Category: Health Care

Here’s the big fucking deal:

Decline of the empire is unimpressed by “a rounding error in the right direction:”

Although the bill solves most of the coverage problem, it accounts for a mere fraction of the cost problem. A report by the centrist policy group Third Way estimated that the Senate legislation would save more than $800 billion over the next 15 years. That’s consistent with the CBO’s expectation that the Senate legislation and the reconciliation fixes would save more than a trillion dollars over the next 20 years.

…. But the savings amount to no more than a rounding error given the tens of trillions of dollars we’re going to spend over that period. It’s half of 1 percent of expected GDP.

Never mind all the dead babies.

Also, never mind the phrase “expected GDP.”  So, yeah, big fucking deal.

My friend died on Sunday. She was 71. Had she been one of the wealthiest she would have lived longer. She was the mother of my Godmother, and I will miss her.

I share this with you for a reason. I loved her, my godfamily mourns her today, the funeral is tomorrow. Our family loved her, and her family worked hard for what they have in the world and did all they could for her, but it was not enough. Had they been a wealthier family my friend would have lived longer but she could not afford the best care in the world, and in America for far too many and for far too long there is often what you can’t afford and nothing at all to choose from. My late friend was 71. She was the grandmother of some of my best friends. She used to call me “Gig” and I tear up as I laugh in her honest hearted way at the fact that I never, ever knew why she used to call me “Gig”?

Sometimes laughter helps ease the pain.

More below the fold.

President’s Obama misuse of the role government continues to go beyond the breeches of Richard Nixon, and is equally as bad as George W. Bush/Dick Cheney.

We’ve already scene this abuse before with the indefinite detaining of people with no legal process, Military Tribunals, the denial of Habaeus Corpus, the perpetuation of horrific CIA Secret Renditions, escalating Predator Drone reckless Bombings of civilians throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, sheltering and providing legal protections for Human Torturers, the perpetuation of the Orwellian “U.S. Patriot Act“, new undeclared Paramilitary and Military provocations and hostilities in Iran and against Venezuela (via Columbia), and on and on and on.

If any Foreign leader on the planet ever did these things, the U.S. Media and our Government would universally regard him as a dangerous Tyrant on the World stage, and a War Criminal.  

But Obama has obliterated the Constitution and the role of government now in an entirely new way.  He has made it unlawful for an American citizen to exist without writing overpriced checks to a predatory Corporation, for an unguaranteed product.

Not only has he used the role of government to subsidize and advance the interests of a Corporate Monopoly, using the hard-earned money of American citizens (itself a robbery of the public), but he has also tasked the I.R.S. to deprive them of their own private money and assets, if they do not become the slaves of these predatory Insurance Monopolies.

Now, this is not free market capitalism.

It is not socialism (as “teabaggers” might incorrectly claim).

It is not communism or a “Soviet health care” system.

It is pure Fascism/Corporatism.

It is a 100% misuse of Government, and Violation of the Oath of Office: to protect and defend the Constitution.

A national health insurance reform bill is on the brink of passing and all is well on Capitol Hill.

But that doesn’t mean too much for the rest of the country.  Much of the country still wants more than a public-option-free, far-from-single-payer, band-aid-like bill to fix our broken health care system.  One writer states, from the interesting vantage point of Australia, where they do have universal health care:

But Australia has something that America lacks: a universal public system that provides basic medical services for all.

Here, thanks to Medicare, you can be cared for in a public hospital without going broke regardless of your health insurance status…But the political compromise [Barack Obama’s] been forced to adopt fails to address the morbidity at the heart of the system.

It’s taking the disease and trying to turn it into the cure.

The solution, the real health care reform that we’ve been asking for since Teddy Roosevelt’s time, lies with the state single payer movement.  And, at least here in Pennsylvania, we’re moving full speed ahead.  All that this bill means for us is that we’d better move fast if we want real health care reform any time soon.

Ha ha.  That’s a joke.  Zombies can clap, but by definition, do not have conscious awareness.

Now that [Health Care is] done, Barack Obama will go down in history as one of America’s finest presidents. It’s always possible of course that, like LBJ, he’ll get involved in some unrelated fiasco that mars his reputation.

– Yglesias giving some tongue action

Suffering succotash: The Punchline.

Jane:

The thing I have learned above all else in this campaign is that the corporate control of government is much more extensive than I ever imagined, and the tools we have to fight its influence are ineffective.

Ezra:

This year, the Obama administration succeeded at neutralizing every single industry.

Compound F:

double face-palm.

Welcome to this week’s Health and Fitness. This is an Open Thread.

Women More Likely to Die After Heart Attack

Study Suggests Women Aren’t Treated as Aggressively as Men Who Have Heart Attacks

By Charlene Laino

WebMD Health News

Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD

March 16, 2010 (Atlanta) — Better heart treatment of women could help close the gender gap in heart deaths. Women would be more likely to survive a heart attack if they were treated more like men, French researchers say.

In a study of more than 3,500 people admitted to the hospital for a heart attack, women were far less likely than men to get angiography to visualize heart artery blockages or angioplasty to open up blocked arteries.

Women were about twice as likely to die within a month of having the heart attack, according to the study, presented at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting.

The higher death rate in women “is related to the fact that they don’t get the same treatments as men,” says Maria Rosa Costanzo, MD, an American Heart Association spokeswoman who was not involved with the study.

Women do not have the typical “chest pain” that is related to a heart attack. They often ignore the symptoms of tightness in the chest and indigestion that is not relieved with antacids are more typical symptoms in women.

Symptoms may appear up to a month before attack

Research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) indicates that women often experience new or different physical symptoms as long as a month or more before experiencing heart attacks.

Among the 515 women studied, 95-percent said they knew their symptoms were new or different a month or more before experiencing their heart attack, or Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI). The symptoms most commonly reported were unusual fatigue (70.6-percent), sleep disturbance (47.8-percent), and shortness of breath (42.1-percent).

Many women never had chest pains

Surprisingly, fewer than 30% reported having chest pain or discomfort prior to their heart attacks, and 43% reported have no chest pain during any phase of the attack. Most doctors, however, continue to consider chest pain as the most important heart attack symptom in both women and men.

The women’s major symptoms prior to their heart attack included:

# Unusual fatigue – 70%

# Sleep disturbance – 48%

# Shortness of breath – 42%

# Indigestion – 39%

# Anxiety – 35%

Major symptoms during the heart attack include:

# Shortness of breath – 58%

# Weakness – 55%

# Unusual fatigue – 43%

# Cold sweat – 39%

# Dizziness – 39%

As is now custom, I’ll try to include the more interesting and pertinent articles that will help the community awareness of their health and bodies. This essay will not be posted anywhere else due to constraints on my time. Please feel free to make suggestions for improvement and ask questions, I’ll answer as best I can.  

Crossposted at Daily Kos

Paging Ed Shultz, psycho talk in the wingnut isle.

    Screw going to 11. The Conservative Freak Out continues to go to infinite and beyond.

    Witness Rep. Paul Broun as he flat out rewrites history in a disgusting attempt to compare Health Care Reform into something scary, such as that “Great war of Yankee aggression”. In the reality based world, we call that THE CIVIL WAR!

    Watch . . .

BROUN: If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States – the Great War of Yankee Aggression.

thinkprogress.org

    So Ronald Reagan will replace that Yankee agressor President Grant on the $50 bill because Reagan’s accomplishments (cough – Jack Shit- cough) are greater than FREEING THE SLAVES?

    Holy revisionist history, batman! WTF?

More below the fold . . . .

FreeSociety has posed the question, Why Did Kucinich Cave In To Obama? Which is fine if you are reporting that Kucinich has capitulated to the Obama administration. But I think it’s more important that we should consider, “What does this mean and how should we go forward from here?”

I refuse to believe Dennis is a turncoat or an evil liar. Instead, what this news means to me is that they finally got to him. To me Dennis Kucinich symbolizes the last bastion of integrity left in congress.  The one stalwart figure who had balls to bring an impeachment resolution to congress and read the resolution into the record. And what was the response like? There was a resounding echo of crickets from the news media and from most of the members of the House. Kucinich is just and good man. You can bet that whatever “deal” Obama offered him, he chose “the lesser of two evils”. The problem he faces is that of a crushing and corrupted system.

We will probably never know the full details of this shit sandwich. However, I do think is important that we recognize what this means: Dennis Kucinich, our firewall, our levy, our one true remaining voice in the House of Representatives, has been compromised.

Here is the Congressional Budget Office’s Score for the Health Care Insurance Bailout, which was just released now, Thursday morning, March 18, 2010.  (thank you, HuffPo)   It is a pdf.  Since it’s a government document, I’m going to post it here, sans the charts, and let you all have a look see instead of pointing you to a pundit.

http://big.assets.huffingtonpo…

and so it begins,

Honorable Nancy Pelosi Speaker U.S. House of Representatives Washington, DC 20515

Dear Madam Speaker:

March 18, 2010

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) have completed a preliminary estimate of the direct spending and revenue effects of an amendment in the nature of a substitute to H.R. 4872, the Reconciliation Act of 2010; that amendment (hereafter called “the reconciliation proposal”) was made public on March 18, 2010. The estimate is presented in three ways:

full text continues

cross-posted from Sum of Change

Just hopped off the conference call with Richard Trumka from the AFL-CIO.

This morning, the AFL-CIO leadership voted in overwhelming favor (higher than 90%) of “active support” for the current health care proposals in the face of slight changes to the excise tax agreement.