Posted on 02/22/2013 10:43:52 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
This week I gasped in horror when I learned that Obama care had ordered Medicare to cut reimbursement for 4 million diabetic seniors by 66%. It also reduced all the companies that were supplying blood sugar monitoring supplies from 1000 to 15. I also learned via the research of Elizabeth Vliet M.D. that one of her 80 year old patients was told he was not covered anymore by Medicare when he went to the pharmacy so couldn’t get his medication. His choice was to pay cash or die.
Pause for a second and snap out of being mildly annoyed and grow a backbone and a few fangs over this. Just with Diabetic and Heart patients alone you are talking many millions of people, mostly seniors with coverage simply cut off or largely cut back — setting them up to die. That is unless they are millionaires and can afford expensive medication out of pocket. This is called as in the days of Nazi Germany, targeting a group of people for extermination and murdering them.
Millions will suffer and many will die just representing the pull back of coverage with Diabetic and Heart disease patients. Think about all the other diseases and seniors represented with dramatic or total cut backs by Medicare. Just as in Britain’s socialized medicine now, state-of-the-art drugs will be denied for all kinds of common cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and others.
Obama care is nothing more than a padded door to the ovens for the most needy and for our seniors...
(Excerpt) Read more at therothshow.com ...
Way too expensive for me. I’d expect half the leaves in the bag to be Cannabis for that price, especially from Central America.
Alright. I wrote a rant on this topic and decided not to bother posting it. But now I have to. :-)
One thing you have to realize is that these machines are not perfect. There can be as much as a 5% variation between readings from the exact same drop of blood and that is considered acceptable by the industry’s standard. My son’s a diabetic and we played with his meters. Here are some of the fun things we found.
- using the same draw of blood with three different calibrated machines (all the same brand) we saw readings across a 60 point range.
- using another blood sample, with the same machine, we ran three consecutive tests and had a 15 point variation.
- good hand washing is vital for testing because the machine will pick up any sugar that might be on your hands. We’re talking about *tiny* amounts. So if you handle a sugar packet or touch a drop of dried juice, wipe off your finger carelessly with a wipe and still have the most minute trace of sugar on your hand, it can throw off the results by a few points.
An accuracy of 5% is considered acceptable. But if you’re talking about a fasting BG of 102-105, you’re still within the accuracy range for the machine. (If you do a Google search about machine accuracy, you’ll find people who report inaccurate readings of up to 100 points. This can be a fatal error.)
Another thing to consider is that “normal” ranges for many diseases are constantly being reevaluated. Until 1998 110 for a fasting BG used to be considered the upper limit and a fasting BG above 140 was considered diabetic. They lowered it to 126. (I honestly believe that they did this to get more people on medication and using the equipment rather to aid public health. They did the same thing with cholesterol numbers.)
I was looking at charts showing the ‘diabetes epidemic’ for the US and it is telling that the numbers shot up after 1998. Diabetes used to be like every other disease. You went to the dr when you got sick. Now they screen most people regularly. People who feel perfectly fine are being diagnosed and medicated based on what could be nothing more than a quirk in the reading. So do we really have an increase of disease or of diagnosis?
So a fasting BG of 104 is nothing to get upset about. Personally, I’d be more interested if the numbers shot up with the glucose tolerance test. If one has *repeatedly* elevated fasting BG’s and responds poorly to the glucose challenge, then they’ve got a problem that has to be dealt with.
Finally, there are many factors that can affect the BG’s of a non-diabetic:
http://www.livestrong.com/article/466221-blood-sugar-levels-in-non-diabetics/
“Many factors may temporarily increase an individual’s blood sugar level, even in non-diabetics. These factors include trauma, stroke, heart attack, surgery and drugs such as corticosteroids, dextrose, epinephrine, diuretics, estrogen, aspirin and certain antidepressants. On the other hand, certain medications may reduce blood sugar including acetaminophen, alcohol, anabolic steroids, monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) and oral diabetic medications.”
Diseases and other factors that can cause elevated hyperglycemia include: hyperthyroidism, acromegaly, cushings, shock, stress (physical or emotional), and liver disease.
So it greatly oversimplifies the situation to say, “Your one fasting reading of 104 makes you a pre-diabetic.”
Why is this important? Because (until right now) this diagnosis greatly effected health insurance rates and it definitely has an impact on life insurance policies. Because we now have a gov’t that isn’t exactly friendly to people who’ve been diagnosed with a chronic illness. Because gov’t wonks use things like the “diabetes epidemic” to justify their nanny-state regulations and laws. Because every medication has negative side effects and it just MIGHT be a bad idea to put a healthy person on a drug that may cause harm in the long run. (And yes, there are drs who medicate pre-diabetics. Sometimes, this can be a good thing, but not if it’s based on one reading.)
And just *maybe* it might be a jerk thing to do to scare a healthy person into thinking that they have a life-threatening disease when they may have just had a really crappy nights sleep. (Yes, one night of bad sleep can raise your BG.)
http://news.leiden.edu/news/lack-of-sleep-affects-blood-sugar-level.html
Thanks for taking the time to post the rant. Experimental error and testing error certainly can be a factor. Going to the same lab consistently can make a difference in consistency. My readings have all been within 5% so I think testing reliability has been very good. I think the likelihood that my true fasting BG is within that range is probably over 95%.
Some folks are obsessively concerned with overpopulation—or more accurately, with the rest of us polluting their scenery by our existence. If not Obama, they had other choices lined up, and they were the only choices allowed for our votes.
I’m retired and happy that I do not take a lot of medications. While I have several health issues, most do not need daily medications. I’m also an RN. I know that sooner or later we’ll be Nazi Germany all over again. Heck, we never really determined as a nation that they were doing anything wrong. We refused to take boatloads of Jewish refugees, turning them away, and back to their country of origin. MANY in the US approved of Hitler and the evil medical things that the SS were performing on Jewish “patients”, mostly without any anesthesia. Jews were not considered human, the same thing you hear from 98% of college campuses today, along with 100% muslim groups, and 98% of the media. It will not take long for this to be approved here today because the democrats have already started the rhetoric, calling Christians, Jews, republicans, babies, disabled, and seniors things that chillingly sound familiar to Nazi Germany and NOBODY is calling them out on it.
Thanks, reading about Australian Cowplant.
You have to admit once again the Baraqqis have come up with a winning strategy,
The Death Panels not only help out Soc Sec and Medicare financials, but more rapidly kill off the group of voters that tend to vote Republican.
I would comment, but is probably best that I don’t.
True! In fact, I believe that they are already crying, but they do not have the intelligence to understand that it was their own actions, by their own hand that caused it.
Don’t hold your breath while waiting for them to do that.
PING
I'm 50 and take levothyroxin for my thyroids. The funny thing is, I pay about $3.85 for it without insurance whereas if I try to pay for it with my insurance, I have a $15 copay for a $3.85 medication.
I frankly don't care if my insurance stops paying for a medication that I can pay less for out of pocket!
Thinning the herd
The point for me isn’t the money, it’s the availability. There have been talks of shortages for crucial medications in the past. Just no telling if T4-specific hormone medications will fall into that category under Obamacare.
Remember the treatment Sara Palin got for talking about death panels?
The media pukes will be affected in this as well.
Just proves what I have known from the start when Obama said Obamacare will lower the debt,cut Medicare spending.
He was not lying,he just was not telling the whole truth,offing seniors will cut spending,no more seniors,less spending.
I believe that misinformed dope Sarah Palin said something about death panels,of course she is a dope.
I wonder if Paul Krugman is also a dope,Obama’s butt boy was caught recently speaking before a group and stated that in order to battle this debt problem we have,we are going to have to raise taxes and have DEATH PANELS.
You won’t hear that on nbc,I heard the recording from a person attending on the Glenn Beck show.
The dumbocrats and their media arm will vigorously blame it on the republican congress underfunding whatever program they can think up. It will then be just the republicans fault.
I picked up a bottle of “Sugar Blocker” (Gymnema) at Wal-Mart for around $9. Be interestingly to see if it lowers the BG 5 or 10 points over time. Also I see it has vanadyl sulfate in it, which is known to resemble insulin in its effects in recognized research. — thanks to Hope for suggesting this
That’s probably an awesome price. I worry about fillers in some herbs from walmart though. Also, gymnema is suppose to help with weight loss. Cant wait to try it!
“Why is there no one SCREAMING this from the rooftops?”
Because a Democrat is president.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.