Free Republic

Sunday, November 25, 2007 EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first day of a seven-day series about the cost of immigration. When doctors swear the Hippocratic oath, they pledge to do all in their power to help their patients. But medical care is extremely expensive today, and hospitals run on money, not ideals. Balancing the ideals with financial reality is an ongoing struggle for medical professionals, and the number of illegal immigrants seeking medical treatment they can't afford exemplifies the problem.

As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers seek ways to care for millions of Californians without medical insurance, a study released Wednesday says policy changes will be difficult to implement because of differences in how residents use the health care system. The 183-page report by the Public Policy Institute of California also dispels some commonly held beliefs, finding that immigrants and their children generally don't seek care at hospitals and emergency rooms any more often than U.S.-born residents. "With the nation now approaching 12 million illegal immigrants, the issue of un- or underinsured Americans has reached critical proportions," said PPIC...

Despite exploding costs, most Americans got sizable life-extending bang for their medical bucks over recent decades, says one of the most sweeping studies ever of health care value. AMERICAN LIFE EXPECTANCY 1960 -- 69.9 1970 -- 70.8 1980 -- 73.9 1990 -- 75.4 2000 -- 76.9 Source: National Vital Statistics System That might come as a surprise to anyone who has ever shuddered over a medical bill, and the report itself raises doubts over how quickly costs have escalated. However, the study calculated that Americans of all ages spent an average of $19,900 on medical care for each extra year...

Tuition and fees at some New York City private high schools will cost more than $30,000 for the school year ... New York already boasts the highest private school tuitions in the country, but prices at some schools will now surpass even the cost of sending a child to Harvard... Riverdale Country School, located on a leafy oasis in the Bronx, will charge $31,200 for tuition, lunch, and books for grades six through 12. Bus service from Manhattan costs an additional couple of thousand dollars. Parents are looking to spend about $400,000 before their children even get to college. Undergraduate...

Family members are investigating what they consider to be suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of a nursing home patient at the center of a life and death tug-of-war reminiscent of the Terri Schiavo tragedy. Seventy-nine-year-old Jimmy Chambers died in the early morning hours of Oct. 24 after the tracheotomy tubes that deliver oxygen from a ventilator to a hole in his neck became unhooked. Family members were told Chambers, a resident of the Anne Maria Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in North Augusta, S.C., apparently pulled the interlocking tubes apart. "We're having it investigated. We're just incredulous," Chambers' daughter, Deanna Potter,...

He says he wants to live. But his wife, caregivers and South Carolina state officials are so focused on carrying out a decade-old, out-of-state living will that 79-year-old Jimmy Chambers can't get a word in edgewise. That's the account of 10 of Chambers's children and their spouses who signed sworn affidavits in an attempt to block their mother from removing his life-sustaining ventilator, which would cause his death. It's a case that's reminiscent of the Terri Schiavo controversy which captured the attention of millions around the world, in which a fault line opened up in the middle of a formerly...

I was asked many times throughout the campaign season, why I rarely criticized the Bush administration in my writings. Like everyone else in America, I had to take a side in the race, and unlike O’Reilly or Savage, who also voted for Bush, I saw no benefit in shooting at my own guy…My answer is just that simple and self-serving. Like everyone else, I had an agenda. Not so much the re-election of the Bush administration, as the defeat of socialist anti-America minded Democrats who in my opinion threaten America’s future more than any outside enemy today. The sad part...

There are two fairly well-defined positions that have emerged regarding the issue, under consideration by the Supreme Court of the United States of America, of whether the use of marijuana should be legalized for the treatment of certain medical conditions. The first of these sees marijuana's limited legalization as, in almost all cases, the effort of so-called "stoners" (in contemporary parlance people who pretty much can't live without getting high on marijuana on a daily basis) to find a way to circumvent existing laws that criminalize the use of wacky weed so that they (the stoners), with the consent of...

Hard-headed or soft-hearted. As Shakespeare would have said, that is the question — particularly when dealing with the question of Hispanic migration. A job that pays enough to support one’s self, to send money home. An education for the children. Health care. An opportunity for your child to be born in the United States and automatically have U.S. and, in some cases, citizenship in their home country as well. Such promises — made by politicians, both Democrat and Republican as well as some in foreign lands, by some less than scrupulous businessmen, by the coyotes (not four-legged ones but those...

During debate rebuttal, Kerry pointed out that large (often frivilous) medical malpractice suits account for less than 1% of total medical costs. I believe he is correct. I think however, he seperates the additional insurance costs adding to spiralling premiums for docs and patients alike. Can someone smarter than me research this and get back to us. It's a significant argument for the upcoming domestic debate and should be gone over thouroughly.

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<p>With a top national ranking it could surely do without, San Francisco has surpassed Detroit as the city with the highest per-capita rate of syphilis in the United States.</p> <p>Driven by an increase in new cases among gay white men, the nation's syphilis rate rose 9.1 percent in 2002, the second consecutive increase after a decade of decline that had raised hopes the sexually transmitted disease could be eliminated in the country.</p>

<p>Organizers of an initiative that would make it easier for the Legislature to pass budgets and raise taxes said Wednesday that they have more than enough signatures to put the measure on the ballot.</p> <p>"It's a broken process that we're facing, and this is what's going to fix it," said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access, a statewide coalition that advocates for health care coverage.</p>

<p>Muhammad Munshi, a subsistence farmer from Pakistan, came to America last year.</p> <p>But since his massive stroke just two days after moving here with his wife last March, Munshi, 69, sees only what's visible from a hospital bed in his son's dining room. He can't talk. He can't eat or breathe without help.</p> <p>He could live for years like this except for one problem. It costs $1,000 a month to keep him alive and already the money is gone.</p>