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I know this is off topic for me, but this seems to be a growing problem. People invest their whole lives, put their trust into a company and then when they turn around and ask for what was promised to them. They get the back of a hand. It is just not right. I am not for universal health care. For the rest..... http://islaminaction08.blogspot.com/2008/07/health-benefits-denied.html

In his "I Have a Dream" speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Character is defined as the essence of a person and determines a person's judgment, or what a person will do when no one is looking. Dr. King's admonishment is relevant during this 2008 election, and black Americans should evaluate the candidates based on competence to be our Commander in Chief, not skin color....

WASHINGTON: US researchers reported that they may have found a way to flush out herpes viruses from hiding — offering a potential way to cure pesky and painful conditions from cold sores to shingles. They discovered that a mysterious gene carried by the herpes simplex-1 virus — the one that causes cold sores — allows the virus to lay low in the nerves it infects. It does so via microRNAs, little pieces of genetic material that regulate the activity of many viruses, the researchers report in the journal Nature. It may be possible to "wake up" the virus and then...

To people around the world who have seen the video, Esmin Green is a symbol of a health-care system that seems to have failed horribly. Green, 49, is shown rolling off a waiting room chair at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, on June 19. She lands face-down on the floor, convulsing. Surveillance video captures her lying on the floor for more than an hour as several hospital workers see her and appear to ignore her. She died there. But to fellow members of her church, she was known as "Sister Green." Together, they served as a family for...

...the pharmaceutical industry has become a lightning rod for critics. For example, Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, blasted the drug industry in a much-publicized 2004 book, accusing it of profiteering and having become "a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit." She maintained the pharmaceutical industry's reputation for innovation is a myth, that it "feeds off the NIH" and that new drugs "nearly always stem from publicly supported research." ...Mr. Zycher and his colleagues concluded that scientific contributions of the private sector were essential for the discovery and/or development of virtually all the...

Homeless people die after bird flu vaccine trial in Poland By Matthew Day in Warsaw Last Updated: 11:17PM BST 02/07/2008 Three Polish doctors and six nurses are facing criminal prosecution after a number of homeless people died following medical trials for a vaccine to the H5N1 bird-flu virus. The medical staff, from the northern town of Grudziadz, are being investigated over medical trials on as many as 350 homeless and poor people last year, which prosecutors say involved an untried vaccine to the highly-contagious virus. Authorities claim that the alleged victims received £1-2 to be tested with what they thought...

Academic Morning After Profits by: Bethany Stotts, July 02, 2008 This June the New York Times broke the story that two Harvard Professors, Dr. Joseph Biederman and Dr. Timothy Wilens, had only belatedly reported their considerable external financing from drug makers to their University. The evidence, revealed during a congressional investigation, may also cast suspicion on the dramatic increase in prescribed antipsychotics. As AIA has documented, some groups remain skeptical of the expansive definitions surrounding Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses. Others are concerned by the rapid expansion of the use of psychotropic drugs among children. The investigation of the Harvard doctors,...

Patients will be able to escape NHS queues by demanding treatment anywhere in the European Union without the prior approval of a doctor, under proposals to guarantee health rights unveiled today in Brussels. The NHS would then be duty bound to refund the British cost of the procedure under the new rules for cross-border healthcare. Today’s proposed EU directive will give patients in all 27 member states the same rights to treatment on the NHS as British patients. It also guarantees that the full cost of treatment abroad will be refunded when an NHS professional has agreed that it...

Changes in the way dentists are paid mean they effectively have no financial incentive to give appropriate treatment, the Commons Health Select Committee said. Under the new contract, dentists receive an agreed annual sum rather than being paid for each individual treatment. The committee found the number of dentists extracting a decaying tooth rather than carrying out a more complicated procedure had increased. As a result, the volume of more complex work like crowns, bridges and dentures has fallen by 57%. Evidence presented to the committee also suggested that patients were being pushed unnecessarily into the hospital system. A survey...

Melissa Wagoner, spokeswoman for Kennedy, added that "Making sure each American has access to quality, affordable healthcare is the cause of Senator Kennedy's life."

One year ago today, San Francisco became the first city in the nation to attempt to provide universal health care to its residents. Twelve months later, some city residents wonder why the program is billed as universal when they're still getting turned away. When the Healthy San Francisco program began at two Chinatown clinics July 2, 2007, public health officials said they would swing open the doors to all of the city's 73,000 uninsured residents on Jan. 1, 2008. They anticipated that people would enroll gradually at a pace of about 600 a week, and full coverage would be attained...

The Sunshine State has about 3.8 million people without insurance, or about 21% of the population, the fourth-highest rate in the country. The "Cover Florida" plan hopes to improve those numbers by offering access to more affordable policies. As even Barack Obama says, the main reason people are uninsured isn't because they don't want to be; it's because coverage is too expensive. But the Florida reform, which both houses of the legislature approved unanimously, renounces Mr. Obama's favored remedy: It nudges the government out of the health-care marketplace. Insurance companies will be permitted to sell stripped-down, no-frills policies exempted from...

Senator Edward M. Kennedy's office has begun convening a series of meetings involving a wide array of healthcare specialists to begin laying the groundwork for a new attempt to provide universal healthcare, according to participants. The discussions signal that Kennedy, who instructed aides to begin holding the meetings while he is in Massachusetts undergoing treatment for brain cancer, intends to work vigorously to build bipartisan support for a major healthcare initiative when he returns to Washington in the fall. Those involved in the discussions said Kennedy believes it is extremely important to move as quickly as possible on overhauling the...

They callously ignored her. Esmin Green is seen in these infuriating images collapsing on the psychiatric emergency-room floor at Kings County Hospital - stared at by one worker, ignored by a security guard, and finally nudged by a health-care staffer on June 19. She lay there for an hour before doctors and nurses snapped to attention and tried to revive the 49-year-old Jamaica native. It was too late. The shocking video was released by lawyers suing KCH in federal court on an unrelated matter. "I heard about it and it's horrible how she died like that," said Green's landlady, Beatrice...

NEW YORK - Video from a surveillance camera at a Brooklyn hospital shows a woman dying on the floor of a psychiatric emergency room while people nearby ignore her. The video was released Monday by lawyers suing Kings County Hospital alleging neglect and abuse of mental health patients at the facility. The video shows the 49-year-old woman keeling over and falling out of her chair on June 19 and lying facedown on the floor, then thrashing before going still. About an hour passed before someone realized what was happening and tried to help.

Arnold Kling EconLog talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the death of his father and the lessons to be learned for how hospitals treat patients and our health care system treats hospitals.

In an occasional series, The Post and Courier has been exploring the potential consequences of illegal immigration on people in business, law enforcement, health and education. Ana-Cecilia de Marquez, 43, rubs her belly when she talks. The illegal immigrant has bothersome and sometimes painful symptoms that require her to stay close to her Goose Creek mobile home. "It's ... like I'm going to deliver a baby," de Marquez said. "It feels like a wound inside." De Marquez, who moved from El Salvador to the United States three years ago, is uninsured. She said she has been bounced around the health...

As of June 25, 2008 report from SEC, www.SEC.gov/news/speech/2008/spch062508cc_annuity.htm "…Equity indexed annuities [fixed index annuities] are investments that insurance companies sell to the public. They were first introduced about 13 years ago, around 1995. They gained ground and grew significantly over the years — in 2004 alone, for example, sales of equity indexed annuities increased over 50 percent, from $14 billion in 2003 to about $22 billion in 2004. In 2007, indexed annuity sales were nearly $25 billion. Today, over $123 billion is invested in indexed annuities…. Today, in 2008, the cause for concern seems greater than ever. Recently, Dateline...

Healthcare Workers to Tour Cuba When Michael Moore directed the documentary SiCKO (Dog Eat Dog Films, 2007), he portrayed Cuba's public health system as an international elite that offers residents free, famously effective, cradle-to-grave medical care that rivals anything offered in the United States and Canada. Some observers challenge any glowing appraisals offered by Moore and others as being at least partially the products of a despotic propaganda machine whose gears are cranked by the Castro dictatorship. The truth about our "forbidden" neighbor's famous health system is one that few Americans have witnessed firsthand since the 1963 U.S. embargo, but...

One in four child deaths is 'avoidable' says report exposing wrong diagnoses and treatments Last updated at 23:29pm on 28.06.08   Failures in care by medical professionals, social workers and parents are responsible for one in four child deaths, according to a Government-backed report.A panel of experts reviewed 126 deaths in one year and found 'avoidable factors', such as doctors misdiagnosing a serious illness or giving the wrong treatment, in 26 per cent of cases.A further 43 per cent were due to 'potentially avoidable factors' – including missing important immunisations or delays in treatment.  Tragedy: Nine-month-old Liam Eaves died...

A group of cardiologists recently had a proposition for Dr. Andrew Rosenblatt, who runs a busy heart clinic in San Francisco: Would he join them in buying a CT scanner, a $1 million machine that produces detailed images of the heart? The scanner would give Dr. Rosenblatt a new way to look inside patients’ arteries, enable his clinic to market itself as having the latest medical technology and provide extra revenue. Although tempted, Dr. Rosenblatt was reluctant. CT scans, which are typically billed at $500 to $1,500, have never been proved in large medical studies to be better than older...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Scientists at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center are about to embark on a human trial to test whether a new cancer treatment will be as effective at eradicating cancer in humans as it has proven to be in mice. The treatment will involve transfusing specific white blood cells, called granulocytes, from select donors, into patients with advanced forms of cancer. A similar treatment using white blood cells from cancer-resistant mice has previously been highly successful, curing 100 percent of lab mice afflicted with advanced malignancies. Zheng Cui, Ph.D., lead researcher and associate professor of pathology, will...

WASHINGTON -- Government-run health care has been debated in the United States for years and has become a flashpoint during the 2008 presidential race with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama advocating some type of nationalized plan like in both Europe and Canada. But there's also a growing movement in opposition to having those individual health decisions made by Washington bureaucrats, and Europeans and Canadians who lived with – or perhaps survived is a better word – their national health-care systems are helping that effort. A series of videos is being released telling horror stories that have emerged under a...

I really have a great amount of pity for those millions of poor souls who have such undying faith in the promises made by any politician, particularly those who hold nationaloffices. Those who swallow this “Alice in Wonderland” rhetoric will suffer the deepest cuts of all when they step back through the looking glass and view reality for the first time. Perhaps the best available example of the “Promises Made-Promises Kept” lie can be found when viewing the health care provided for career military retirees. Those who enlisted in the armed forces from World War II through the Korean War...

As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates' comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in Detroit, the overworked doctor in Orlando, to name a few. But no one will mention Claude Castonguay — perhaps not surprising because this statesman isn't an American and hasn't held office in over three decades.

The Oregon Health Plan:The Reality of When the Government Runs Health Care "Elect me and your health care problems will all be over." The people of Oregon fell for that line almost 20 years ago. Expecting Utopia, what they got was a reality check: long lines for a lottery to pick who's covered and suicide coverage--instead of cancer drugs. In 1989. Oregon became the second State, after Hawaii, to attempt complete medical coverage of it's citizens. It has not gone as planned. In fact, it seems to be approaching disaster. Within a few years: In early 2003, the Oregon Health...

Barack Obama on Thursday used Pittsburgh as his stage to ask Americans for a mandate to implement a national health care plan if he's elected president. "If we can't control skyrocketing health care costs, we'll confront a mounting moral crisis and a major anchor on the ability of American business to compete," Obama said the health care system's shortfalls hold back the nation and concern Americans more than any issue except soaring fuel prices. "The key is that the American people have to provide a mandate for change in this area," Obama said. "We have to insist ... we're going...

To prevent the NHS from turning septic politically, the health secretary, Alan Johnson, moved on June 17th towards dropping an increasingly untenable piece of dogma. The issue is whether patients who doctors think might benefit from expensive new drugs that are not provided by the NHS must be denied all state-financed treatment if they choose to buy those drugs privately. The NHS has always rationed care but, in an era of medical paternalism and no internet, patients were ignorant of what they were missing. That allowed the fiction to flourish that the highest-quality care was being provided for all, according...

It's been six weeks since my quadruple coronary bypass. Time to return to the Cardiologist; time for my first post-op EKG. Why is my EKG still bad and what is a negative T-wave? Why can't TWO doctors decide on my prescription drugs? Why aren't my surgical wounds handily healed and ready for moving on?

<p>CARACAS - Grimacing from contractions, expectant mother Castuca Marino had more on her mind than birth pangs.</p> <p>She was nervous about whether she and her newborn child would make it out of the hospital alive. Interviewed as she stood in the emergency room of Concepción Palacios Maternity Hospital here last week, Marino had heard news reports of six infant deaths there over the course of a 24-hour period late in March.</p>

TRENTON, N.J. — A New Jersey surgeon's medical license was suspended after state regulators found he removed the wrong lung from a patient, then tried to conceal the error. The State Board of Medical Examiners found Dr. Santusht Perera moved a portion of the patient's right lung when he should have been removing a tumor in the left lung, the state Attorney General's Office said Wednesday. Perera, according to the board, then told the patient that the right lung contained a life-threatening tumor, though there was no such growth. He also altered the patient's records to show he intended to...

As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates' comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in Detroit, the overworked doctor in Orlando, to name a few.But no one will mention Claude Castonguay — perhaps not surprising because this statesman isn't an American and hasn't held office in over three decades. Castonguay's evolving view of Canadian health care, however, should weigh heavily on how the candidates think about the issue in this country. Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government...

What if we bought cars the same way we buy health care? The dealer would say, "Look, we don't really know the price of our cars, but we know you really need one. So, why don't you just come by and pick one up." Then three weeks later you would begin receiving a blizzard of bills — a bill from the people who made the chassis, a bill from people who made the transmission, a bill from the seat maker and the paint people and the folks who made the sound system. ... Gratefully, cars aren't sold that way. All...

HAVANA, June 24 (Reuters) - Cuban scientists said on Tuesday the first vaccine to extend lives of lung cancer patients has been approved by Cuban authorities for use and is available in the island's hospitals. The drug, CimaVax EGF, has been shown to increase survival rates on average four to five months and much longer in some patients, they said in a news conference at Cuba's Center of Molecular Immunology. In contrast to chemotherapy, the traditional treatment for lung cancer, they said CimaVax EGF has few side effects because it is a modified protein that attacks only cancer cells. The...

A NSW man has pulled out his own rotten tooth after waiting years for public dental treatment. Jeff Miners said he extracted his own molar tooth about four weeks ago, after he had languished on a series of public dental waiting lists since 2001. Despite having a mouthful of rotten teeth, the 58-year-old from Bega in southern NSW has gone without treatment except for a single filling in 2005. "Through inaction, I had to start taking action myself,'' Mr Miners said. "I kept working on it to loosen it, the cavity was so big I could fit my forefinger into...

We constantly hear about the cost of earmarks and the Iraq War, but we hear nothing about "entitlements" -- the government's ironic term for programs that transfer money from people who earned it to people who didn't. Today's big problem with entitlements is that their growth will soon eat everything in the federal budget, says 20/20 host John Stossel. Last month, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed the growth of government spending and deficits for Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), ranking member of the House Budget Committee. According to the CBO report: Spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which in...

In a surprise development, the House on Tuesday passed a Medicare bill with a veto-proof majority, marking a significant step toward a goal that has eluded Congress all year. The measure passed on a 355-59 vote, with 129 Republicans joining all Democrats who voted to approve the bill. Several members of the GOP leadership cast votes for the legislation. The Democratic leadership set a high bar for passage by placing the measure on the suspension calendar, where it needed a two-thirds majority. As time ran out on the vote and it became clear it had reached that mark, at least...

Fear Factor Accompanies Generic Drugs Made In China By ROBERT COHENWASHINGTON — First, it was inexpensive toys, apparel, footwear and electronics that flooded the U.S. market from China. The next Chinese export to reach American consumers will be lower-cost generic versions of brand-name medicines. Although it will take at least several years before Chinese-made generics are available here in significant numbers, the prospect already is raising safety concerns, given China's history of substandard drugs at home, the recent scandal involving contaminated ingredients in the blood thinner heparin, and other safety problems, from tainted pet food to toothpaste. "We should be...

One of D.C.’s main health care providers for the Latino community is facing a financial crisis. According to......El Tiempo Latino, la Clinical del Pueblo has a deficit of $500,000 and may have to cut services soon without a bailout. The clinic serves more than 7,000 clients, most of whom are recent immigrants. Manuela Sifuentes, a project manager at the clinic, says the cash-flow problems stem from the facility’s recent growth. Last summer, the federal government awarded the center certification as a federally qualified health center, which meant they could bill Medicaid at a higher rate and get access to additional...

My lad is in America waiting for a visa to live there and marry a lovely American lass. He was taken ill and went to hospital where an appendectomy was performed. The bill is $28,000 minimum. We think he has medical cover but we don't know the datils ...is ths figure about right? Anyone out there with any advice?

US health official says flu threat high A top U.S. health official says the threat of a flu pandemic remains high. And while the world has made great strides to prepare, it's not enough. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Julie Gerberding says bird flu fatigue among countries and the public is a growing concern. Scientists have identified the H5N1 bird flu virus as a potential candidate that could mutate into a form that spreads easily among people. "People have very short attention spans and when something is in the news for a while, it becomes old...

Audience member: If you have this great message and you have to turn it over to the opposition’s message machine — it’s like if you’re in court and you ask the opposing attorney to explain your story — how do we overcome that? BO: Well, look, can the Democrats do a better job delivering a message? Absolutely. But this may reveal some naiveté on my part, and so I offer this with some hesitance. I don’t think that the Democrats will be effective simply by trying to mimic what the Republicans have done. First of all, we’re not as good...

Ottawa, Canada (AHN) - Four million Canadians do not have a regular physician, indicating the acute lack of doctors in the country. The Canada Community Health Survey of Statistics Canada released Wednesday said 86 percent of those born in Canada or have been in the country for at least 5 years have a regular doctor who oversees their medical needs, while only 65 percent of recent immigrants have one. The numbers, however, must not alarm Canadians, said Dr. Raisa Deber, professor of health policy at the University of Toronto. "What you really worry about is not having someone able to...

A GOP Prescription Health care need not be a Democratic issue. By David Gratzer Americans rank health care as one of their top domestic concerns; Democrats are heavily favored on the issue; and Barack Obama campaigns on his health-care plan. What’s a Republican to do? The GOP can start by attacking Democratic overreach. Americans dislike big-government programs. They dislike wage and price controls. They hate being told what to do. Yet, in many ways, those are the core principles of practically every major Democratic health-care proposal today. Republicans should remind voters of the heavy-handed features of Democratic plans — the...

A government-sponsored survey of the use of computerized patient records by physicians points to two seemingly contradictory conclusions, and a health care system at odds with itself. The report, published online on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that doctors who use electronic health records say overwhelmingly that they have helped improve the quality and timeliness of care. Yet fewer than one in five of the nation’s physicians have started using such records. Bringing patient records into the computer age, experts say, is crucial to improving care, reducing errors and containing costs in the American health care...

Fair Care by: Emily Miller, June 18, 2008 Solutions to fix the problem of the estimated 47 million Americans without health insurance usually entail the creation of yet another cumbersome government bureaucracy riddled with red tape. Authors J. Patrick Rooney and Dan Perrin take a different approach in their new book America’s Health Crisis Solved: Money-Saving Solutions, Coverage for Everyone. Rooney, famed for creating the first health savings account (HSA) and former chief executive of Golden Rule Insurance Company, and Perrin, President of HSA Coalition, proposed a health care insurance plan they dubbed “Fair Care” that focuses on fixing the...

Last week, the National Center for Health Statistics announced that the average life expectancy for Americans has risen to an all-time high of 78 years. In addition, record high life expectancy was recorded for both white males and black males (76 years and 70 years, respectively) as well as for white females and black females (81 years and 76.9 years). This is obviously good news. But a question nags—why are people in other countries living longer on average than Americans? After all, we are the country that spends the most money per capita on health care. For example, according to...

Despite having the most costly health system in the world, the United States consistently underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries. This report—an update to two earlier editions—includes data from surveys of patients, as well as information from primary care physicians about their medical practices and views of their countries' health systems. Compared with five other nations—Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom—the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The U.S. is the only country in the study...

BOISE--The Idaho Supreme Court ruled Monday that an undocumented immigrant who was injured while living in Ada County is entitled to medical indigency assistance from the county. A majority of the justices sided with Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center, which had sued the Ada County Board of commissioners after it denied an application for medical indigency assistance from Javier Ortega Sandoval. Sandoval had more than $187,000 in medical bills after he had a stroke while working in the Boise region. The high court found that undocumented alien status doesn't affect the determination of whether someone is a resident. In other...

/ Iowa and Beijing, China - From where Ruth Lycke sits, it comes as no surprise that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke would warn that rising health costs may pose an economic risk. She's seen the rising cost of health care emptying the wallets of her clients for several years now. "My clients can't afford health care treatment in the United States," says Ruth Lycke, CEO of China Connection, an Iowa and China-based company and foundation that helps Americans and other foreigners seek medical treatment in China. "These people go to China because the care in China is affordable, reliable...