Mother's Day

I read a stat the other day. It said that stay at home moms would be worth approximately $117,000 if they were paid according to market demand.

I think my mom would be worth more than that.

Not just because she's my mom, but with me as her kid, you'd have to tack on a nurse's salary, too, which would put her earning power at more than $200,000, probably (beating my dad--sorry dad!).

My parents have split the Emily duties--Dad usually does the ER runs, the surgery runs, the let's go out of town and visit doctors who know nothing runs. He also Handles the Insurance Company (that's a biggie). Mom does the day to day Children's stuff, the meds, makes appointments, takes me to appointments, and does fun stuff like wash my hair, flush my port, change burn dressings, etc., etc., etc. That's a lot of work. Trust me. And we've had to be fairly inventive as the years have gone on. Washing hair with a PICC, for example, is different than washing hair with an accessed port.

Somehow in the midst of all this fun, Bryan and Mel also got raised and fed and taken to soccer, football, marching band, tennis, etc., etc., etc. I had voice lessons and dance classes and choir rehearsals. Meals got made and Christmas presents bought (Mom is, without a doubt, the Champion Christmas Shopper of the World. She is just awesome.). School projects got done, including counting pieces of litter in Blacklick Woods for a 5th grade "cluster" project. We went prom dress shopping and headed to hair appointments.

When people talk about "working mothers," they're usually leaving my mom, and all the other Stay and Home Moms, out. This irritates me. My mom certainly works, and works hard!! She's worked the equivalent of two jobs for, oh, 26 years now. That's not easy. And there's no paycheck, no reward banquets, no bonuses, not even cool lunches at fancy places with The Boss. If Mom had worked at a "real" job, then I have no idea what would've happened to me (or the rest of us). Part of successful CF and post-tx care is having a strong support system. In the weeks after tx, we were at The Resort almost every day. I couldn't drive for three months, and Dad had to work. What were we supposed to do? So mom took me and hung out in waiting rooms while I did PT and OT and all that good stuff. It takes time to learn to change dressings, access ports, and make sure all the meds are going right. I was sort of half there, what with all my drug interactions and such. Someone needed to take charge. And that was mom.

I would put up a pic of mom, but she's picky about that, so I'll just say we look alike. :) That should give you an idea.
Happy Mother's Day!

ARGH!!!

Mike Huckabee is really, really naive about our health care system.

I"m watching the GOP debate (well, was; now it's Steeler playoff time!) and the last topic before the commercial break was about health care, which I'm just a tiny bity interested in.

Mike Huckabee gave some of the worst answers I have EVER HEARD. First, he says that 80% of health care costs in America are caused by chronic illness, so we should do things to "prevent" these illness.

Well, OK.For things like type II diabetes, what are you going to do? Eliminate all McDonald's? Have exercise squads policing our physical activity? Exactly how are we going to enforce these things?

Second of all, things like CF and MS come under this 80% umbrella. So short of killing people, we can't prevent these, Mike. Sorry. (I bet Ann Romney just LOVED Huckabee's answers throughout this.)

Then he says we need to have a health care system that "prevents visits to the hospital." OK, again, nice idea. But what about those of us who, um, need hospitals? Who sort of live there, but not by our own volition?

I know that there's some substance to what he says (that yes, many of our health care problems,--obesity, etc.--come about by personal choices). But really, everything with cancer or CF or MS or anything genetic, etc. gets ignored by Huckabee. It's classical Protestant "The Lord helps those who help themselves" stuff.

And we all know what I think about that.

My boy Mitt did better. Talked about MA's plan, where you can buy private health insurance. Deductibles went from $300 to $180 a month. If you don't want to buy in, you don't have to. But then you're paying if you get sick.

Oh, and drug companies aren't the devil. Thanks for that, Mitt. :)

For the love of mike...

OK, yes, we know I am against socialized health care and all that. But that DOES NOT mean that I think our system is perfect.
oh no.
For example, most insurance companies don't cover hearing aids. That's right. And they go for about $1,500 a piece, meaning you're shelling out approximately $3,000 for these babies. Apparently insurance companies think you don't need to hear. Yet glasses and dental work are covered by (usually separate) insurance plans.
I think needing to hear is just as important as being able to see, don't you? My CI was covered, but my hearing aids weren't. And then for the CI, we had to proveI needed one before they'd consent. Because, you know, the idea of surgery involving my head is something I like to do just for kicks.

SOHC 4: CF kids in Australia

In Australia, where they have the much-vaunted "single-payer" or "universal" health care, this is the situation for CF patients:

YOUNG adults with cystic fibrosis are having to share a ward with children because the Royal Adelaide Hospital is refusing to take new patients.
About 20 adults, aged 18 to 20, are still being admitted to the deteriorating medical ward of the Women's and Children's Hospital for life-saving treatment because the RAH lacks resources to care for them, patients say.

The situation has created a bed shortage in the WCH, with cystic fibrosis (CF) patients being put on waiting lists for treatment.

And patients said they would refuse to transfer to the RAH unless the State Government funded urgent improvements to the RAH – the only hospital in Adelaide able to provide specialist care to adult CF sufferers.

One specialist and up to six nurses in the RAH's S2 ward are responsible for the care of about 120 patients a year.

Pictures of the S2 ward supplied to the Sunday Mail reveal holes in the walls, ceilings and floors, and broken equipment.

One patient was so desperate for hospital care she accepted a bed last week at the RAH in a bay that had been converted into a store room, sharing it with broken beds and medical equipment.

"I was desperate. There were no beds so I took the storage room – when you are really unwell you need the rest to get better," Gloria Lancione, 23, of Wynn Vale, said.

Carolyn Collis, whose sons Kyle, 20, and Daniel, 18, have CF, said services had reached a "crisis point" with the chest clinic "vastly understaffed".

The Hillbank mother this month launched a petition, addressed to Health Minister John Hill, demanding immediate action to improve the situation at the RAH. Among concerns were:

PATIENTS having to self-administer drugs because of a lack of staff.

PATIENTS sharing the ward with people with emphysema, tuberculosis and infectious diseases.

CF patients sharing IV pumps because of a lack of equipment.

PATIENTS being pressured into home treatment to ease the strain.

Parents want another full-time CF specialist doctor at the RAH, more nurses and a wholesale makeover of the ward, Ms Collis said.

"The state of that ward is affecting their health and a lot suffer depression," she said.

"It is cold, old, dull and depressing. A new hospital in the future does not help the crisis that we are in now."

Daniel Collis, who is treated at the WCH, said: "It gets hard because I still have to get up in the morning and go to work, and sometimes I don't get any sleep for three weeks because of babies crying."

But he cannot fault the level of care compared to what older brother Kyle receives at the RAH.

More often than not Kyle chooses to administer his own drugs because of work commitments and the lack of staff at the RAH – even if it means no ongoing monitoring of his health.

"Really, the state of the RAH is shocking," Kyle said. "They are promising a new hospital in 10 years, but we've got an average lifespan of 30, I'm 21 this year, what am I going to be like at 30?"

Ms Collis met with RAH CEO Virginia Deegan, and nurses on Tuesday.

She said Ms Deegan had acknowledged improvements were needed but had said nursing numbers were adequate.

A focus group of parents and nurses will meet next month.

In an emailed statement, Mr Hill said $420,000 a year has been allocated from June 1 to set up a statewide CF service, including the recruitment of more staff.

"This service . . . will focus on the way our health system cares for people with CF, including their treatment at the WCH and the RAH, and broader issues such as support . . . in the community," he said.

"There have been major gains made in recent years in treating this disease with . . . more people with CF living into their 30s."

SOHC : data (part 3)

Continuing...some data I have gleaned from various sources on Canadian versus American health care:

WAIT TIMES:
24% of Canadians waited 4 hours or more in the ER, versus 12% in the US
57% of Canadians waited 4 weeks or more to see a specialist, versus 23% in the US
21% of Canadian Hospital Administrators said it would take over three weeks to do a biopsy for possible breast cancer on a 50 YO woman, versus less than 1% of American hospital administrators.
50% of Canadian hospital administrators said it would take over 60 months for a 65 YO to undergo routine hip replacement surgery, versus none of their American counterparts.

MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS:
Canada has fewer doctors per capita than the US--the US has 2.4 doctors per 1,000 people, while Canada has 2.2. (2005)
Many Canadian physicians go to the US for post-graduate training in medical residencies, since new and cutting-edge sub-specialties are often more widely available in the U.S. as opposed to Canada.

TECHNOLOGY
2004: Canada had 4.6 MRI scanners per 1 million people; the US had 19.5 million. Canada has 10.3 CT scanners per million people--the US has 29.5 million.

MONOPSONY--outlawing private medical care for services covered by the public health plan.
--Those with non-emergency illness such as cancercannot pay out of pocket for time-sensitive surgeries and must wait their turn on waiting lists.
--The Canadian Supreme Court ruled in 2005 (Chaoulli v. Quebec that waiting list delays "increase the patient's risk of mortality or the risk that his or her injuries will become irreparable." This ruling is expected to lead to greater privatization efforts.

Do we STILL think that this is the way to go? Cancer patients being put on waiting lists for surgeries and chemo? More than four months to see a specialist? Fewer than 5 MRI scanners for every million people in the country? Being unable to have a surgery when you need it, even if you can pay for it, because the government says no???

SOHC: The European Utopia

The following are all taken from Dr. Theodore Dalrymple's article, "Health of the State"in the Aug. 13, 2007 edition of National Review. . Dr. Dalrymple worked as part of the British National Health Service for 20 years.

To avoid public criticism of the NHS in Britain is like avoiding evidence of dictatorship in North Korea: It is possible only for the willfully blinkered.

In its most successful period, the state-run NHS was possibly the least bureaucratic system in the world: far, far less bureaucratic than the American free-enterprise, or increasingly corporatist, system. This was because doctors were still the most powerful group within it...in return for their salary, the doctors had effective control of most things, including who got what. They neither knew nor were interested in what anything cost: Rationing was informal and implicit rather than formal and explicit as it is now, and quite without bureaucratic controls or costs. The NHS also had the cultural capital of the hospital system that existed before it.

But there were problems from the first. Chief among them was that capital expenditures came to an immediate halt after the NHS was begun

EMD: so no new hospitals, new infrastructure, nothing.

Fewer hospitals were opened in the first half-century after the start of the NHS than in the 1930s alone. The result has been that the vast majority of NHS hospitals are now run down institutions...the one in which I worked was a 19th-century workhouse.

The NHS was founded on the supposition that, as the population grew healthier thanks to its socialized ministrations, health-care costs would decline. The exact opposite was the case, of course: Not only did health care become vastly more expensive, but the population aged fast and needed ever more such health care. Government funding form general taxation always limped behind what was necessary to keep up with demand and with technological developments. Waiting lists for expensive investigations and procedures lengthened as shortages became even greater. Emergency care remained good, but at the expense of almost everything else.

Expenditure has increased 300 percent in ten years, but most people believe that very little, if anything, has changed for the better, and some for the worse...[h]e who pays the piper calls the tune, at least eventually. For many years tye government refrained from interfering very obviously in the running of health services in Britain, but it has increasingly set targets for hospitals and doctors to meet, and interfered with the minutiae of medical practice, laying down who must be treated first, and with what treatment.

Manager in the NHS now often decided on the priority of patients' operations, not on clinical grounds, but according to government targets; they scour the wards for patients they believe can be discharged; they set priorities in the emergency rooms, again not according to clinical criteria, but in according to the need to meet government targets. Manager now screen all referrals to psychiatrists and decide which patients the psychiatrist should see, which is a fundamental breach of medical ethics. A central organization, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, lays down what drugs may be prescribed by doctors in the NHS.Now of course problems such as the ones I have just mentioned exist in all systems where payment for medical services is made by third parties. But to make a single, all-powerful third party--and the government at that--responsible for all such payment is to magnify and compound the problem.

Variation in morbidity and mortality between the social classes in Britain is as great as it was before the NHS was instituted, and possibly greater. [Michael] Moore [in his film Sicko] does not tell us about waiting times in the NHS. (I remember one patient, a man of 70, who had had a hernia diagnosed seven years previously. HE was put on a waiting list for an operation, but hearing nothing from the hospital for seven yearswrote a letter to enquire when he would have his operation. He received a letter telling him to wait his turn. In a system such as the NHS, an apparently rational and just reason not to operate on him--i.e., there was something more urgent to be done--can always be found.) He also fails to tell us there has been a rising tide of public dissatisfaction with the NHS; that 75 percent of senior doctors in Britain want to retire as soon as possible...that the results in the NHS for many cancers and heart conditions are among the worst in the Western world; that the hospitals are filthy and that the rates of hospital infection are also among the highest.

Before the NHS...75 percent of the population had private medical insurance, and they couldn't all have been rich

It is clear that the American systems leave a lot to be desired--as do most systems. It is expensive and not particularly effective when viewed from the point of view of public health. It has strengthens...for example, that it is by far the most innovative and performs by far the most important medical research in the world. Nor is it even a complete public-health disaster: life expectancy at birth in the Untied states increased from 75.4 years in 1990 to 77.5 in 2003.

The Saga of Health Care #1

I can tell this is going to be a semi-regular feature here in the bucket, so I'm going to kick it off with a few posts right off the beat. Some of these will be rebuttals (as this one is), some will be informative, and some will be ranting. :) So without further ado, installment 1 in the SOHC series: (this I got fro Lieft of the Dial. My comments in bold, and emphases

Laboratories of Failure

Another fine column pointing out the absurdity not only of our current health care system but the flaws in one of the most common arguments in favor of keeping it.

This is a consistent theme among opponents of universal care. They act like universal care is some crazy utopian fantasy like communism that has no realistic prospect of working and has failed miserably whenever tried. They never acknowledge the fact we are the outliers, that every other first world country has long since moved to a system of universal care and that there are now a multitude of different, fully-functioning systems out there for us to choose from. In other words, we're well past the experimental stage. It's like mocking someone's idea for a "flying machine" in, say, 1954 ("when that contraption crashes it will prove to the world that man was never meant to fly!").

I thought this comment also explained quite nicely one of the reasons we haven't made any serious progress on this issue, despite the majority of Americans haing the current system:

Under a socialist health care system, the government hires all the doctors, nurses and other health professionals. The government owns and runs all the clinics, hospitals, ambulance services — the whole enchilada.

Anyone who thinks that system is absolutely no good better be prepared to explain why presidents, Cabinet members, 535 members of Congress and the whole sprawling U.S. military find it overall satisfactory or better. Because that's exactly the health care system those Americans have.

In other words, the politicians already have the best system in the world. So they have no pressing need to fix ours.

Because, after all, they got theirs. Screw everyone else.

Although that's not even the system folks are really clamoring for.

What folks on the left want is a single-payer, universal health insurance system, with the federal government doing the honors. So, consumers get the coverage they need at a price they can afford for care from whomever they choose to get care from.

Businesses get relieved of the burden of co-funding expensive insurance plans. They also will be relieved of the temptation to push 59-year-old Marge, who's already had a lumpectomy, into an early and meager retirement because she (and other less than completely healthy older workers) will run up the premiums for the whole company if they're kept on the payroll.

Well. That does sound radical.

EMD: Well, as usual, this is posted without any sort of reasoning, data, etc., except perpetuating the whole fantasty that if we had single-payer health care, life would just mbe this magical fantasy land where everyone had magic health care and we'd just all be the healthiest people ever.
In the next post I'm going to regale you with ACTUAL facts about how this supposedly great system works in these counties and what is actually means.

Work!

Back to work today--I even got there early! Well, OK , part of that was due to my stupid uneven head which led to an inability to sleep (I am so doing the Tylenol PM tonight kids. So definitely.), which lead to it being pretty easy to get up when the alarm went off.
I am all caught up, and even started doing some regular work, so I am proud of myself. I thought I'd be super-behind since we were supposed to be busy today. Don't get me wrong, we were busy, but the boys had most of it in hand and didn't need reinforcements, so I was able to catch up and get organized. Fantastic.
Head feeling OK, it can still be a pain in the butt though. I'm wary of starting pilates/yoga again due to some of the positions my head would be in. I suppose I could modify them, or just skip them. Parish Council went long tonight so I'll just do some minimal stuff and try the modified yoga tomorrow.
Hoping to get some letter writing/reading/journaling in before bed...started A Wonderful Welcome to Ozlast night by reading the Gregory Maguire introduction, and am hoping to read the beginning of Mansfield Park tonight.
Oh, btw, saw the bill for my surgery today....$77 THOUSAND. Can I say how much I love my insurance company right now? We don't have to pay any of it. Mwah insurance company. Mwah.

Way too true....

From Dream Mom, a new blog I've discovered. She's talking about treatment options for her son, who has a variety of medical problems (read the blog for more details, http://dreammom.blogspot.com, I think):

The visit ends with a discussion of the surgeries. Tonsils and adenoids removed, to open the throat for breathing and a Nissen, to help with the reflux. I ask if it can all be performed before the end of the year, since we’ve met our stop loss. Our stop loss, is met every year now, as a formality. That’s when you know, the disease has you.

That is so true. We meet ours every year, usually around August. It's good, because then everything is covered after that, but sad, because that means you've used a heck of a lot of money on health care.