US Lags Other Countries In Healthcare. Critics of the Affordable Care Act continue to insist that the American health care system, as presently constructed, is the best in the world. But most of the available evidence suggests otherwise. And now there's yet one more set of data making the same point. It comes from a study supported by the Commonwealth Fund, which specializes in comparisons of health care across country.
And it looks at a statistic called "Mortality Amenable to Health Care. " As the name suggests, it measures preventable deaths, which is a pretty good proxy for the quality of a nation's health care system. Here are the details: In “Variations in Amenable Mortality—Trends in 16 High Income Nations,” Ellen Nolte of RAND Europe and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine analyzed deaths that occurred before age 75 from causes like treatable cancer, diabetes, childhood infections/respiratory diseases, and complications from surgeries. US Lags Other Countries In Healthcare.
Air pollution rising at national parks. SteveD. /FlickrEvolution Lake at Kings Canyon National Park Air pollution in national parks is at a three-year high, and two California parks have recorded the worst readings, according to a report by the National Parks Conservation Association. Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, located next to each other, exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency standard for ozone pollution 68 days so far this year, the most of any of the national parks that monitor air quality. Joshua Tree National Park came in second, with 49 days above the EPA standard. These readings are not only high among national parks, but also for the state as a whole. While high by today's standards, the rates are lower than they were in the late 1980s, when some areas of the state logged 100 or more days with ozone above acceptable levels, according to Air Resources Board data.
National Park ServiceMap of 2011 ozone exceedances. Main Street Alliance Supports Paid Sick Days. The Main Street Alliance voted recently to officially endorse a new issue: paid sick days. Why do small business owners care about this issue? For a wide range of reasons – like workplace productivity, public health, and a commitment to treating workers like family. In short, it seems like the right thing to do… and it makes good business sense, too. The productivity case alone is a strong one. We’ll be posting periodic updates about paid sick days in the weeks and months to come. HHS Official: Administration is Shuttering CLASS, Obamacare's Long-Term Care Entitlement. Europe's tuberculosis spreading fast - Europe. Forms of tuberculosis are spreading at an alarming rate in Europe and will kill thousandsunless health authorities halt the pandemic, the World Health Organisation has said.
Eastern Europe has the highest level of infection, while in western Europe, London has the highest TB rate of any capital city. Launching a new regional plan to find, diagnose and treat cases of the airborne infectious disease more effectively, the WHO's European director warned on Wednesday that complacency had allowed a resurgence of TB and failure to tackle it now would mean huge human and economic costs in the future. "TB is an old disease that never went away, and now it is evolving with a vengeance," Zsuzsanna Jakab, WHO's regional director for Europe, said. TB is currently a worldwide pandemic that kills around 1.7 million people a year. According to the WHO 15 of the 27 countries with high cases of TB are in the WHO's European region, which includes 53 countries in Europe and Central Asia. Rise of TB. Number of people without health insurance in U.S. climbs - Sep. 13. NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The number of people who lacked health insurance last year climbed to 49.9 million, up from 49 million in 2009, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.
Nationwide, 16.3% of the population was uninsured last year, statistically unchanged from 2009. Three groups comprised the bulk of the uninsured in 2010, including foreign-born residents who are not U.S. citizens, young adults ages 19 to 25 and low-income families with an annual household income of less than $25,000. Much of the declines in insured rates in recent years can be attributed to the loss of employer-provided coverage, which fell amid sustained unemployment and as employers continued to cut back on benefits. The percentage of people who had health insurance through their employers fell to 55.3% in 2010 from 56.1% the year before, continuing a long, downward trend. In 2000, 64.1% of the population received health insurance through their employers. Poverty on the rise What health care reform is (and isn't) doing now. D.C. has fewer than 3,000 active doctors, report says.
The numbers drop even further among actively practicing primary-care doctors: 382 in internal medicine, 307 in pediatrics, 119 in obstetrics and gynecology, and 110 in family practice. The report provides what board officials say is the first detailed snapshot of the physician workforce in the District. It was drawn from a survey during license renewal last fall and early this year. It does not draw conclusions about shortages, but the numbers suggest more doctors are needed. “People will complain they do not have access to physicians, and, holy cow, 9,000 have a license. The report found that actively practicing doctors are clustered in Wards 1, 2, 3 and 5, near hospitals. In Ward 3, for example, there is an abundance of physicians, with “literally hundreds of doctors to choose from,” said Michael Williams, chief of health-care operations for the nonprofit D.C. The board’s report found that, among actively practicing doctors: ●72 percent do not live in the District;
Health-Care Reform Rules Would Restrict Public Reporting. Last year’s health-care reform law promised to use Medicare billing data to increase public reporting about the performance of doctors and health-care facilities. Now, proposed government rules could prevent consumer groups from getting the data and would give medical providers the right to review any quality findings in advance. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at a press conference regarding the health care reform law. (File photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of patients die annually from preventable harm suffered while undergoing medical care. The infections, injuries and errors could rank as a leading cause of death in the United States. Last year’s sweeping health-care reform law — the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — promised to improve the problem by allowing outside groups to use Medicare billing records to analyze and publicly report on the quality of care.
Pay up to $200,000 for the data. More Americans going abroad for medical treatment to save money. Pearl Gabel for News Bartender Brennan Mulligan showed off his new smile after dental surgery in Costa Rica. Stuck with an aching tooth and very little cash, Brennan Mulligan was faced with a painful dilemma: Wait weeks to get a dental procedure in the city that he couldn't afford or fly off to see an unfamiliar dentist in a foreign country at a fraction of the cost.
Mulligan, a 23-year-old uninsured Manhattan bartender, chose the latter. Within five days, he was inside a gleaming dental office in Costa Rica. "Everybody was saying, 'You're going to this shack in thejungle in Costa Rica and there'sgoing to be a witch doctor there,'" said Mulligan, who had the work done outside thecapital city of San Jose in mid-July. "I got there and it looked like the Starship Enterprise. Mulligan is part of a rapidly growing wave of Americans who have gone overseas for medical treatment. Less than 10 years ago, "medical tourism" was considered a dirty word in U.S. medical circles. Extracurricular activities. Another Conservative Argument Against Obamacare Bites The Dust? Medicare Advantage Premiums Down, Enrollment Up. Republicans made a lot of arguments against the Affordable Care Act. But perhaps none were as effective, or as seemingly plausible, as their contention that their new law would cripple Medicare Advantage.
New evidence suggests -- surprise! -- that the argument was wrong. Medicare Advantage is the program that gives seniors the option of enrolling in private insurance rather than the traditional, government-run program. The government pays the insurers a flat fee, per enrollee; in return, the insurers provide coverage, sometimes including benefits that traditional Medicare does not. The policy rationale for Medicare Advantage is two-fold: To give seniors more options and to introduce some private-sector competition. The architects of the Affordable Care Act decided, quite sensibly, to reduce those extra subsidies and use the money to offset part of the law’s cost. It’s just one set of data, undoubtedly reflecting a variety of factors. It's only one year of data. Federal agency blocks FDA-approved marijuana research for veterans. By Eric W. DolanTuesday, October 4, 2011 21:06 EDT The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has blocked a pilot study to examine the benefits of marijuana for veterans with treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The study was sponsored by the nonprofit research organization the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and would have been conducted by Dr. Sue Sisley of the University of Arizona at Phoenix. “Hundreds of veterans in medical marijuana states already report using marijuana to control their PTSD symptoms,” MAPS said in a statement. Recently, a study conducted by Haifa University in Israel found that rats which were treated with marijuana within 24 hours of a traumatic experience successfully avoided any symptoms of PTSD. But no studies have been conducted on humans. NIDA’s monopoly on the supply of marijuana for research means the study has no way of moving forward, even though it was approved by the FDA. The D.C. Eric W. Measuring the Health of Communities. Measuring the overall health of populations allows public health leaders to better allocate resources to areas of greatest need. In this article, authors Remington and Booske note the inextricable ways improving the health of an individual is tied to improving the health of their community.
The authors discuss how the measurement of the health of communities has changed over time to include multiple determinants of health and the social-ecological framework. Both America’s Health Ranking and the Wisconsin County Health Rankings are efforts to apply a broad framework to both measure and monitor overall health in the United States. While challenges to measuring population health exist, the authors note that attempting to measure the overall health of populations allows public health leaders to better allocate resources to areas of greatest need. It also empowers citizens with information to advocate for their local community's investments. Personality disorders: One of the most controversial & misunderstood areas of mental health. Ask the average person what they associate with personality disorders and you get a blank stare or description of a human chameleon capable of changing from normality to social menace in the blink of an eye.
In reality, the majority of people with a personality disorder are a greater danger to themselves than others, with high rates of self-harm and attempted suicide as a way of managing often turbulent emotions. Most of us recognise our moods and feelings and manage them until they pass, while many people with personality disorders have a tendency to get stuck in these emotional states which increase in intensity, resulting in behaviour that many of us find unusual. These limiting patterns of behaviour and response become engrained like a scratched record, producing great feelings of anxiety and frustration. Sadly, public perception of the condition is largely media driven with a succession of sensationalist headlines, films and books. So how common are personality disorders?
When health insurance isn’t enough - Ezra Klein. (KAREN BLEIER) We have a lot of numbers to estimate how many people will gain health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will hover around 34 million, with 24 million purchasing coverage through the new health exchange marketplaces. We think, based on a study published this week and the Massachusetts experience, that the majority of the uninsured plan to comply with health reform’s mandated purchase of health insurance. But there’s one crucial detail we don’t have much information on at all: what those 34 million people will do with their health insurance once they get it. And it’s actually a pretty open question in the health policy research, whether the newly-insured use more health services (making up for the earlier lack of coverage) or continue to act as they did prior to gaining coverage.
Interestingly though, this study didn’t find a cost difference between these two populations. Judicial Watch Obtains Obamacare Records from Department of Health and Human Services -- WASHINGTON, Sept. 8, 2011. 3,497 Pages of Documents Include HHS Correspondence and Internal Emails Regarding Obamacare Waivers WASHINGTON, Sept. 8, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Judicial Watch, the public interest organization that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it recently obtained 3,497 pages of documents from the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding the Affordable Health Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Judicial Watch obtained the records as a result of a Freedom of Information Act FOIA) lawsuit filed on December 30, 2010 (Judicial Watch v. U. S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 10-2328)).
The records include internal HHS email correspondence and strategic documents, as well as email communications with unions and companies applying for waivers. As of July 2011, 1,472 one-year waivers and 106 three-year waivers were granted, covering some 3.4 million enrollees, more than half of which belong to unions. SOURCE Judicial Watch. Maricopa County adjusts health strategy. By Michelle Ye Hee Lee - Oct. 11, 2011 12:00 AM The Arizona Republic Maricopa County is shifting the way it provides public-health services, in response to budget and staffing cuts in recent years. The county's goal is to make policy changes that could result in healthier behavior, rather than doing one-on-one public outreach to change people's behaviors.
Resources are dwindling, but the needs of the third-largest public-health jurisdiction are not. Public-health departments across the nation have seen cuts to their budgets and staff for the past three years. Maricopa County public-health officials say the cuts have been especially difficult because the county Department of Public Health already was working with a budget that was disproportionately low for the number of people it serves.
Some county public-health services have been cut or are no longer a priority. But it also has resulted in some "abysmal" public-health situations, said Bob England, county public-health director. CDC reports on pediatric influenza deaths - The Checkup. Health care: A new prescription for the poor. Will the Lack of Paid Sick Days Make Movie Thriller 'Contagion' A Reality? Obamacare: A Reason To Believe. Medicare paid $3.1M for Viagra, other erectile-dysfunction drugs.