrain 96]

Ask Dr Jeff (or any other docs who post here) how much they enjoys working with Medicaid, getting claims paid, reimbursement rates, etc, then decide if you want to stick to this reasoning that Medicaid is a better alternative to what we've got.

one, I was just relaying what was talked about on a show.two, I have never met ANY doctor who thought ANY insurance company was good at the things talked about above.

[Jeepster80125 0]

A decent article on why healthcare isn't a right...Health Care is Not a Right [stephen Spruiell]I'm not sure what else Zach Wamp said to incur the wrath of the blue-blog zombies, but he is absolutely right about one thing: Health care is not a right, at least not according to the conception of rights upon which this country was founded. Your rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You may not be unjustly deprived of these things. Your rights do not include things that I or anyone else must be forced to provide for you, such as a home, a car, a job, or health care.It might or might not make sense for the government to help people obtain these things, but that's not the same thing as saying that we all have a right to them. It only takes a moment's thought to see why this is so. What is meant by people who say we all have a right to health care? Do they mean that we all have a right to any sort of treatment that modern medicine can provide, regardless of cost or necessity? Or do they mean that we all have a right to some basic level of care? If it's the latter, who decides where we will draw the line?Take a heavy drinker who develops cirrhosis. He desperately needs a liver transplant in order to survive. But there is a shortage of available livers, and there are many other patients in need. Does he have a right to receive a life-saving transplant, or has he given up his right? Let's say he has, and we deny him a transplant, but there are still not enough livers to save the deserving patients. How do we decide among them without arbitrarily depriving some of their right to health care?This is the problem we face when we shift from a negative to a positive conception of rights. We encounter shortages, we face tradeoffs, and at some point we have to make arbitrary decisions. When that happens — well, to quote William Munny, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."For some time now, the debate over how best to allocate scarce resources has been a settled matter. The market, with its system of price signals, is the most efficient way to direct resources to where they are most urgently needed. We need health-care reform that enables the market for health care to function more efficiently. Removing the distortion in the tax code that favors employer-based health insurance would be a good start.The last thing we need is public policy based around the idea that health care is a "right" to which we are all entitled. We've seen the results when other countries have adopted such policies: shortages, rationed care, higher taxes and a less innovative health-care sector — in short, a state of affairs that infringes on everyone's right to pursue the best care he or she can obtain.

[strategy 4]

not that this ordeal has changed my outlook on the issue at all, but I had an incident with acid reflux where I ended up at the hospital for a few hours to make sure I wasn't dying of a heart attack. I forget what the original bill was (I could search it, but won't) but basically I went through the official process of declaring my McIncome and giving them all of my financial/tax information. the adjusted bill? $1750. I'm going to offer a few hundred, otherwise I'll just argue for a payment schedule with a disgustingly low present value.

[hblask 1]

Here's a story which shows why central planning is such a disaster for health care in this country. What is the point of the FDA again? The FDA explicitly forbid a company from putting a warning on their package, but they can be sued for not having the warning. How in the f does that make sense? How much does this type of nonsense add to the cost of medicine in this country?--------------------------------------------------------------------http://reason.com/news/show/132307.htmlThe Supreme Court handed down its decision this month in the case of Wyeth v. Levine, ruling that federal law did not bar plaintiff Diana Levine from suing pharmaceutical maker Wyeth over allegedly insufficient drug safety warnings, even though the warnings had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This decision establishes the troubling precedent that a sympathetic jury can now supersede the expert opinions of the FDA on what qualifies as adequate safety labeling. Ultimately, that means drug firms face higher costs and greater uncertainty. Both are bad for patients.Levine lost an arm to gangrene after a physician's assistant injected the Wyeth drug Phenergan in such a way that it came into contact with oxygen-rich arterial blood. Although the drug's label explicitly warned that doing so poses a high risk of tissue damage, Levine claimed that the label should have instructed physicians not to use this intravenous "IV-push" method at all. A Vermont jury agreed, and awarded Levine $7.4 million, which the court reduced to $6.7 million.On appeal, Wyeth could not challenge the jury's fact finding, but argued that the FDA's extensive regulation of drug labeling should preclude claims of negligent failure to warn. The Supreme Court held, by a 6-3 majority, that federal law does not preempt Levine's claim.According to Justice John Paul Stevens' majority opinion, "The history of the [Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act] shows that Congress did not intend to preempt state-law failure-to-warn actions." Although true in a general sense, the Court failed to recognize that this is not a typical failure-to-warn case. As Justice Samuel Alito's dissenting opinion notes, Levine conceded that, in 1988, Wyeth proposed a label change that "if followed, would have prevented the inadvertent administration of Phenergan into an artery," but the FDA rejected that language. [story continued at link]

[strappazon 0]

I didn't read all the posts but i'm French and i live in France. It has been said many times that we have the best heatlh care system in the world, i don't know if that's true but i had an accident years ago : i spent 18 Months in hospital and had surgery about 20+ times. Without this system ii'd have paid 100,000 euros.So yes i support this system. More here if you're really sick you can go to the hospital (at the emergency service) and be cared for free Of course i pay taxes every month for that but i think it worth it.

[hblask 1]

i had an accident years ago : i spent 18 Months in hospital and had surgery about 20+ times. Without this system, if I'd been stupid enough to not buy catastrophic care insurance, i'd have paid 100,000 euros. Instead, I got more productive members of society to pay 150,000 Euros for 100,000 Euros worth of care. It was a great deal for me, and I don't have to think about the person who paid for this inefficiency.

FYP

[strappazon 0]

FYP

I pay an insurance every month. This + social security (that every employee has in France) means i didn't have too pay anything. If he US if you can't afford an insurance or something, you're fuked.Here even an homeless guy could go in an hospital for free. Believe what you want but i think anyone has the right to be cared.

[hblask 1]

I pay an insurance every month. This + social security (that every employee has in France) means i didn't have too pay anything. If he US if you can't afford an insurance or something, you're fuked.Here even an homeless guy could go in an hospital for free. Believe what you want but i think anyone has the right to be cared.

Fortunately, since we are less socialist than France, we have fewer homeless people, so it's less of a problem.Oh, and nobody who requires care and seeks care in the US is denied care. It doesn't happen. That's a myth created by people who want other people to give them something for free.But have fun with that rationed care. In the US we have higher standards, and wouldn't tolerate it.

[strappazon 0]

Well, for a 47 year old guy you should know that we didn't have any socialist president since the 80's. And i highly doubt that you have less homeless people than France.We are about 65 millions, you're like 300 millions. You're unemployement rate is the same as us, about 8.5 % and a lot of poeple lost their job in the last fews month."Since the recession started in December 2007, the economy has shed 4.4 million jobs, with more than half of that number lost in the last four months alone. A total of 12.5 million people were unemployed in February, the Labor Department said."http://www.boston.com/business/articles/20...bs_in_february/I don't pretend than France is better than the US, but you should get your fact straights before talking aobut think you don't know. More if you think that Obama and his descisions are full of shit, try to vote McCain next time. At least most Americans have been smart enough to vote Obama.

[vbnautilus 49]

Well, for a 47 year old guy you should know that we didn't have any socialist president since the 80's. And i highly doubt that you have less homeless people than France.We are about 65 millions, you're like 300 millions. You're unemployement rate is the same as us, about 8.5 % and a lot of poeple lost their job in the last fews month."Since the recession started in December 2007, the economy has shed 4.4 million jobs, with more than half of that number lost in the last four months alone. A total of 12.5 million people were unemployed in February, the Labor Department said."http://www.boston.com/business/articles/20...bs_in_february/I don't pretend than France is better than the US, but you should get your fact straights before talking aobut think you don't know. More if you think that Obama and his descisions are full of shit, try to vote McCain next time. At least most Americans have been smart enough to vote Obama.

Not in numbers, but by percentages we do have fewer homeless. By my calculation in the US its about 2 homeless per 1,000 population, while France seems to be over 3 homeless per thousand. But these numbers do not take into account recent events, so it may very well be closer now.

[Balloon guy 158]

Not in numbers, but by percentages we do have fewer homeless. By my calculation in the US its about 2 homeless per 1,000 population, while France seems to be over 3 homeless per thousand. But these numbers do not take into account recent events, so it may very well be closer now.

Would you rather have 10,000 homeless people as long as it's a lower percentage, or 1,000?andAt the recent Obama press conference, the reporter from Ebony said that 1 in 50 children in America are homeless... That's a lot of kids running the streets. I hope we can start up midnight backetball again to save them.

[vbnautilus 49]

Would you rather have 10,000 homeless people as long as it's a lower percentage, or 1,000?andAt the recent Obama press conference, the reporter from Ebony said that 1 in 50 children in America are homeless... That's a lot of kids running the streets. I hope we can start up midnight backetball again to save them.

I think you'd rather have as few as possible. But in order to meaningfully compare across countries you probably want to normalize by population size.

[hblask 1]

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/postrel-drugsIf I lived in New Zealand, I’d be dead.That’s the lead my editor wanted me to write, and I have to admit it’s great. Alas (for this column, at least), it’s not exactly true. But neither is it false. And the ways in which it’s partly true matter greatly, not just to me or to New Zealanders but to anyone who might get cancer or care about someone who does.The American health-care system may be a crazy mess, but it is the prime mover in the global ecology of medical treatment, creating the world’s biggest market for new drugs and devices. Even as we argue about whether or how our health-care system should change, most Americans take for granted our access to the best available cancer treatments—including the one that arguably saved my life.In mid-July 2007, after a routine mammogram, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. As cancer diagnoses go, mine wasn’t particularly scary. The affected area was small, and the surgeon seemed to think that a lumpectomy followed by radiation would eradicate the cancerous tissue. Surgery was scheduled for late August, allowing me to complete a planned move from Dallas to Los Angeles.Two days before the surgery, I went in for magnetic resonance imaging; the MRI would be used to place wires marking the cancer hot spot. On the day of my surgery, I showed up at the UCLA radiology department expecting a routine procedure to insert the wires. Instead, I got news that turned me cold and shaky. The scan had detected a large, completely distinct hot spot in another area of the breast. My prognosis had suddenly become less cheery.The post-surgery pathology report wasn’t reassuring. Although the tumor was indeed tiny—just seven millimeters across—cancer cells were all over the place; they had invaded my lymphovascular system and extended beyond the margins of both areas of surgically removed tissue. All six of the excised lymph nodes were malignant, a bad sign. The cancer also tested positive for a genetic trait called HER2, found in 20 to 25 percent of breast-cancer patients, which marked the cancer as particularly aggressive. Given the details of my case, with more surgery, traditional chemotherapy, and radiation, I had only a 50 percent chance of surviving.I was lucky, however. Those were no longer the only treatment options. Adding the biological drug Herceptin, approved by the FDA in 2006 for use in early-stage cancers like mine, could increase my survival odds from a coin flip to 95 percent.Starting in the late 1990s, oncologists had used Herceptin to extend the lives of patients whose HER2-positive cancers were advanced and metastatic, buying them months, and in some cases years, of life. Then, in May 2005, reports of clinical trials on patients with early-stage HER2-positive breast cancer electrified the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting. Herceptin halved the chances of cancer recurrence: from one in six to one in 12 after two years. No one knew what would happen after five or 10 years, but the preliminary results were, to quote a New England Journal of Medicine editorial, “stunning.”For breast cancer that hasn’t spread elsewhere in the body, Herceptin offers the possibility of a cure. It enhances chemotherapy, encourages the immune system to attack cancer cells, and hinders those cells from reproducing. A year of the drug, with one dose every three weeks (or, for some patients, along with weekly chemotherapy), is now the international standard of care for patients with cancers like mine. So, along with chemotherapy, another round of surgery, and seven and a half weeks of daily radiation, that’s what I got. The Herceptin treatments cost my insurer about $60,000. A year later, I have no evidence of disease and, though it’s still early, I have hope of staying that way indefinitely.Not everyone in similarly rich countries is so lucky—something to remember the next time you hear a call to “tame runaway medical spending.” Consider New Zealand. There, a government agency called Pharmac evaluates the efficacy of new drugs, decides which drugs are cost-effective, and negotiates the prices to be paid by the national health-care system. These functions are separate in most countries, but thanks to this integrated approach, Pharmac has indeed tamed the national drug budget. New Zealand spent $303 per capita on drugs in 2006, compared with $843 in the United States. Unfortunately for patients, Pharmac gets those impressive results by saying no to new treatments. New Zealand “is a good tourist destination, but options for cancer treatment are not so attractive there right now,” Richard Isaacs, an oncologist in Palmerston North, on New Zealand’s North Island, told me in October.A more centralized U.S. health-care system might reap some one-time administrative savings, but over the long term, cutting costs requires the kinds of controls that make Americans hate managed care. You have to deny patients some of the things they want, including cancer drugs that are promising but expensive. Policy wonks dream of objective technocrats (perhaps at the “independent institute to guide reviews and research on comparative effectiveness” proposed by Barack Obama) who will rationally “scrutinize new treatments for effectiveness,” as The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn puts it. But neither science nor liberal democracy works quite so neatly.In New Zealand, for example, Herceptin is a high-profile public issue. Until July 2007, Pharmac wouldn’t fund the drug for early-stage breast cancer. (It has covered the drug for the advanced disease since 2002.) In protest, activists filed lawsuits and sent petitions to Parliament. Pink-clad motorcycle riders circled the North Island in a “Bikers for Boobs” publicity stunt that got widespread attention. To pay for treatments, women who could do so have mortgaged their homes, dipped into their retirement savings, and held fund-raisers among their neighbors. Many have cut their treatments short to save money. “It’s not easy to sit down every three weeks and write a check out for four and a half thousand dollars,” says Chris Walsh, a breast-cancer activist who mortgaged her house to buy the drug, stopping after 15 doses rather than the usual 17.Eventually, Pharmac decided that Herceptin was worth paying for—but only for nine weeks, or three treatments. Rather than citing costs, the agency claimed to be following the science. It pointed to a small Finnish trial that showed positive results from a nine-week regimen. The government’s public statements also emphasized potential cardiac complications from Herceptin. In our October interview, Dr. Isaacs, the oncologist, complained that government spokesmen have been “really skewing the way that people perceive the information. If I had not known what I know and had only listened to the media releases of Pharmac after their last decision, I would have thought, ‘Thank goodness we’re only giving them nine weeks of this terrible drug.’”If a shorter treatment can achieve the same results, it makes sense to save money. Did the government have a reasonable case? Passions run high in New Zealand, so I asked a more distant source: John Glaspy, the director of the Women’s Cancers Program Area at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and my own oncologist. “The government of New Zealand is being accurate when they say that there is no convincing evidence that a year is better than nine weeks,” he said. But the Finnish study involved only a couple hundred patients, while the 12-month treatment trials included more than 13,000. The Finnish results thus are far less statistically certain. We know that a year works. With nine weeks, we’re guessing. “The scientific evidence supporting that it is equally good to do nine weeks compared to a year isn’t there,” says Glaspy.You can err on the side of patient safety or on the side of cost. New Zealand chose the latter. It just didn’t want to admit its priorities, preferring to conflate economic and medical questions. No public figure wants to seem heartless, after all.That surely accounts for the most damning inconsistency in New Zealand’s policy. When Pharmac was denying Herceptin to early-stage patients, it was fully funding the drug, without limitations, for women with advanced metastatic cancer, who are just buying time. A purely rational calculation would suggest the opposite course: letting patients with advanced cancer die while shifting the money to early-stage patients who, if treated, might survive for decades. But once a treatment has become standard practice, taking it away is hard.Contrary to the dreams of technocrats, in the real world, politics and emotion matter. In that sense, New Zealand’s resistance on Herceptin is unusual. Breast-cancer patients are numerous, organized, and highly visible. They usually get what they want. Four days after the U.S. election, New Zealand also held national elections that marked a political change. The Labour Party is out. The National Party is in—and it promised to fully fund Herceptin, bypassing the Pharmac process altogether. “Herceptin funding was a significant election issue,” wrote Libby Burgess, the chair of the Breast Cancer Aotearoa Coalition, in a post-election e-mail. (Aotearoa is the Maori word for New Zealand.) “We feel we have emerged into the light after three years of struggle.”New Zealand was a rare holdout. Most of Canada’s provinces approved Herceptin for early-stage patients within a few months of the May 2005 reports, much faster than the usual pattern. The same thing happened in the United Kingdom, where the health minister ordered the notoriously cheapskate National Health Service to cover Herceptin before the country’s cost-effectiveness bureaucrats had even issued a report. By contrast, kidney-cancer patients, who are less numerous and harder to treat, weren’t so fortunate. In August, those same bureaucrats, at the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, better known as NICE, turned down four new therapies for that disease, arguing that they cost too much.“They clearly got panic-stricken because there were four of them,” charges Gordon McVie, the former chief executive of Cancer Research UK and a senior consultant at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan. If all four drugs were available, a single kidney-cancer patient might run through the entire list, spending tens of thousands of pounds for each treatment. McVie, a prominent critic of the National Health Service’s approach to cancer care, still practices oncology one day a week in Bristol. When his English kidney-cancer patients need Sutent, one of the new drugs, he advises them to come to Milan for treatment. Patients have to cover their own drug bills, but they can buy Sutent more cheaply in Italy and don’t risk losing NHS coverage of the rest of their care.That sort of private payment, and the two-tiered medicine it implies, is becoming common in supposedly universal systems. Private infusion clinics have been springing up all over Canada, offering cancer drugs to patients who either can pay themselves or have private health insurance, usually through an employer, that will cover the cost. While several Canadian provinces have allowed such private payment, this “topping up” has been controversial in the U.K. Some regional authorities threatened to exclude patients from all NHS coverage if they pay private providers for pricey cancer drugs. (Despite its name, the NHS works through local authorities that don’t necessarily provide uniform coverage, creating what critics call a “postcode lottery.”)Going outside the system means two sets of doctors, making it harder to coordinate care. But allowing patients to buy drugs to be administered within the NHS would threaten the system’s egalitarian ideology. “Two patients with the same condition could find themselves lying next to each other on the same ward, yet receive very different treatments, not because that is what doctors advise, but because one person can afford to pay extra to top up their care while the other cannot,” Karen Jennings, the health chief for Unison, a public-employees union, wrote in a September op-ed. She warned that if such “co-payments are allowed, they will fast become the norm.” But kicking out patients who’ve paid taxes into the system, just because they spend their own money on cancer drugs, has become untenable.Sure enough, in early November the health ministry announced a new policy allowing NHS patients to “top up” payments. In a concession to egalitarian treatment, the new policy calls for patients to receive the drugs outside of NHS wards—little comfort to traditional socialists. “The decision to allow a two-tier NHS is undignified and divisive,” opined The Lancet. But the journal’s definition of dignity has proved incompatible with the country’s democracy. Citizens expect to be able to buy the drugs they need, and politicians respond to public pressure. As an oncologist writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine observes, “Consumerism and social solidarity do not sit comfortably together.”Looking at the crazy-quilt American system, you might imagine that someone somewhere has figured out how to deliver the best possible health care to everyone, at no charge to patients and minimal cost to the insurer or the public treasury. But nobody has. In a public system, trade-offs don’t go away; if anything, they get harder.The good thing about a decentralized, largely private system like ours is that health care constantly gets weighed against everything else in the economy. No single authority has to decide whether 15 percent or 20 percent or 25 percent is the “right” amount of GDP to spend on health care, just as no single authority has to decide how much to spend on food or clothing or entertainment. Different individuals and organizations can make different trade-offs. Centralized systems, by contrast, have one health budget. This treatment gets funded, and that one doesn’t.If I lived in New Zealand, I wouldn’t be dead, just a lot poorer. But if every place were like New Zealand, far fewer complex new drugs would get developed in the first place. And my odds of survival would be much, much lower.

[hblask 1]

I sure hope the government takes over all healthcare so we can get quality like this for only twice the price:-------------------------------------------(AP) Veterans Affairs officials say 16 patients exposed to contaminated equipment at its medical facilities have tested positive for viral infections, including hepatitis.VA spokeswoman Katie Roberts said Friday that 10 colonoscopy patients from the VA medical center in Murfreesboro, Tenn., tested positive for hepatitis. She said six patients from a VA clinic in Augusta, Ga., tested positive for unspecified viral infections.The number of reported infections could rise. Roberts says the department doesn't yet have results from most of more than 10,000 veterans warned to get blood tests because they could have been exposed to contamination. Patients at a medical center in Miami also were urged to get tested.All three sites failed to properly sterilize equipment between treatments."What if you had to worry about giving your wife AIDS?" said Wayne Craig, a 52-year-old U.S. Navy veteran who lives in Elora and had a colonoscopy at the VA's Alvin C. York Medical Center in Murfreesboro, near Nashville, about five years ago. "Why haven't I been notified within five years?"After the VA declined to answer repeated requests from The Associated Press during the past week about the results of what the department described as a nationwide procedure and training review that was to end March 14, Roberts said Thursday that the evaluation of the review was continuing.Roberts said she was confident that any other mistakes in operating endoscopic equipment at other VA facilities were corrected during the review. The VA has attributed the mistakes to human error.The review of all VA medical centers and outpatient clinics followed reports in February that the department discovered "improperly reprocessed" endoscopic equipment used for colonoscopies in Murfreesboro and ear, nose and throat exams in Augusta, Ga.Just this week, the VA acknowledged problems at a facility in Miami, too.Veteran Gary Simpson, 57, of Spring City had a colonoscopy at the Murfreesboro clinic in 2007. He said his blood has tested negative for HIV and hepatitis, but he's still worried because a nurse told him some diseases don't show up for seven years."He talks about it every day," said his wife, Janice. "It has really messed with him a lot. It is just too disturbing."Nashville lawyer Mike Sheppard said his firm is preparing to file claims on behalf of up to 15 colonoscopy patients, including several who have since tested positive for hepatitis B. He said an elderly man who had cancer when he had a colonoscopy died shortly afterward."We are investigating the death," Sheppard said.According to a VA e-mail, only about half of the Murfreesboro and Augusta patients notified by letter of a mistake that exposed them to "potentially infectious fluids" have requested appointments for follow-up blood tests offered by the department.In February, the VA said it sent letters offering the tests to about 6,400 patients who had colonoscopies between April 23, 2003, and Dec. 1, 2008, at Murfreesboro and to about 1,800 patients treated over 11 months last year at Augusta.The VA has now sent letters advising 3,260 patients who had colonoscopies between May 2004 and March 12 at the Miami Veterans Affairs Healthcare System that they also should get tests for HIV, hepatitis and other infectious diseases.That revelation prompted two Florida lawmakers to demand an investigation by the VA Office of Inspector General.Dr. Mark Rupp, president of the Society of Health Care Epidemiology of America, said the risk of infection following routine endoscopic procedures is 1 in every 1 million to 2 million procedures.Rupp, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said that "tracking is very difficult" and that hospitals are not required to report mistakes that expose patients to infectious diseases."The people in the hospitals are encouraged to report," Rupp said. "If there is any kind of outbreak usually the Public Health Service is notified."Roberts said the VA notified patients based on the installation date of equipment that was improperly operated.Janice Simpson said an employee in U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp's office in Chattanooga told her that the blood test notices sent to colonoscopy patients of the Murfreesboro clinic were timed to the date of a procedure on a patient with AIDS. A spokeswoman for Wamp said Simpson was mistaken.The VA did say in a March 19 e-mail to AP that at the VA's Murfreesboro colonoscopy facility "one of the tubes used for irrigation during the procedure had an incorrect valve." The statement also said "tubing attached to the scope was processed at the end of each day instead of between each patient as required by the manufacturer's instructions."The VA letter to Craig said he "could have been exposed to body fluids from a previous patient." Craig said his follow-up test did not show any infection.He said he thinks the VA was saving money by not cleaning the tubing between its use on each patient."What if this was a public hospital?" said Craig, who has six grandchildren. "There's no reason in the world a veteran can't file a suit against a veteran hospital the same as a public hospital. This is veterans you are talking about."

[Dagata 0]

I pay an insurance every month. This + social security (that every employee has in France) means i didn't have too pay anything. If he US if you can't afford an insurance or something, you're fuked.Here even an homeless guy could go in an hospital for free. Believe what you want but i think anyone has the right to be cared.

No no no no! God that is just ridiculous. Medicine is a product, health care is a service, I have as much of a right to health care, as I have a right to a brand new Aston Martin

[FCP Bob 1,322]

No no no no! God that is just ridiculous. Medicine is a product, health care is a service, I have as much of a right to health care, as I have a right to a brand new Aston Martin

That's the difference in philosophy right there.Every rich country in the World except the US has made the decision that as a society they feel that everybody has the right to a minimum level of healthcare and the majority of people in those countries are willing to pay through the tax system for it.There are pros and cons to both ways of viewing things and every country is faced with health care problems.

[hblask 1]

That's the difference in philosophy right there.Every rich country in the World except the US has made the decision that as a society they feel that everybody has the right to a minimum level of healthcare and the majority of people in those countries are willing to pay through the tax system for it.There are pros and cons to both ways of viewing things and every country is faced with health care problems.

Americans believe it is better to provide opportunity and let people take advantage of it rather than limit opportunity and have the government rescue the victims.The countries that have decided everyone deserves a minimum level of health care have also decided that there is a maximum level of health care, and prevents people from getting more unless they are willing to leave the country. The theory of universal care fails in practice, just like all central planning. The reality is that in socialized medicine, people in politically powerful and wealthy areas get decent care, while the poor and politically powerless get long waits and no access to care. Also, many specialties have extremely long waiting lists, so that only the rich can get rapid treatment by coming to the US.On the other hand, anyone in the US who needs treatment and seeks treatment from community and govt resources can get treatment. There are no cases of people in the US who could not afford care, have attempted to avail themselves of care through all available options, and were unable to get care.Reality matters.

[Jeepster80125 0]

That's the difference in philosophy right there.Every rich country in the World except the US has made the decision that as a society they feel that everybody has the right to a minimum level of healthcare and the majority of people in those countries are willing to pay through the tax system for it.There are pros and cons to both ways of viewing things and every country is faced with health care problems.

We do have a minimum level of healthcare. It's called welfare. Also, EMTALA.You act like there are constant stories of people needing care and not having access to it, and you know it's an incorrect opinion.