Here’s what some Hollywood actors have to say in defense of those pitiful corporate victims of possible competition in todays health care market… Enjoy!

Useful link:
New health care plan and your wallet

Thus we have likely been watching the D.C. Street Theater (recently back from nationwide tour over the August recess at Town Hall meetings in every state) with some amazement. Knowing that the truth is that health care is the third leading cause of death, perhaps wondering if greater access for some of the ~50 million Americans without insurance is actually going to “fix” what’s wrong with health care in this country. Which is #37 on the list of 37 industrialized nations in both access and outcomes.

One of the more “important” results of what is now more honestly being called Health Insurance Reform is the promise of government subsities to enroll as many of those ~50 million uninsured Americans in for-profit health care as possible. This is of course a way to compensate for-profit insurers for new regulations that will prevent them from refusing to insure those with pre-existing conditions, rescinding policies when the person gets sick or injured, and other racketeering practices that have 3 of every 4 of the “medically bankrupt” bankrupt despite HAVING insurance.

So I went Googling to find out if the uninsured and underinsured use a lot of health care, since that doesn’t ring true. What Google responded with were various evaluations of how much the uninsured as a CLASS cost the delivery system every year. The best example is a pdf from Health Affairs entitled:

How Much Medical Care Do The Uninsured Use, And Who Pays For It?

Here we can see in black and white that the uninsured use the medical care delivery system far, far less often than anybody else. If we divvy up the total cost of health care in America evenly amongst a rounded 350 million citizens, the cost is $7439 per person every year. But the uninsured – 50 million of the 350 milliion – only cost $1253 per person. That means in real terms the per capita cost to 300 million insured Americans must go up to over $8250 per year!

Wow! Looks like the uninsured are a positive bargain! At least, in actuarial terms, as an insurance hack would view such things. Thus an extremely desirable, low-risk pool of potential patsies to bilk.

Now, we all know that most of overall expenditures reflect people who use way more than an equal share of medical care per year. In addition to the uninsured who use little health care, there are tens of millions more Americans who also don’t use the health care system unless they have to. Co-pays and deductibles have been rising as fast as premiums (at many times the rate of annual inflation), so even the middle class doesn’t have money to go to doctors anymore.

So what we’re looking at (in order of importance for the Congress) in the matter of health insurance reform is that -

1. The for-profit insurance companies are so RICO crooked that they absolutely must be regulated severely.

2. Co-pays and deductibles are completely unreasonable (and getting worse fast), making even expensive insurance these days useless except for Big Ticket items. For which you have to fight hard, threaten to sue, or go bankrupt. Unacceptable for those who have to eat the losses (We The People).

3. In order to get items 1 and 2 accomplished, the insurers must be ‘given’ that pool of ~50 million people who barely use the system at all. They can make good money on these people.

4. The “Public Option” we’ll end up getting will be a subsidy to the insurers to cover the people who seldom use health care, and the minimal pay-out for those who do.

The only way a public option can actually control costs (beyond any limits imposed on the insurers, which will be made up for by the increased pool) is for it to be a government-run single-payer system. One that bargains for prices on everything, and with clout. That is not what we’ll get, so all this is just shine to disguise a bailout of the insurers in exchange for absolutely necessary regulation of their fraudulent tendencies.

The pool of uninsured in this country is very desirable for profit-oriented insurance companies, but most of them cannot afford $3000 apiece a year for premiums. Regulation that limits their ability to refuse pre-existing conditions, drop people for no apparent reason when they get sick, or simply refuse to honor their contracts, is going to cut into the for-profit industry’s bottom line. And that bottom line is and has long been extremely lucrative. They’d love nothing better than to get their hands on all those relatively healthy people, whose premiums will be paid no-questions-asked by the government.

And what does the government get? Coverage of the Big Ticket items for the generally healthy population. They’ll spend about $3000 per capita for the policies with large personal deductibles and co-pays. Then when one of those people has a bad accident or comes down with cancer and costs $50,000 that year, the actual cost of the care is covered. That the difference will likely bankrupt the patient matters not. The bailout here is for the insurers and the government, not for the people.

Health insurance is not health care. It’s a futures market on the suffering of real people. Because health care in this country is more dangerous than not getting health care (unless you’ve got heart disease or cancer), there are tens of millions of people in this country who avoid the system like the plague. Because it IS a plague.

So… wake me up when they start talking about addressing what’s really wrong with health care in this country. Nothing coming out of Congress about insurance reform is going to change the lives of those of us on a Shoestring Budget. The government will buy insurance to protect the system against us if we get hurt or sick. Most of us weren’t worried about them in the first place.

The biggest bank failure of 2009 happened last week when the FDIC moved to shut down Colonial BancGroup of Alabama, along with four other banks, bringing the total thus far this year to more than 70. A quick deal with BB&T to purchase Colonial caused its shares to rise. FDIC will be shouldering much of the losses, of course, which adds billions to the bailout of the banking system while at the same time working to further bank consolidation for the wealthiest banks still standing.

Such situations are a ‘win-lose’ proposition. Win for BB&T and their stockholders, lose for We the Taxpayers. This scheme where the feds cap the buyer’s losses at taxpayer expense is just another outrage to the hard-pressed public at a time when all the glorious pronouncements of economic recovery have yet to even begin to touch the lives of the general public still losing jobs at a high rate while no new jobs seem to be forthcoming.

And on top of the still-dismal economic situation for average people in this country, now we have the extremely contentious health care reform debate ongoing that looks more and more like bad street theater every day. Between the noisy hoards of idle old folks bused around the country to shut down discussion of provisions during Town Hall meetings held by vacationing congresscritters, and the absurd lies being spewed by the usual suspects at FoxNews and right wing radio, it’s looking more and more like the final result will be a significant new tax on the working poor that will be earmarked directly to the health insurance industry by means of mandatory purchase of junk insurance.

The situation is really health insurance reform, though reform isn’t really a good title either considering how much the Death by Spreadsheet crowd will end up getting from the public directly and from the government as subsidies. Yes, they will have to stop excluding anyone with a pre-existing condition, retroactively canceling policies if the insured person gets sick, and simply not paying for covered health care after the fact. But they will more than make up for however much this costs them by the ~40 million new policies the uninsured will have to purchase, and with government subsidies for many of those as well as losses incurred by having to honor their contracts.

And I am sure readers know that “junk insurance” – insurance that has a high deductible and hefty co-pays – isn’t going to help a person living on a shoestring budget already. Whatever ‘extra’ money those people might have saved over months to pay for a doctor’s visit will be taken by the insurers for that junk insurance. Leaving the working poor even worse off than they were before.

Even the so-called “Public Option” Obama and other Democrats have been touting is just another insurance option. Basic buy-in Medicaid, for which the government plans to auto-deduct from people’s bank accounts to make sure their premiums get paid on time. No word yet on whether they’ll do that for bank accounts that don’t have enough money in them to cover the deduction (like mine, for instance), thus causing families to suffer huge bank overdraft charges and messing up their other payment plans, or if a too-slim bank account qualifies people for automatic subsidy to make those insurance payments. But if I were to guess, I’d guess it’s just going to shaft the barely getting by yet again by throwing their bare budgeting into chaos and costing them more than they can pay.

Isn’t it funny how the wealthy and well-off are somehow able to convince themselves that we at the low end of the spectrum somehow have lots and lots of ‘extra’ money they should be able to take at will?

At any rate, we will not know until Christmas at least what the health care bill looks like or what’s in it. None of us should be holding our breath hoping for real reform or actual access to health care. In the end it’s way more likely that the government will simply be able to claim that they’ve ‘fixed’ the access problem – those ~50 million uninsured and ~100 million underinsured – so the U.S. will no longer rank #37 on the list of 37 industrialized nations on all measures of health care. While We the People will simply be poorer than we were before. I’d like to be pleasantly surprised, but don’t expect to be so long as people like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are spouting lies about killing granny and the Medicare crowd is hollering for the government to keep their hands off their Medicare. Stupid and/or evil people always seem to win in this country.

If you haven’t called or written your representatives and senators yet, please do so. We don’t have much of a voice in what happens in this country, but they at least need to know we’re out here and want real access to health care instead of just another theft of what little we do have. Then when we lose we’ll have earned our own bitching rights!

Those of us attempting to live on what was a shoestring budget even before the Great Unending Recession/Depression have probably been watching the large insanity of vacationing Congresscritters attempting to hold Town Hall meetings with their constituents back home with some bemusement. It’s no secret that the WingNut Network [a.k.a. Fox] and Hate Radio pundits have been inciting their faithful dummies to riot, since this has been ongoing ever since they lost the election last November in a big way. Between the clueless idiots who can’t believe a black man is a real American citizen (or that exotic Hawaii is actually a state) and the Bermuda shorts and gray hair crowd shouting “Keep the government OUT of my Medicare!” one really does have to wonder if maybe there’s something in the water making people lose what few IQ points they might have had back in kindergarten.

Some of us also know that going to a doctor regularly if you aren’t actually sick is not wise, thus are probably better off if we don’t suffer some chronic condition with our very limited access to the health care system than we might be if we had annual check-ups and the ability to demand whatever drug is advertised on television nightly. While it’s a sad truth that ~50 million Americans have no access to the health care system – and that’s an insurance issue – I haven’t seen anybody talking much lately about the health care system itself, which just happens to be the third leading cause of death in the United States.

Thus they’re fighting about “Health Insurance Reform” while the dismal failure of doctors and hospitals to confront the outrageous error rate, hospital-acquired infection rate, etc. that KILLS at least 195,000 Americans every year. Americans who DO have access to the system! The U.S. pays more per capita of our GDP on health care than any other industrialized nation – most of which have universal, single-payer health care systems – and are at the very bottom of the list on all measures of health care outcome. Life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality (tied to our ridiculous C-section rate and lack of prenatal care), general health, number of chronic diseases, etc., etc.

We’d all like to see universal access to health care. We’d like for insurance companies to be barred from canceling policies if the person gets sick, from refusing to cover those with pre-existing conditions, and from raising the rates at five times the rate of inflation every year just because they can. We’d like for the poor and working poor to be able to get health care even if they don’t work for a company that offers it, or don’t earn enough to participate. We’d really like to get our bones set and our cuts stitched when we need to without going bankrupt, and we’d like to get treatment for our cancers and our other serious ailments instead of simply dying of them because health care is beyond our reach.

But because something must be done about the current situation in this country no matter how loudly the idiots yell about not offering their government health care to others who need health care, we can expect that something minimal will indeed be done. Best advice to those who have managed to get this far in life without being regular users of the health care system or the drug companies’ medicine chest is to approach new access with caution. Nothing is being done to cure the rate of iatrogenic disease and death (iagrogenic means “doctor-caused”) in any of this political maneuvering, so increased access only means that the delivery system will be able to harm or kill even more Americans every year.

Make use of your intelligence and your access to the internet, go looking for reliable information if you or someone you love gets sick. Merck has their entire medical manual on-line, the Physician’s Desk Reference is available as well with good information about drugs and which ones may conflict with others – something too many doctors don’t keep track of, and a large contributor to deaths from prescription errors. There are lots of physician websites offering information about various conditions, as well as patient associations that often have collected information from people who have or have dealt with particular conditions with even better information. Always be careful of information, make sure it’s good and not just another quack selling the magical ‘cure’ for AIDS or cancer or whatever, because those are out there too.

And if you’ve got questions, write them down, collect the good information you’ve gathered, THEN take it to your primary care provider and ask. Don’t tolerate a physician or practitioner who gets his or her nose bent out of shape because you’ve done your homework, and never put up with a doctor who balks if you ask for a second opinion. If you’re in line for surgery or some other serious treatment, go to the website of your state government’s medical regulatory agency and search until you find a list of the physicians and other practitioners who have been disciplined by the agency for gross or repeated malpractice or errors. If your doctor’s on the list, get a new one.

And most of all, keep always in your mind the fact that your personal choices affect your health for the better more acutely than anything an insurance company or doctor or hospital can. No one else can “heal” you – people’s own bodies do the healing, health care providers can only help it along. Best not to get sick in the first place, and we’ve no excuse not to know that our diets greatly affect our health. Eating well, getting exercise, maintaining our environment, etc. will stave off many a nasty illness or condition – avoiding the plagues that come with obesity is much better than treating this plague or that plague after they’ve developed.

Now, sit back and enjoy the street theater spectacle of the ‘haves’ trying most desperately to prevent the ‘have-nots’ from getting anything! It’s black comedy at its most absurd, something we’ll probably never see again in our lifetimes. Laugh, because that’s the best medicine in the world!

More than 40 million Americans – including children – have no health insurance. As the economy continues to weaken and good jobs are outsourced to countries where universal care exempts businesses from having to carry the health care burden, millions more are being thrown into the ranks of the uninsured. Then there are those who have changed jobs, and encountered insurers who simply will not cover them due to pre-existing conditions. These days if you’ve ever had treatment for things like acne, high cholesterol or carpel tunnel you can find yourself on the growing list of the “Uninsurable.”

Now, if you don’t mind jumping serious hoops and get an early start in the fiscal year, states do have sliding scale plans and Medicaid allotments. If you are covered by one of these, you do NOT count among the officially uninsured. In my officially “economically depressed” region, approximately two thirds of the citizens qualify for food stamps and medical care, but there’s only enough money to cover less than half of them. The rest simply do without, at least until they simply can’t do without anymore. The cost of indigent care at our few public hospitals is yet another perpetually unpaid bill.

This blog offered many good tips and links to useful resources for the uninsured in a previous 3-part series Inexpensive Health Care Tips, Part 1, including in Part 2 some strategies for getting necessary prescription medicines, and in Part 3 how to negotiate access to primary and emergency care.

Now that approximately half of the citizens of the US are either uninsured or underinsured (have high deductible “junk insurance” or coverage that is routinely denied), we cannot expect that things will get any better any time soon, at least not so long as the inside-the-beltway crowd has unlimited free health care. The progressive political website Daily Kos is hosting a Thursday series by diarist ‘nightowl724′, part 1 of which is 10 Survival Topics for the Uninsured.

There are some good resources, advice and strategies presented (topics 1 – 6 of the promised 10). The project arose from the Daily Kos Health Care Google Group. The posting schedule for this month is worth noting:

August 14: Survival Tips for the Uninsured, Part 1
August 15: Uninsured and Lucky to be Alive Part 1
August 21: Survival Tips for the Uninsured, Part 2
August 22: Uninsured and Lucky to be Alive Part 2
August 28: Living with a Chronic Illness

Interested readers can subscribe to the series here.

Links:

Inexpensive Health Care Tips, Part 1
nightowl724′s page
Inexpensive Health Care Tips: Intro
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2: Necessary Medicines
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3: Primary and Emergency Care
Basic Health Maintenance: Part 1
Basic Health Care Maintenance: Part II
Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism

Part 3: Discouraging Bugs, Treating Boo-Boos

In this last installment of the series examining inexpensive and natural alternatives to the many household products people spend so much money on through the year, I want to look at the basic summertime first aid kit.

My family lives in the “deep woods” that Deep Woods Off^TM was invented to de-bug. We have lots of company during the summer season, adults and children. There’s not much one can do about nasty encounters with aggressive poisonous snakes (copperheads are much more aggressive than timber rattlers, who live in the area but are hardly ever seen) or bone breaks or serious puncture wounds or cuts. Those just have to go to the ER, best thing to do is make that happen as quickly as possible. But there are a host of lesser injuries and situations that can be treated adequately at home, without the fancy, expensive products that contribute so much to a weekly grocery bill.

In the first installment of the series I listed the basic ingredients to purchase – brand name or generic (I get generic, but brands aren’t that much more expensive) borax, baking soda, rubbing alcohol, white vinegar, basic soap flakes (or liquid soap made from your disintegrating bath bars), and added ammonia. In the second installment I gave some recipes for laundry soap, kitchen and bath scouring powders, drain cleaner, surface disinfectants, etc. Now, using the same ingredients (plus a few things from the garden) let’s make the first aid kit and general insect management substances…

Insects In The House, Yard and Garden

Chances are your area has its share of mosquitoes, biting gnats, ticks, chiggers, bees, wasps and yellow jackets during the summer. The best thing to do is avoid them altogether, or at least discourage them from taking up close residence.

Mosquito/Gnat Repellant

For some people simply splashing some rubbing alcohol on exposed skin and allowing it to dry will deter mosquitoes and gnats, who are attracted to white clothing, carbon dioxide exhaled by breathing, and the scent of humans. Anything that disguises or (temporarily) eliminates the scent will help repel.

Avon Skin-So-Soft is a strong-smelling bath oil that works very well to repel biting insects, if you can stand the smell.

Crushing and rubbing mint, lemon balm or basil leaves on the skin is often an effective mosquito repellant.

A few drops of essential oil (eucalyptus, cedar, tea tree, fir, etc.) in rubbing alcohol will extend the useful repellant time of plain rubbing alcohol. Oil of citronella, peppermint lemon balm, cloves, geraniums, fleabane (pyrethrum) or rosemary also work.

garlic oil – available as supplements in gelatin shells you can prick with a pin will work if you can stand the smell, and eating a lot of garlic (or taking good doses of the oil supplements) will give your sweat a garlic odor that discourages biting insects. So does a strong decoction of mint, and the mint smells better. Mix with rubbing alcohol, put it in a spray bottle and use liberally.

Wood smoke dispels biting insects too, I’ve found that keeping the campfire going during gatherings and not sweating the smoke very much tends to keep the main portion of the back yard clear of mosquitoes and gnats.

First Aid for Insect Encounters

Wasps, yellow jackets and bees can produce big, painful welts and can cause serious allergic reactions. Bees will often leave a stinger in the skin – DO NOT squeeze or try to pull it out. Scrape it out with the edge of a fingernail or credit card so more venom isn’t introduced. The best immediate treatment I’ve found is a paste of baking soda and cold water. Apply thickly to the sting site and let it dry, then brush the residue off and apply again. As the soda dries, it will tend to pull the venom from the wound.

A good paste for this purpose is also baking soda and rubbing alcohol, so keep these ingredients close together. The alcohol will not only disinfect the site, it dries faster than water and increases the leaching action of the soda.

For pain, applying lemon juice or vinegar to the sting often helps. Ammonia works too, and can definitely help dispel the itch of mosquito bites. A wet tea bag (black tea) applied to bites will help keep swelling down.

If a guest is unlucky enough to encounter a swarm and sustain more than one or two stings (yellow jackets are bad for swarming, as are hornets and sometimes bees), keep some Benedryl cream and pills handy. If anyone coming to visit has a deadly allergy to bees, you might ought to encourage them to go to the beach instead.

A slice of cucumber applied directly to bites helps to ease itching. A cucumber mush (run peeled cukes through the food processor) with some chunks of aloe is very soothing to apply to chigger bites. Add some salt for rashes. You’ll also want to treat chiggers with alcohol, they’re some of the worst bites when it comes to infection setting in.

First Aid for Poison Ivy/Poison Oak

…and other plant irritations. The cucumber and aloe goop mentioned above is soothing to poison ivy rashes, helps to ease itching. But the best thing to do if someone has been somewhere on the property where they’re just bound to encounter ivy, is to put them into a bathtub with about 4-6 inches of tepid water into which you’ve mixed half a cup of baking soda or a quarter cup of chlorine bleach. Have them wash thoroughly all exposed skin with soap and rinse well.

Alternatives to the above are baths with white vinegar or epsom salt.

A paste of baking soda and vinegar is often better than Calamine for easing the itch. It will foam, but if you mix slowly you’ll eventually get a paste thin enough to spread. When it’s good and dry, rinse off again in tepid, salted bathwater, then apply aloe in rubbing alcohol.

Other Issues

A tepid baking soda bath also soothes heat rashes and diaper rash, sunburn and windburn, and other skin rashes.

Baking soda paste is an excellent whitening toothpaste, and baking soda in water is a healthful mouth rinse. Half a teaspoon of soda in half a glass of water eases heartburn and acid indigestion as well as upset stomach from gas.

A strong, hot water salt solution is a great gargle for sore throats. My father swore by hot salt water, we never kept sore throat medicines in our house – salt water was it, and it worked.

I advise everyone to keep a healthy aloe plant in a big pot somewhere in the house or on the porch to treat sumburns, minor burn-burns, skin scrapes and lesions, dry skin, etc., etc. Mints aren’t hard to grow either, and like Rosemary are perennial wherever you put them. If the mints escape into the yard (as they’re entirely likely to do), just mow them when you mow the grass. Makes your fresh-mowed lawn smell absolutely heavenly, and you’ve plenty of mint for making teas, stomach-soothers, bug repellant, etc.

If readers have more money-saving recipes and hints, please post them in the comments! One could spend literally hundreds of dollars on these sort of products just for the summer season, or save a lot of money by doing it themselves!

Posts to This Series:

Part 1: List of Ingredients
Part 2: Recipes
Part 3: Bugs & First Aid

In response to increasing unaffordability of health insurance in America and justifying his repeated vetos of State Children’s Health Insurance Program [SCHIP] expansions, President George W. Bush declared during an appearance in Cleveland last July that:

“The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

As if that weren’t clueless enough, the New York Times reports today (April 23) that one of the nation’s largest health insurers, UnitedHealth, announced disappointing first-quarter earnings (profits), saying the weakening Economy Has Dented Its Prospects. In short, as premiums rise, employers are dropping insurance plans for their employees, more employees are opting out, and rising unemployment is reflected in increasing numbers of uninsured.

The for-profit industry has also shot itself in the foot by increasing premiums to protect its profits over the quickly rising cost of care, not covering people who may have health problems, and simply refusing to pay for health care for the insured. Medical bills now account for a full half of all bankruptcies in the US, and ER treatment is NOT “free.”

So in this installment in the series of inexpensive health care tips, let’s look at some resources out there for people who don’t have insurance, or have “junk insurance” that doesn’t actually cover anything, and those who simply cannot pay cash for doctor’s visits, eye care, dental care, hospitalization or any other aspect of health care in this country.

The readers of this blog have access to a computer (or they wouldn’t be reading). There are some searches you can do through Google or some other search engine to access information on free or sliding scale health care in your area. I did this for my state and locality, western North Carolina. Here are some of the results…

On a search for “free eye care NC” I found Unite for Sight’s Free Health Coverage Program Portal, with hot links to every state. It also links to many sites out there for free basic health care resources, SCHIP coverage programs for children, free eye care, veteran’s insurance by the states, Medicaid and Medicare, free prescription medications, and the states’ free health coverage programs generally. This is a valuable resource page which is featured weekly on CNN International.

In North Carolina, I was also returned a Blue Cross Blue Shield Association page listing a total of 69 free clinics across the state supported by the foundation. North Carolina has the nation’s largest association of free clinics, but it also has a high number (~1.3 million) of uninsured and working poor who don’t have access to insurance. The state Medicaid and Children’s Insurance programs are capped due to funding shortfalls, leaving thousands who qualify for the coverage out in the cold.

The clinics are often traveling, available only on certain days or months. But if you plan ahead and do your homework, this can be a good way to get basic primary care. The NC Department of Health and Human Services, Division of Medical Assistance administers our SCHIP program. The waiting list is long, usually ‘forever’ long in that emergency situations take precedence (as they should), but you never know. Keep applying, someday you might get your children in. The coverage is for all regular and emergency medical needs, and is supposed to be available on a sliding scale to 200% of poverty level income. At that level, it’ll only cost your family $567 per month per child! At poverty level, it’s just $50 a month for one child, $100 for two or more. Plus there are deductibles you must pay out of pocket. I know… not much of a deal, is it? I mean, if you had an extra $100 a month, you could probably just go to the doctor and pay cash.

A better bet when you need help and there are no free clinics available is your local Health Department. Most cities (or counties) offer immunizations and flu shots, cancer screening, child and adult primary care, dental care, and physical examinations for work and school requirements. This is government medicine at its bureaucratic worst, but it is honest-to-goodness medical care. It’s worth bookmarking your area’s health department site for when you may need it. If your family has some income, expect to pay on a sliding scale. So have your income and expenses list ready, along with pay stubs, utility bills, etc. Keep them in a folder or envelope to take with you whenever you access a free or sliding-scale provider.

All I can say is that until and unless America offers single-payer coverage to all citizens, there will be tens of millions of American citizens who have no health care. Estimates of up to 80,000 people die every year due to lack of medical care – don’t let that figure include you or your family. Be prepared to get what you need when you need it, and do NOT take ‘no’ for an answer.

In the most extreme – if you or someone in your family is in serious need and access is being denied, go ahead and bookmark your area’s free legal services association. When in real need, there’s no sense in standing on pride if that means you lose your life or your child’s life. Every other civilized country on the planet offers universal care to their citizens (and most also offer it to visitors). The only reason the US doesn’t have universal care is corporate greed.

I do not believe that some corporate greed-head’s golden parachute or multi-million dollar salary is worth even one person’s untimely death. More people in this country are victims of the “Death by Spreadsheet” industry than fall to terrorists or either of our current wars. This is simply unacceptable. Be a Boy Scout – Be Prepared.

Links:

Economy Has Dented UHC’s Prospects
Free Health Coverage Program Portal
Department of Health and Human Services
Discount Drug Company Assistance Programs

Previous Posts About Health and Health Care:

Inexpensive Health Care Tips – Intro
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3
Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism
Basic Health Maintenance: Part I
Basic Health Care Maintenance: Part II

The New York Times reported on Monday, April 14 that Co-Payments Soar for Drugs With High Prices as the nation’s largest health insurers struggle to keep their profits high and their payments for health care low. The new pricing system forces patients taking name-brand medications to pay a percentage of the cost rather than a fixed co-payment of $10 to $30 a month for each medication they take.

The situation, and plans for a public demonstration in San Francisco during the AHIP annual meeting on June 19th are outlined in Insurers target the sickest: Say bye bye to $20 prescription co-pays.

This means that the burden of increasingly expensive health care now affects the insured, who may now have to pay thousands of dollars a month for medications in addition to their high monthly premiums and treatment co-pays and deductibles. America’s sickest citizens are once again being abandoned by a system that was originally designed to spread the costs of their care across a large pool that includes healthier people. Insurers say the new system will keep everyone’s premiums down, just at the time of year that Americans are discovering that they must pay double or more for the same health insurance they had last year. That’s not a very impressive system, considering that all other developed nations on the planet have universal health care.

Thus this installment of the series of inexpensive health care tips will offer some alternatives for obtaining drugs that may be beyond your ability to afford.

Because large public hospitals and smaller hospitals serving the public in smaller towns make up the backbone of the American health care delivery system are also being driven to bankruptcy by greedy insurers who increasingly refuse to pay for covered services [see Health Insurance Racket as Organized Crime and People of New York vs. Vampires], the gaps in our system are quickly widening and threatening to sink doctors, nurses, hospitals and clinics in the process.

The first place a strapped citizen should try to contact, even if s/he does not qualify for Medicaid or other subsidized health care plans is the Department of Health and Human Services in their area – the good ol’ Health Department (search for “health department” and your state or city). Most health departments offer both sick and well child services, just call ahead to find out what days they are available – you don’t want to be taking a well child in for immunizations or flu shots on sick child day, where they’ll be exposed to God knows what. Immunizations and flu shots are one of their specialties. The same services are available on certain days for adults, just make your inquiries ahead of time. If medications are prescribed, the patient is usually informed of generic alternatives, referred to pharmacies that partner with HHS for low cost, and some will give brochures for pharmaceutical company free drug programs if the medication is expensive or long-term.

Some localities also offer free or low cost clinics staffed by volunteer doctors and nurses a few days a week. Again, these physicians will usually know if there are generic drugs that can substitute for higher cost name brand drugs, and prescribe accordingly. Walmart offers $4 prescriptions on a general basis, and some states also have drug assistance programs. Often, just getting prescriptions filled at Walmart or another participating chain pharmacy is cheaper than using the deductible schedule, even for the insured or Medicare/Medicaid patients.

If you or someone in your family suffers from a condition for which the best drug treatments are solely brand name and very expensive (or you take a sufficient number of prescriptions to put a serious dent in your income), the big pharmaceutical companies offer free and low cost prescriptions directly via funded programs. If your doctor or health department doesn’t give you the information you need, you can search on the manufacturer’s name and go to their website. They usually have readily accessible links to their programs, or you can do an internal search. SelectCare Benefits Network has some programs and offers useful links for health care professionals as well as patients to get them started on finding free medicines and prescription assistance programs.

In the next installment in this series, we’ll take a look at ways to gain access to doctors, tests and (not prescription) treatments for conditions without going broke. Good luck to all out there as we weather the necessary growing pains that accompany our shift from private, for-profit health care to a modern system that offers health care to all citizens without fomenting class warfare. Keep your chin up, there ARE alternatives!

Links:

Discount Drug Company Assistance Programs
Department of Health and Human Services
Walmart $4 prescriptions
SelectCare Benefits Network

Previous Posts About Health and Health Care:

Inexpensive Health Care Tips – Intro
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3
Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism
Basic Health Maintenance: Part I
Basic Health Care Maintenance: Part II
Shoestring Budget: Nutrition Posts

A few months after moving to our mountain retreat I got bit by a tiny deer tick while working to clear the neglected garden for planting. Soon I had fever and swollen glands, seriously painful joints and a nasty rash surrounding the bite site. After a few weeks of this we finally got a little ahead on basics, so I went to the local doctor. He has a little clinic next to the grocery store, comes to town twice a week.

First thing was to check in and lay $60 on the counter up front before the doctor would see me, given that I had no insurance. If I’d had insurance, it would have been $10. Then the assistant took my vitals and I was asked to wait in an overcrowded room with a lot of obese locals and their obese children. I guessed immediately that the primary cause of illness in this rural area had to do with America’s basic poor-person bad diet. But that wasn’t my problem…

$150 worth of in-office blood tests and a ‘scrip for a week’s worth of antibiotic later (plus the original $60 just to see him), I found out I’d contracted Lyme disease. He made another appointment for his next in-town day, said he’d give me another week’s worth of antibiotics every week until I was cured. Ha!

So I went home, opened up my handy-dandy Merck Manual, and looked up Lyme. Treatment was 3-6 months’ worth of constant antibiotics. Quickly adding up the doctor’s plan for $60 a week just to get the prescription for antibiotics I could barely afford told me I was much better off just getting the antibiotics and skipping Doctor McGreedy. Because we had quite a bit of experience dealing with our pets’ health issues, I knew I could purchase a full three-month’s supply of the very same antibiotic he prescribed from a veterinary supply firm, for less than the cost of just one more unnecessary visit to his sometime clinic. So I did.

Merck gave the dose too, and luckily the vet tablets were at the right dosage. I found that they dissolved too quickly and upset my stomach, so purchased some gelatin capsules to encase them. Sure, the medicine is generic, but it’s the very same antibiotic that humans use, in just the right dose, for not very much and without having to go to the doctor once a week to get the prescription. It worked just fine, so I’ll thank that doctor for the diagnosis and not for his greedy abuse of uninsured patients.

CNN has some good generic advice for people with high blood pressure who can’t afford the high costs of “New and Improved!” brand-name drugs. I predict we’ll see a lot more of this sort of advice as the recession deepens, so I’ll collect some of it here on this blog.

Stay tuned for further posts to the subject!

Useful Links:

HHS: Free and Low Cost Health Care Referrals
The Merck Manuals
Physicians’ Desk Reference: Prescription Drug Information
Ask The Nurse: Health & Medical Resources
MedHelp: All Ask Doctor Forums & Support Communities

Previous Posts About Health and Health Care

Inexpensive Health Care Tips – Intro
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3
Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism
Basic Health Maintenance: Part I
Basic Health Care Maintenance: Part II
Shoestring Budget: Nutrition Posts

Then there are the “working poor” – those who work as many hours a day as is possible at as many jobs as they can get, but whose income still falls to poverty level or below. These people generally have no health insurance and no state/federal coverage. Not because they choose not to purchase expensive insurance, but because it’s simply not available to them. And on top of this are all those in the “lower middle class” who may have junk insurance through their employers with deductibles so high they simply cannot afford health care, or whose insurers routinely refuse to cover any and all claims.

And on top of that there is the whole rest of the middle class, who have exactly the same problem with their insurance companies – they simply refuse to pay for health care, leaving all but the very rich (who can pay out of pocket) without usable access to health care and one accident or illness away from bankruptcy.

Thus there are entire ‘underground’ networks set up to import drugs Americans can’t afford to buy and their insurers won’t cover (including Medicare/Medicaid), usually from Canada or India. There are also networks designed to help Americans leaving the country in order to get the health care they need, in countries where the costs are far lower and the care much better than what they can get here in the U.S. of A.

When my brother-in-law (who works for the State Department and has excellent government insurance) was informed at his yearly physical that he needed heart bypass surgery, he was in India – a popular destination for medical tourists where the care is good and the costs 1/5 what they are in America. But since he could choose, he opted to have the surgery done in Singapore because they have a new technique that doesn’t involve stopping the heart or using a heart-lung machine (known to cause cognitive deficits). His government insurance would have paid either way, so he took the best option for himself. I figure that if a high-level, well-paid government-insured person knows the health care he can get abroad is better than what he could hope for at home, those of us at the lower levels of the economy (and scheduled to get hit hardest in the recession) should be taking notes!

Medical tourism is something to think about if you need a procedure but can’t get it in this country due to prohibitive cost. If you’ve a few thousand in savings (one way or another) and must have that spinal fusion or hip replacement or bypass in order to function, it wouldn’t hurt to do some homework. There’s an excellent series about a medical tourism journey to India for hip resurfacing ongoing over at Health Care Hacks that is a good place to start.

There is a 5-page feature article in Good Housekeeping examining the options as well, entitled Passport to Cheaper Health Care?. Amy Scher of Health Care Hacks began her series over atWise Bread with I’m Fleeing the Country for Health Care!, and one commenter is the director of America’s Medical Solutions, a medical tourism concierge service run by Americans in India. I suspect there may be similar coordinators in other countries Americans have found can offer cheaper, better health care, so a search is warranted when you’re doing that homework.

If you’re lucky enough to have assets you can make liquid for necessary care – or if your insurer has flatly refused to cover necessary care at all – you might be much better off (and save a bundle) hopping a flight to India or Thailand or Singapore than if you stayed here to suffer-unto-death.

Links:

Passport to Cheaper Health Care?

Health Care Hacks

I’m Fleeing the Country for Health Care!

America’s Medical Solutions

Medical tourism: Need surgery, will travel