Posts from — August 2009

CNN is starting to get the message by presenting articles like this: Nurses offer tips for surviving a hospital stay. One of the highlight points is: “Medical errors kill up to 98,000 U.S. hospital patients a year.”

There are a few things I would add:

With a black marker, write your name and type of surgery on your body before they put you under, and include blood type and any major drug allergies. [suggested by a professor at a major medical school]

Displaying the card of a well-known malpractice attorney on your side table wouldn’t hurt.

Don’t depend on doctors or nurses remembering anything about you or your case, especially your chronic diseases or problems.

Keep your own medical history, including all diseases and surgeries, medications, allergies, etc. and take it with you if you are hospitalized. The hospital records are usually crap. Also verify that the ID band they put on your wrist is actually you. Be extremely careful if you have a common name, or a large family in the area.

Keep in mind that medicine is a business and one of the few for which you are expected to pay, even if the work is worthless. If a plumber doesn’t fix the leak, s/he doesn’t get paid, but doctors expect their money even if the “customer” dies.

CBS is starting to do some reporting, well, Stephanie Condon at CBS is anyway. She has two pieces up today. In 10 Health Care Reform Myths, she covers some of the obvious lies and distortions, as well as a few misunderstandings about what is actually in the House bill.

Then she lets a Republican Senator make a fool of himself in Grassley: “Obama-Care” Wouldn’t Help Kennedy. She refers to her previous article on “Myths” to show Grassley repeating some of them.

I would point out to Senator Grassley, that the Queen Mum wasn’t denied care in Britain, nor was Baroness Thatcher when they had problems at a rather advanced ages. Somehow Henry Allingham made it to 113, and died as the oldest man on the planet, and the last founding member of both the Royal Navy Air Service and the Royal Air Force. Not being wealthy, Mr. Allingham received his care from the National Health Service of Britain, just like the members of Parliament.

I would note that Senator Kennedy’s health insurance is paid for by the taxpayers, just like yours, so your complaint is doubly stupid, which is not exactly a new situation for you.

The BBC reports that Murdoch signals end of free news:

News Corp is set to start charging online customers for news content across all its websites.
…

Mr Murdoch said he was “satisfied” that the company could produce “significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content”.

“The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution,” he added.

“But it has not made content free. Accordingly, we intend to charge for all our news websites. I believe that if we are successful, we will be followed by other media.

“Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting,” he said.

In order to stop readers from moving to the huge number of free news websites, Mr Murdoch said News Corp would simply make its content “better and differentiate it from other people”

Well, yes, if you have a good product, people might want it. They also might advertise at good media outlets, but given News Corp’s track record in the media business I can confidently predict bigger losses for their on-line sites as people stop visiting and the ad revenue drops as a result.

Good reporting sells newspapers. If media owners had concentrated on good reporting, instead of their stock price and profit margin, and had stopped mortgaging everything they own, driving up their interest expenses, they just might have gotten a good return on investment for generations, instead of the spike of obscene profits followed the the bankruptcy many are now facing.

To Steve Bates of the Yellow Something Something and NTodd of Dohiyi Mir!

Jack, the Grumpy Forester, has an interesting concept for dealing with a problem as annoying as mosquito bites. It just needs to clear possible copyright problems, and deal with the concerns about making this situation worse.

On balance, I think the benefits outweigh the possible costs.

Some good news for Lilooet. The fire crews took advantage of favorable conditions on Tuesday to light backfires and clear the fuel away between the Mount McLean fire and the town which has created a large fire break. The fire is still classified as uncontained.

The Terrace Mountain fire was 90% contained until high winds blew it beyond a fire break, threatening local communities, so the battle continues as they wait for improving weather conditions.

The BC Fire Map shows more new fires caused by lightning strikes in the tinder-dry forests.

Since we already have to deal with the Hyde Amendment in the health care debate, I want a Jekyll Amendment that prohibits any Federal moneys being spent on treatment for “erectile dysfunction”.

I’m sick of having to delete the spam from the jerks who are selling it, or the stupid ads that my Mother complains about. I doubt the condition actually exists outside of the minds of a pharmaceutical marketing department, and the pathetic hopes of some losers.

[BTW, Hyde was the crazy one. 😈 ]

Well, they have to make enough money to pay their fines.

Via Cookie Jill at skippy’s you arrive at Government Dirt which has a list of the Top 20 Largest Cases of Companies Caught For Committing Fraud Against the Government.

The settlements, understand that these are the ones that got caught, range from $900 million for number 1 down to $152 million for number 20. The fun part of this list is that there is only one state fraud case, Bank of America caught acting badly in California to the tune of $187.5 million, and that is also the only case that does not involve a health care provider or pharmaceutical company.

When the health care reform was being discussed, the people who were guaranteed access were this collection of criminals. If they were people instead of corporations they would be in prison, not in the White House and Congressional meeting rooms.

The last two days a number of people have noted how slow the ‘Net seems to be. Part of the problem might be the recent spike in comment spamming. I’ve been deleting hundreds of them recently which is transparent to readers but a PITA.

This crap burns up bandwidth for no purpose, as they won’t get a link.

If you have a comment go missing, you may have used one of “bad words” which are generally pharmaceuticals, or a perverse Japanese cartoon form. I normally check for spam errors, but the last two days there have been dozens of pages of this crap, so I just hit the delete all button.

Sorry if you got caught in this mess, but life is too short to even scan this drivel.

Happy Birthday to Helen Thomas, who is 89 today. Ms Thomas is one of a dying breed, a reporter who actually asks real questions and calls out lies.

Someone else, who might have been born in Louisiana, could also have a birthday today, but you can’t be sure. [How do they reconcile this controversy with the claim that life begins at conception?]

Who you gonna call? The Big Dog if you need something done. Bill Clinton dropped by North Korea, and the two correspondents of Current TV are pardoned. The process is known as diplomacy, but the Republicans will complain that he only got sent because of his wife. [hint: Plame] Of course, it might be that Bill used the same procedure during his administration and asked Jimmy Carter to stop by North Korea, which was also a success.

Atrios highlighted this nonsense.

Arthur Laffer on CNN:

If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they’re run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government.

This is THE Arthur Laffer of the “Laffer Curve”, the most famous cocktail napkin in US politics. This is the brain power behind “supply side economics”, the foundation of RepubliCon policy since the administration of Reagan.

First off, let me say that he obviously is unaware that the DMV is a function of state government, and, therefore, comes in a minimum of 50 different flavors. In Florida you generally deal with the state on drivers’ licenses, normally by mail. The license plates are issued by the individual counties, and in Okaloosa County I can walk a block to the local office, mail in the renewal, or click on the ‘Net site.

Would anyone dislike that experience more than trying to get Kaiser Permanente to pay when the EMTs take you to the “wrong hospital”?

[Read more →]

So I’m trying to drum up some enthusiasm for Medicare-for-All and I keep running into the same stupidity. If you are local and got into Jeff Miller’s [the local Congresscritter] conference call, you heard it.

You have people who are on Medicare saying they don’t want “the government” involved in making medical decisions, because medical decisions shouldn’t be made by “government bureaucrats”, and ignoring the inconsistency in that statement, they go on to say that government programs shouldn’t pay for abortions.

The last time I checked, abortion was a medical procedure, and doctors and patients should be making those decisions, not Congress.

So, I have learned that people don’t seem to understand that Medicare is a government health insurance program, and that bureaucrats shouldn’t be involved in making medical decisions, unless some people don’t like the decision that some people might make.

The justification for the abortion ban is that people shouldn’t have to pay for procedures they are opposed to. Excuse me, but I don’t approve of abstinence only sex education, the Office of Faith-based initiatives, the Osprey, and a lot of other things, but somehow I didn’t get to make that choice. This is an insurance policy, just like auto insurance. I pay my premiums but don’t get to say I don’t want the company to insure gas-guzzling SUVs, even though some of the money I pay may be used to fix them after rollovers.

Well, not without a bit of help as Okanogen at Corrente noted in Death by Math.

S/he is a bit prescient as today on All Things Considered they asked the question: Are Insurers’ Profits As Low As They Claim?

The answer is yes and no because the insurance companies used that marvelous symbol, %, to tell their tale of woe. Their claim is that health insurance company profits are only 1% of the cost of health care in the US. That is probably close, but they fail to note that insurance companies only fund approximately 35% of the actual health care that people receive.

The ATC article notes that using the standard methods for determining profits, the difference between income and expenses, the health care insurance companies make profits between 2 and 10%, nor is it explained that in the expenses there are megabuck executive salaries and perquisites, marketing costs, and all of the other things that they spend money on other than paying for actual health care for policy holders. In the corporate world there is no difference between the money spent on a pacemaker, and the annual dues at a country club for the CEO, they are just expenses.

The USGS is showing a series of quakes in the Gulf of California/Mar de Cortés between Santa Isabel, Baja and La Doce, Sonora, around the North-South midpoint of the Gulf.

It started at 12:55:23 with a 5.8, then the big one at 12:59:56 6.9, at 13:33:34 5.0, and at 13:40:50 a 5.9 6.2. [Times are in CDT, subtract 2 hours for local time, PDT]

The San Andreas has been grumbling for a while, indicating that there is definite stress in the area.

No reports of damage, but there aren’t a lot of people in the area, and communications are not always the best when nothing is happening.

Update: the last quake was upgraded from 5.9 to 6.2 and is deeper than the three earlier events.