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QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER

Community For Affordable Health Care

Vol VIII, No ?1, April, 2009

 

Utilizing the $1.8 Trillion Information Technology Industry

To Transform the $2.4 Trillion HealthCare Industry into Affordable HealthCare

In This Issue:            

10.         Featured Article: Surprising facts about American Health Care

1.         Featured Article: Surprising facts about American Health Care

2.         In the News: President Obama claimed that the FDA is underfunded and understaffed

3.         International MedicineHealthcare: St. Patrick's Day Health-Care News from Ireland 

4.         MedicareU.S. Government Healthcare: How Should We Reform Health Care?

4.         Lean HealthCare:

5.         Lean HealthCare: Rethinking the Healthcare Paradigm

6.         Misdirection in Healthcare:: JAMA Wants to Restrict Competition for Pharma Dollars 

7.         Overheard on London Bridge: MPs investigating financial systems hit by a Scandal

8.         Innovations in Health Care: Cutting Emergency Stays in HalfWhat's New in US Health Care:

9.         The Health Plan for the USA and the World:Health Plan USA: Connecting Health Care Across Locations and Clinicians

10.       Restoring Accountability in Medical Practice by Non-Participation in Insurance and Government Programs


HealthPlanUSA is now a separate Newsletter devoted to the rapidly evolving field of health plans being promoted throughout the USA. These are dangerous times. Will you have the  freedom to have a doctor who will protect you from disease and from the State Mandates? Stay tuned to the evaluations of the  current issues which we bring quarterly and will increase as staffing permits. Why not sign up now at www.healthplanusa.net/newsletter.asp?


 

The Annual World Health Care Congress, a market of ideas, co-sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, is the most prestigious meeting of chief and senior executives from all sectors of health care. Renowned authorities and practitioners assemble to present recent results and to develop innovative strategies that foster the creation of a cost-effective and accountable U.S. health-care system. The extraordinary conference agenda includes compelling keynote panel discussions, authoritative industry speakers, international best practices, and recently released case-study data. The 3rd annual conference was held April 17-19, 2006, in Washington, D.C. One of the regular attendees told me that the first Congress was approximately 90 percent pro-government medicine. The third year it was about half, indicating open forums such as these are critically important. The 4th Annual World Health Congress was held April 22-24, 2007, in Washington, D.C. That year many of the world leaders in healthcare concluded that top down reforming of health care, whether by government or insurance carrier, is not and will not work. We have to get the physicians out of the trenches because reform will require physician involvement. The 5th Annual World Health Care Congress was held April 21-23, 2008, in Washington, D.C. Physicians were present on almost all the platforms and panels. However, it was the industry leaders that gave the most innovated mechanisms to bring health care spending under control. The 6th Annual World Health Care Congress was held April 14-16, 2009, in Washington, D.C. The solution to our health care problems is emerging at this ambitious Congress.  The 5th Annual World Health Care Congress – Europe 2009, is meeting in Brussels, May 23-15, 2009. The 7th Annual World Health Care Congress will be held April 12-14, 2010 in Washington D.C. For more information, visit www.worldcongress.com. The future is occurring NOW.  You should become involved.

The Annual World Health Care Congress, co-sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, is the most prestigious meeting of chief and senior executives from all sectors of health care. Renowned authorities and practitioners assemble to present recent results and to develop innovative strategies that foster the creation of a cost-effective and accountable U.S. health-care system. The extraordinary conference agenda includes compelling keynote panel discussions, authoritative industry speakers, international best practices, and recently released case-study data. The 3rd annual conference was held April 17-19, 2006, in Washington, D.C. One of the regular attendees told me that the first Congress was approximately 90 percent pro-government medicine. The third year it was 50 percent, indicating open forums such as these are critically important. The 4th Annual World Health Congress was held April 22-24, 2007, , in Washington, D.C. That year many of the world leaders in healthcare concluded that top down reforming of health care, whether by government or insurance carrier, is not and will not work. We have to get the physicians out of the trenches because reform will require physician involvement. The 5th Annual World Health Care Congress was held April 21-23, 2008, , in Washington, D.C. Physicians were present on almost all the platforms and panels. This year it was the industry leaders that gave the most innovated mechanisms to bring health care spending under control. The solution to our health care problems is emerging at this ambitious Congress. Plan to participate: The 6th Annual World Health Care Congress will be held April 14-16, 2009, in Washington, D.C. The 5th Annual World Health Care Congress -– Europe 2009, will meet in Brussels, May 23-15, 2009. For more information, visit www.worldcongress.com. The future is occurring NOW. 

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1.   Feature Article: Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.

Surprising Facts About American Health Care

Medical care in the United States is derided as miserable compared to health care systems in the rest of the developed world.  Economists, government officials, insurers and academics alike are beating the drum for a far larger government role in health care.  Much of the public assumes their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex.  However, before turning to government as the solution, some unheralded facts about America's health care system should be considered, says Scott W. Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at the Stanford University Medical Center. 

Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers:

To read more, please go to www.healthplanusa.net/archives/April09.htm.

·         Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom.

·         Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway.

·         The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries:

·         Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit are taking statins, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease.

·         By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons and 17 percent of Italians receive them.

Lower income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians:

·         Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report "excellent" health compared to Canadian seniors (11.7 percent versus 5.8 percent).

·         Conversely, white Canadian young adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower income Americans to describe their health as "fair or poor."

Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom:

·         Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long -- sometimes more than a year -- to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements or to get radiation treatment for cancer.

·         All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada.

·         In England, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.

Source: Scott W. Atlas, "10 Surprising Facts About American Health Care," National Center for Policy Analysis, Brief Analysis No. 649, March 24, 2009.

For text: www.ncpa.org/pub/ba649 

For more on Health Issues: www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=16

Why would anyone want to Europeanize American Healthcare by supporting Obamacare?

Feed back . . .

 

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2.   In the News:  President Obama claimed that the FDA is underfunded and understaffed.

FDA is Overfunded, Overstaffed, and Costs Lives According to New Pacific Research Institute Report

San Francisco (March 20, 2009) -- A new research report by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI) reviews three decades of the Food and Drug Administration’s performance and concludes that the agency is overfunded, overstaffed, and denies hundreds of thousands of Americans timely access to new medicines. Leviathan’s Drug Problem: The Cost of the Federal Monopoly of Pharmaceutical Regulation and its Deadly Cost was authored by John R. Graham, Director of Health Care Studies at PRI.

President Barack Obama, in this past week’s radio address, asserted that “there are certain things
that only government can do, and one of those things is … ensuring that the medicines we take
are safe, and don’t cause us harm. That’s the mission of our Food and Drug Administration.”
President Obama also claimed that the FDA is both underfunded and understaffed.
To read more, please go to www.healthplanusa.net/archives/April09.htm.



“In recent years, the contamination of American staples such as spinach, tomatoes, and peanut butter has made news headlines nationwide and has now captured the attention of President Obama,” said Mr. Graham. “But lost in these headlines are the hundreds of thousands of people who loose their lives each year waiting for access to new life-saving or life-prolonging drugs that are mired in the FDA approval process. While food contamination is serious, the deaths resulting from long waits for new medicines far outnumber the lives lost from food contamination – indeed Mr. Obama should move the slow FDA approval process to the top of his agenda.”


Overstaffed and Overfunded


Many well-meaning observers continue to believe that the FDA’s failures are due to a lack of funding and employees. “This is not the case,” said Mr. Graham. Other developed countries have similar agencies that approve new medicines with far fewer employees. Great Britain’s regulator is about one-third more productive than the FDA, and other European countries are even more productive. This is because the European Union has implemented a policy of regulatory competition, where a central regulator and national regulators compete for user fees that they charge manufacturers to lift their bans on new drugs. When one regulator has lifted its ban on a new medicine, all countries must generally reciprocate by lifting their bans.


The Prescription Drug User Fee Act, first passed in 1992 by Congress, and renewed every five years, imposes a fee on drug manufacturers to fund the approval process. This excessive tax has dramatically increased the FDA’s budget, so that half of the funds for reviewing new prescription drugs now come from this tax burden. Mr. Graham notes, “While this has sped up the FDA’s bureaucratic processes somewhat, it has not transformed the harmful incentives facing the agency. Indeed, it has reinforced them, and entrenched the FDA’s monopoly-power.”


Leviathan’s Drug Problem recommends that Congress amend the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to allow Americans to use new medicines once a regulator in a comparable jurisdiction, such as the European Union, has removed its prohibition. Drug makers would then be permitted, but not compelled, to distribute their medicines to willing doctors and patients in the U.S.


The report also recommends that Congress adopt the policy enshrined in the ACCESS Act, introduced by U.S. Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) in 2008. This allows seriously ill patients who have exhausted other treatments to try experimental drugs at an earlier phase of regulatory approval than is possible now, and encourages the FDA to use measures other than placebo trials to determine the safety and efficacy of such new drugs.



To download a copy of Leviathan’s Drug Problem: The Cost of the Federal Monopoly of Pharmaceutical Regulation and its Deadly Cost click here.

The Tax and Spend Party’s habit of throwing money at a problem only worsens it and costs money.

Feed back . . .

 

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2.   International Healthcare Medicine:

3. International Healthcare: St. Patrick's Day Health-Care News from Ireland March 18, 2009

 

ER charges up 50%, visits drop 5% By John R. Graham

(OK, so I am a little late for St. Paddy's Day: It's the thought that counts.)

The Stockholm Network's weekly bulletin for March 18 is not yet online, but it came into my e-mail with a fascinating bit of news from Eire:

A new report in the Republic of Ireland by the Health Service Executive (HSE) has revealed that the amount of patients attending accident and emergency (A&E) departments has decreased by almost 5%, in the wake of increased governmental charges for the service. To read more, please go to www.healthplanusa.net/archives/April09.htm.

 

The 2009 Irish budget, presented by finance minister Brian Lenihan, revealed that charges for A&E services would rise from €66 to €100, if the patient has not been referred by their GP, or if they do not hold a medical card.

The revised tariff came into force on 1st January and there are fears that the HSE’s findings, which saw 4.5% less people attend A&E in January 2009 than in January 2008, could highlight that the new charges are frightening people off being treated.

However, the report also claimed that “The drop in attendances was mainly in the lower triage categories, which would explain why the lower numbers did not result in a reduced number of admissions to hospital”.

Meanwhile, here in the Excited States of America, the government outlaws the use of financial incentives to motivate patients to go to doctors, or convenient clinics, or urgent-care clinics, as appropriate, instead of going to ERs.  Which, despite what you've read in the papers are "free" if you want them to be free, courtesy of EMTALA, which commands all hospitals with ERs to "stabilize" anyone who presents there, without charge.

When it comes to incentives to manage overuse of the ER, at least one single-payer country has it figured out better than the U.S. has!

Feed back . . .

 

Government medicine does not give timely access to healthcare, it only gives access to a waiting list.

In America, everyone has access to HealthCare at all times. No one can be refused by any hospital.

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4.   U. S. Government HealthcareMedicare: How Should We Reform Health Care?

Should the United States have a government-run health care system similar to the ones in Canada and Great Britain?  No, says Devon Herrick, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis.

"I am in favor of everyone having access to health care," Herrick told an audience at Susquehanna University last night.  "I am opposed to the current view on how they plan to achieve universal health care."

Access to health care is problematic, explained Herrick.  The quality is inconsistent and the cost is high:

 

·         Last year, Americans spent $2.3 trillion on health care costs.

·         The reason is because of increased longevity, the overuse of third-party payment, low cost control and less out-of-pocket payments.

President Obama's proposal for mandated health insurance will not be achieved for several reasons, says Herrick: To read more, please go to www.healthplanusa.net/archives/April09.htm.

·         Mandated insurance is difficult to enforce and will drive up the cost of coverage and encourage special-interest groups while reducing consumer choice.

·         Mandated acceptance by health insurance providers would encourage Americans to wait to obtain insurance until it is needed, and mandated benefits would increase the cost for each person, even though the person may not need specific coverage.

Source: Tricia Pursell "Speakers debate need for health-care reform," The Daily Item, March 27, 2009.

For text: www.dailyitem.com/0100_news/local_story_086000045.html?keyword=topstory

For more on Health Issues:  www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=16

 

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Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.

- Ronald Reagan

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5.   Lean HealthCare: Lean HealthCare: Rethinking the Healthcare Paradigm

By David J. Gibson, MD & Jennifer Shaw Gibson

The difference between the interventional and public health organizing paradigms is the allocation of funding.  Public health invests in a population’s well being; the interventional invests in treating the individual

Will Rogers once said, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”  California finds itself in a monumental health care financing black hole that is destabilizing government. The good news - this gives us the rare opportunity to rethink how we structure and finance health care.  We need to stop trying to make the current system work better and rethink the mission and role of government in health care.  We need to stop digging and think about the future.

 

There is now an uncontested consensus that the current system is unsustainable.  It ill serves Americans and there exists the political support to reform the system.  Unfortunately, the only option now presented requires more public spending, which we do not have.  We are all prisoners within the present paradigm.  Without fresh ideas, we are left with continued digging as the only option. To read more, please go to www.healthplanusa.net/archives/April09.htm.

So, let’s look at a fresh idea that is now almost two-hundred years old.  Few policy makers appreciate that there are two ways to organize the healthcare delivery system in that they have only been exposed to our current interventional system.  This system focuses resources on expensive diagnostic and therapeutic technology delivered by specialists to treat individuals during their last three months of life.  You can visit almost any intensive care unit in the country and find them overwhelming populated with septuagenarians and octogenarians who have just undergone massively invasive procedures.  The Dartmouth studies on Medicare have definitively shown that there is no credible evidence that all of this effort improves the lives of these desperately ill patients and there is no value delivered to society as a whole, which pays for all of this invasive technology.

A second way of organizing health care is within a public health paradigm.  The great advances in medicine during the late 19th and early 20th century were within this paradigm.  The public health paradigm delivered objective value in the form of quality of life and increased longevity to society.

Before the ascendency of the invasive system, public health applied the practical use of science to treat populations of patients.  Within this system the priority was to vaccinate against and virtually eradicate various viral diseases that ravaged the population; deliver potable water; install sewage treatment; control mosquitoes; tame devastating tropical infectious diseases; combat the transmission of syphilis and gonorrhea; isolate and treat tuberculosis; and provide compassionate care for the dying during flu pandemics.  This is the legacy of the public health paradigm.

The big difference between the interventional and public health organizing paradigms is the allocation of funding.  Public health invests in a population’s well being; the interventional invests in treating the individual.

Public health and interventional medicine have co-existed in an uncomfortable accommodation for the past century and a half.  With the introduction of anesthesia into surgery and the discovery of antibiotics to treat infections, the interventionists have increasingly dominated the health care delivery paradigm.  This domination has produced the circumstances in which we now find ourselves.  Healthcare now consumes more resources to maintain its insatiable need than any other industry in America’s economy.  As we are now witnessing in Massachusetts, we could allocate America’s entire gross national product and still be unable to finance the universally applied interventional system.

Conversely, public health systems are designed to work within a prescribed budget.  For a given amount of funding, the system will allocate resources away from the end of life and focus upon pre-natal and obstetrical care, child health care with an emphasis on preventive universal vaccination programs, effective educational programs for smoking prevention, weight control, early detection of diabetes performance based mental health and social service support programs aimed at abuse of the vulnerable.

Public policy is by its nature a broad brush.  It is best suited for setting macro goals and priorities for society.  It is ill suited for dictating decisions at the micro level.  Involving government in “fairness” judgments or dictating mandates for insurance coverage have inevitably led to our current unworkable and un-financeable system.

Implementing a public health paradigm for government entitlement health care programs will not be easy.  The issues should be forthrightly articulated, addressed and debated before implementation.  The most contentious will be how do we address populist egalitarianism?  Closely related, how do we as individuals confront our own mortality?  How do we allow both the interventional and the public health paradigms to co-exist in that crushing the interventionists will simply drive them off-shore?  How do we address the fraud that is now endemic within government healthcare entitlement programs (Erick Holder, the current Attorney General, just pegged the magnitude of funding diverted to fraud within the Medicare and the Medicaid programs at over $60-billion annually) so that these programs will have legitimacy before the tax payers in the future?  How do we make cost and performance transparent within the interventional system? How do we restructure medical education, hospitals and supporting diagnostic and therapeutic modality manufacturers to serve a population based paradigm?  What do we do with the excess of medical specialists that a public health system would produce when implemented?

Beyond the above, how do we lead society through this difficult paradigm change without retrogressing into a “Harry and Louise” like political polarization debate fostered by the current healthcare-industrial complex that is now extracting tremendous profits from the current system?

None of these issues will be easily addressed.  However, if we do not do so proactively, then we will witness the wholesale throwing of widows and children under the bus as is being contemplated here in California.

Jennifer Gibson traded energy commodities on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.  She is also an economist who trained at the London School of Economics and now specializes in evolving health care markets.  David Gibson is the C.E.O. of Reflective Medical Information Systems, a software development and healthcare data mining firm.

 

The Future of Health Care Has to Be Lean, Efficient and Personal.

Feed back . . .

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5.   Misdirection in Healthcare:

6. Misdirection in Healthcare: JAMA Wants to Restrict Competition for Pharma Dollars 

Editor-in-Chief wants all payments laundered through medical journals

By John R. Graham , Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Many elite, academic doctors would like to believe that they can create a world where human beings do not influence other human beings.  This makes them ashamed of their profession's relationship with research-based drug companies.  They believe that any item or communication from a pharmaceutical representative, be it a branded pen or an all-expenses-paid conference in the Caribbean, corrupts.  If such contacts were forbidden, only scientific evidence would influence doctors' behavior.

 

But this dream-like state has a more down-to-earth element to it as well, especially from the elite medical journals, which profit from advertising.  The Editor-in-Chief of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, has collaborated with academic medical colleagues to pen an opinion in the journal which states that professional medical associations (PMAs): To read more, please go to www.healthplanusa.net/archives/April09.htm.

".....should work toward a complete ban on pharmaceutical and medical device industry funding ($0), except for income from journal advertising and exhibit hall fees."

Well, I guess that will make JAMA's advertising sales staff happy!

But I should be more courteous: the writers did not demand government action to restrict PMA's financing, but have simply encouraged their profession to accept these restrictions voluntarily.

Nevertheless, artificially limiting contact between inventors and doctors will reduce investors' willingness to put their capital at risk in pharmaceutical and medical-device enterprises, as I have previously described.

Feed back . . . 

 

 

Well-Meaning Regulations Worsen Quality of Care.

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7.   Overheard on London Bridge:  Capital Hill:MPs investigating banks and financial systems hit by a Scandal.

The scandal in the U.K. over expenses claimed by members of Parliament widened this past week to a powerful committee that has been scrutinizing pay and behavior in the country's financial system. . .  Peter Viggers, a Conservative MP who has sat on the committee since 2005, claimed £1,600 for, among other things, a floating duck island -- a miniaturized replica of a Swedish house that can serve as shelter for ducks. Both have gained a high public profile from their positions on the committee, by investigating banks, hedge funds, ratings companies and other parts of the financial system as part of a probe into the financial crisis in the U.K. . . Sir Peter said he will step down at the next election.

 

 

Looks like What is Congress Parliament Really is as Crime infested as our Congress.Saying?

 

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8.   Innovations in Health CareWhat's New in US Health Care: Cutting Emergency Stays in Half

Meadows Regional Medical Center has cut in half the length of time a patient stays in its emergency room by embracing the lean manufacturing practices first implemented in the automotive industry. But the hospital, unwilling to rest on that achievement, put in place in April a system to reduce ER wait times even further.

The 122-bed facility in Vildaltia, Ga., has reduced ER stays from 247 minutes to 125 minutes, which is making it possible for the department to treat more patients. Where, two years ago, the unit saw 60 patients a day, it now treats 100 or more people daily.

 

"It's been an incredible success," says Matt Haynes, a health care efficiency specialist who works with a group at Georgia Tech that consulted with Meadows on how it could improve its operations. To read more, please go to www.healthplanusa.net/archives/April09.htm.

A key piece of Meadow's "lean hospital" effort is its emergency department information system from T-System Inc., Dallas. The system automates and coordinates critical ER tasks such as triage, patient tracking, and documentation, among others. The EDIS was installed in the second half of 2005.

But, as in the case of lean manufacturing, which is designed to drive out waste and inefficiencies while also instilling a sense of continuous process improvement, the hospital is looking to do even more. In April, Meadows upgraded its EDIS with a computerized physician order entry system, which it hopes will lead to an additional 30-minute reduction in ER patient stays.

The hospital's search for ER efficiencies started in 2004. By then, the average length of ER stays had grown to 200-plus minutes and, on some days, reached an intolerable 300 minutes. The hospital's managers decided something had to be done.

The hospital turned to Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute, a consulting arm of the university. The institute was looking to bring the benefits of the lean manufacturing principles first developed at Toyota to other industries.

Georgia Tech thought that if lean manufacturing worked in other businesses, it ought to work in healthcare, says Peggy Fountain, the director of Meadow's emergency department. And, she adds, "I was ready to do anything to improve our wait times."

In June 2005, Georgia Tech specialists came in, studied the organization, and made a list of more than 40 recommendations to improve the hospital's processes. Among the changes that were subsequently made, according to a paper put out by Georgia Tech, were standardizing mobile supply stations; labeling racks, trays and drawers; and adding a holding area for patients who could be treated without putting them in a room. . .

The EDIS implementation presented a few change-management issues. At first the doctors and nurses were apprehensive about using the system, thinking it would add extra steps, and time, to their day. But once the system was installed and they started to see the benefits of having real-time information, "they just grabbed it and ran with it," says Fountain.

The system was integrated to the core hospital information system from Medical Information Technology Inc. of Westwood, Mass. The integration task turned out smoother than envisioned. "We thought there would be lots of issues," Fountain says. But the hospital spent considerable time planning the integration and extensively testing the systems, and those investments paid off. . .

--John McCormick

Read the entire article at www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/efficiency-28183-1.html.

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9.   Health Plan USA: Connecting Health Care Across Locations and Clinicians

The Federal Government is funding the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) so that every doctor’s patient and every hospital patient’s record can be accessed from Washington, DC. This, of course, has nothing to do with improved quality of care. It is necessary only for the purpose of government snooping into every American’s personal medical history.

 

Medical histories are a storehouse of personal information with widespread politically important information. As the government is getting more involved with regulating personal habits, having the information on every American will wield vast powers. With taxes exceeding ability to pay, what could be more salivating to a Congressman than knowing and fining those who still smoke, have sexually transmitted diseases or even high- costs illnesses such as diabetes with complications? Already the administration is eyeing futile care that can be eliminated from the cost of health care. To begin a system of fines for everyone that smokes, or drinks, or are obese, or have STD, especially the rich data from STD or from MSWM (men having sex with men), could become more lucrative than confiscatory taxes now planned.

What are the alternatives? To read more, please go to www.healthplanusa.net/archives/April09.htm.

Kaiser Permanente has one of the finest EMR systems anywhere. It is also secure. It is secure across their vast system. In Sacramento, the doctors in twenty or so different medical office buildings can access medical records of their patients as they change locations or are admitted to one of their three hospitals. Permanente doctors can work from their medical offices or even from their homes on patient records, access laboratory and x-ray reports, actually view the x-rays, call or email their patient the reports, and order new tests based on the results of recently reported tests without ever leaving their office or home computer. Kaiser hospitals and Permanente physicians are secure from Government surveillance.

In Sacramento, all five hospital systems have EMR. These are secure from Government Snoops. Most hospitals have given access to their medical staff so they can access their patients records while in the hospital, in their offices, or at their home computer. In these situations, the EMR optimizes patient care. Having these records interface with the government computers does nothing to improve quality of care and hinders doctors from making medical decisions, all of which involve some risk that attorneys love to exploit. Thus, medical practice becomes a legal maze with appropriate risks to save lives too dangerous or treacherous to consider.

Medicine always has risks, which the lawmaking Congress and lawyers can’t comprehend with dispassion. In the early days of heart transplants, a patient with a life expectance of three months would accept a 50% risk of death from a cardiac transplant in exchange for a 50% chance of living a few extra years. Recently, a Multiple Sclerosis drug was removed from the market because it had a high risk of adverse effect. It was a business journal, the Wall Street Journal, that pointed out the inappropriateness of the decision to remove the drug from the market: there could likely be an MS patient who is suffering to an extent that even a 50% chance of improvement would be acceptable, considering the misery with which they are living. The Business Community has always understood the Medical Community better than the Legal or Government Community has understood healthcare.

The HPUSA Research Group continues to work on models of innovative solutions extending from the above. To keep up with these studies, be sure to subscribe to this newsletter, HealthPlanUSA.net by entering your email address at www.healthplanusa.net/newsletter.asp.

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Current Issues Being Studied.

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10.  Restoring Accountability in Medical Practice by Non-Participation in Government Programs and Understanding the Devastating Force of Government

Medicine and Liberty - Network of Liberty Oriented Doctors, www.MedLib.ch/ Alphonse Crespo, MD, Executive Director and Founder

·                     We support professional autonomy for doctors and liberty of choice for patients

We uphold the Hippocratic covenant that forbids action harmful to the patient

We defend responsible medical practice and access to therapeutic innovation free from bureaucratic obstruction

We work towards a deeper understanding of the role and importance of liberty & market in medical services

MedLib is part of a wide movement of ideas that defends

the self-ownership principle & the property rights of individuals on the products of their physical and intellectual work

free markets, free enterprise and strict limits to the role of the State

·                     Medicine and Liberty - Network of Liberty Oriented Doctors, www.MedLib.ch/, Alphonse Crespo, MD, Executive Director and Founder
Medicine & Liberty (MedLib) is an independent physician network founded in 2007, dedicated to the study and advocacy of liberty, ethics & market in medical services.
  - We support professional autonomy for doctors and liberty of choice for patients
 
 - We uphold the Hippocratic covenant that forbids action harmful to the patient
 
 - We defend responsible medical practice and access to therapeutic innovation free from
   
  bureaucratic obstruction
 
 - We work towards a deeper understanding of the role and importance of liberty & market in
    
 medical services
MedLib is part of a wide movement of ideas that defends
   - the self-ownership principle & the property rights of individuals on the products of their
     
physical and intellectual work
   - free markets, free enterprise and strict limits to the role of the State

·                     Americans for Tax Reform, www.atr.org/, Grover Norquist, President, ke of Americans for Tax Reform, www.atr.org/, keeps us apprised of the Cost of Government Day® Report, Calendar Year 2008. Cost of Government Day (COGD) is the date of the calendar year on which the average American worker has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of spending and regulatory burdens imposed by government on the federal, state and local levels. The average American will have to work 111 days just to pay for the cost of federal spending, which will consume 30.36 percent of national income this year. This is a jump of over 31 days compared to 1999 and almost 21 days compared to 2008. This increase was caused by the rapid growth in federal spending relative to the growth of national income. Federal spending relative to the economy has increased by 39 percent since 1999. The average American will have to work 111 days just to pay for the cost of federal spending, which will consume 30.36 percent of national income this year. This is a jump of over 31 days compared to 1999 and almost 21 days compared to 2008. This increase was caused by the rapid growth in federal spending relative to the growth of national income. Federal spending relative to the economy has increased by 39 percent since 1999. Read more . . .

·                     Cost of Government Day for 2008 was July 16th, a four-day increase above last year’'s revised date of July 10th. With July 16th as the COGD, working people must toil on average 197 days out of the year just to meet all the costs imposed by government. In other words, the cost of government consumes 53.9 percent of national income. If we were to put health care into the public trough, the additional 18 percent would allow the government to control 70 percent or nearly three-fourths of our productivity and destroy our health care in the process. We would have almost no discretionary income.

·                     National Taxpayer's Union, www.ntu.org/main/, Duane Parde, President of the National Taxpayer’s Union, www.ntu.org/main/, keeps us apprised of all the taxation challenges our elected officials are trying to foist on us throughout the United States. To find the organization in your state that's trying to keep sanity in our taxation system, click on your state at www.ntu.org/main/groups.php.

·                     National Taxpayer's Union, www.ntu.org/main/, Duane Parde, President, keeps us apprised of all the taxation challenges our elected officials are trying to foist on us throughout the United States. To find the organization in your state that's trying to keep sanity in our taxation system, click on your state at www.ntu.org/main/groups.php. NTUF is the research arm of the 362,000-member National Taxpayers Union, a nonprofit, nonpartisan citizen group founded in 1969 to work for lower taxes, smaller government, and economic freedom at all levels. Note: Tables containing the word counts are below. Read more . . .

·                     FIRM: Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine, www.westandfirm.org, Lin Zinser, JD, Founder, www.westandfirm.org, researches and studies the work of scholars and policy experts in the areas of health care, law, philosophy, and economics to inform and to foster public debate on the causes and potential solutions of rising costs of health care and health insurance.

·                     FIRM: Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine, www.westandfirm.org, Lin Zinser, JD, Founder, researches and studies the work of scholars and policy experts in the areas of health care, law, philosophy, and economics to inform and to foster public debate on the causes and potential solutions of rising costs of health care and health insurance. Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM) promotes the philosophy of individual rights, personal responsibility, and free market economics in health care. FIRM holds that the only moral and practical way to obtain medical care is that of individuals choosing and paying for their own medical care in a capitalist free market. Federal and state regulations and entitlements, we maintain, are the two most important factors in driving up medical costs. They have created the crisis we face today. Read more . . . 

·                     Ayn Rand, The Creator of a Philosophy for Living on Earth, www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer, is a veritable storehouse of common sense economics to help us live on earth. Review the current series of Op-Ed articles, some of which you and I may disagree on. Read

·                     Ayn Rand, a Philosophy for Living on Earth, www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer, is a veritable storehouse of common sense economics to help us live on earth. Review the current series of Op-Ed articles, some of which you and I may disagree on. Read Atlas Shrugged—America's Second Declaration of Independence By Onkar Ghate.

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Articles that appear in HPUSA may not reflect the opinion of the editorial staff. Several sections 1-5 are entirely attributable quotes in the interest of the health care debate. We trust our valuable and faithful readers understand the need to open the debate to alternate points of view to give perspective to the freedom in healthcare issues. We have requested permission and many of the sites have given us standing permission to quote extensively from their sites and refer our readers back to their site.  

Editorial comments are in brackets.


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PLEASEALSO NOTE: HealthPlanUSA receives no government, foundation, or private funds. The entire cost of the website URLs, website posting, distribution, managing editor, email editor, and the research and writing is solely paid for and donated by the Founding Editor, while continuing his Pulmonary Practice, as a service to his patients, his profession, and in the public interest for his country.


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Del Meyer

Del Meyer, MD, CEO & Founder
DelMeyer@HealthPlanUSA.net

Satyam A Patel, MBA, CFO, & Co-Founder
SatyamPatel@HealthPlanUSA.net

HealthPlanUSA, LLC
www.HealthPlanUSA.net

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Feed back . . . 

 

Words of Wisdom

"Observation is like a muscle. It grows stronger with use and atrophies without use. Exercise your observation muscle and you will become a more powerful decoder of the world around you."
Joe Navarro: Former FBI agent and expert on nonverbal language

"The fruits of a fulfilling life—happiness, confidence, enthusiasm, purpose, and money—are mainly by-products of doing something we enjoy, with excellence, rather than things we can seek directly." — Dan Miller: Inspirational speaker and author

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.” Plato quotes (Ancient Greek Philosopher He was the world's most influential philosopher. 428 BC-348 BC)

 

Some Recenlevant Postings

It’s Time for Fundamental Health Care Reform by David Gibson, MD. . .

WHO OWNS YOUR BODY?: Doctors and Patients Behind Bars by the late Madeleine Pelner Cosman, PhD, Esq . . .

Why Are The Uninsured, Uninsured? By David Gibson, MD . . .

HealthPlanUSA January 2009 issue . . .

This Month in History – April

April Fool’s Day is a day that it is difficult to be taken seriously. However, some very serious things happened on April Fool’s Day.

April 1, 1789, is the Day that the U. S. House of Representatives finally achieved a quorum and went to work. Today they have an approval rating of just under twenty percent. They couldn’t be taken seriously except that they have power over our lives and the ability to take away our freedom. Do we wish we could wake up tomorrow and it was April Fool’s Day again?

April, 1863, marks the first U.S. conscription law which went into effect during our Civil War. The previous three wars were fought on a volunteer basis. After massive drafts for the two World Wars, we are again fighting the current wars on a volunteer basis.