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I believe we are moving toward two different health systems. Which tier do you think you will be in? In one system, patients will be able to see doctors promptly. They will talk to physicians by phone and email. They will have no difficulty scheduling needed surgery. If they have to go into a hospital, a "hospitalist" (who reports to them and not to the hospital administration) will be there to make sure their interests are looked after. They may even have an independent agency that reviews their medical records, goes with them when they meet with specialists and gives...

When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie’s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at MD Anderson with extending his life by at least eight years. Stephanie was then told by a billing clerk that the estimated cost of Sean’s visit — just to be examined for six days so a treatment plan could be devised — would be $48,900, due in...

Forty-three hospital patients starved to death last year and 111 died of thirst while being treated on wards, new figures disclose today. The death toll was disclosed by the Government amid mounting concern over the dignity of patients on NHS wards. * as well as 43 people who starved to death, 287 people were recorded by doctors as being malnourished when they died in hospitals; * there were 558 cases where doctors recorded that a patient had died in a state of severe dehydration in hospitals; * 78 hospital and 39 care home patients were killed by bedsores, while a...

Thousands of elderly people are dying unnecessarily early because ‘despicable’ age discrimination in the NHS is denying them treatment for cancer, a charity has warned. A lack of treatment or insufficient treatment is contributing to 14,000 deaths a year in people over the age of 75, Macmillan Cancer Support has found, in what it called an ‘unacceptable act of discrimination’. Deaths from cancer are reducing in most age groups but at a slower rate in those aged 74 to 84 and are increasing in people aged 85 and over, the report said. The report, The Age Old Excuse: the under...

A source on the Rick Perry campaign tells Hot Air that the Texas governor conducted some Texas-size fundraising in the third quarter. Coming in just a little over halfway through, Perry raised $17.1 million. That number would put Perry somewhere between $4-6 million ahead of Mitt Romney’s rumored total for Q3, according to this report last week from the Boston Globe. It’s also likely to far outpace Herman Cain’s fundraising or that of the other Republicans currently in the race. The pace is even more impressive. Perry had 49 days in which to raise funds, rather than the full 92...

Oklahoma: FReeper trussell's daughter Crystal has some urgent medical care needs that sound like a blood issue from the discriptions. She does not qualify for Sooner health care. Your information or knowledge of where she can take her for medical care is needed. FREEP MAIL trussell if you have the knowledge of the information she can use. You who live in Oklahoma, you know your health system, CAN you provide the information she needs? FREEP MAIL trussellShe would also appreciate your prayers for her daughter Crystal.

In Texas, a Catholic bishop made two hospitals cease doing tube-tying operations for women who are not going to have more babies. In Oregon, another bishop cast a medical center out of his diocese for refusing to discontinue the same procedure. In Arizona, a nun was excommunicated and the hospital where she works was expelled from the church after 116 years for allowing doctors to terminate a pregnancy to save a woman's life. Such disputes between hospitals and church authorities appear to be arising because of a confluence of factors: Economic pressures are spurring greater consolidation in the hospital industry,...

A health care bill to expand Medicare and increase taxes to pay for it passes both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate by wide margins and is signed by the President. Most people who are paying attention think that, for good or ill, this expansion of government will be with us forever. But just 17 months later, the law is repealed. Whereas it was passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 328 to 72, the same House, with only a slight change of membership, votes 360 to 66 to repeal the bill. The new President,...

"If you get sick at older ages, you will die sooner in England than in the United States," study author James P. Smith, PhD, of the nonprofit RAND corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., says in a news release. "It appears that at least in terms of survival at older ages with chronic disease, the medical system in the United States may be better than the system in England." The researchers speculate that this may be because these same illnesses are more likely to be fatal in England than in America, or that English people may be diagnosed at later stages...

BOSTON – An infectious-disease nightmare is unfolding: Bacteria that have been made resistant to nearly all antibiotics by an alarming new gene have sickened people in three states and are popping up all over the world, health officials reported Monday. The U.S. cases and two others in Canada all involve people who had recently received medical care in India, where the problem is widespread. A British medical journal revealed the risk last month in an article describing dozens of cases in Britain in people who had gone to India for medical procedures. How many deaths the gene may have caused...

Recent media reports have declared that timely, dignified care should be provided to returning servicemen and women. At the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, we completely agree. America's soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors, and Coast Guardsmen deserve the very finest medical care. Earned at enlistment, it is America's sacred promise to them. Nationally, and here in southeast Texas, VA works hard to honor that promise. Since 2003, more than 1.5 million military personnel have served and returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Roughly 40% have enrolled for care in a high-tech, quality-focused VA system, including more than 8,500 southeast Texas sons...

Medicine: The administration's nominee to run Medicare and Medicaid is a fan of Britain's National Health Service and rationing services. He believes in less discretion for your doctor, more power for your government. 'The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open" is what Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, said in an interview published in Biotechnology Healthcare in June 2009. The question is whether the Senate will confirm Berwick with open eyes. Berwick says: "NICE is...

Health Reform: The white coats showed up again at the White House, helping the administration ram health care reform down our throats. Can you have a bipartisan bill without a bipartisan vote?It didn't work the first time, when the White House last year assembled enough sympathetic medical professionals to stage a photo-op in the Rose Garden trying to persuade us that, as the commercial goes, three of four doctors really, really support the administration's attempt to nationalize health care. Rather than a grass-roots uprising of physicians, last year's event was a classic case of astroturfing. Attendance was by invitation only,...

Health Care: A government task force has decided that women need fewer mammograms and later in life. Shouldn't that be between patient and physician? We have seen the future of health care, and it doesn't work. We have warned repeatedly that the net results of health care bills before Congress will be higher demand, fewer doctors, more cost control, all leading to rationing. New recommendations issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) regarding breast cancer and the necessity for early and frequent mammograms do not convince us otherwise. Just six months ago, the panel, which works under the...

Politics: The administration stages a photo-op with handpicked doctors who support its health care reform. Fortunately, most doctors still believe that the first rule of medicine is to do no harm. It would seem some doctors still make house calls. Some 150 of them made one at the White House Monday in an attempt to give a booster shot to the administration's chaotic and stalled health care reform drive. Rather than a grass-roots uprising of physicians, this was a classic case of AstroTurfing. Attendance was by invitation only, and 40 of the 150 were said to be members of Doctors...

Health Care Systems: A return to private health care is rising from the grass roots north of the border. While we rush headlong toward socialized medicine, Canadians are saying, "No, thanks — been there, done that." We recently told the story of Ava Isabella Stinson, born 13 weeks premature at St. Joseph's hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. She weighed all of two pounds and had no time to be put on a waiting list. But there were no open neonatal intensive care beds for her at St. Joseph's or anywhere else in the entire province of Ontario it seems. Canada's perfectly...

Litigation: The Founding Fathers envisioned the states as laboratories for ideas and choices. If the administration needs a demonstration project for successful tort reform, it need look no further than Mississippi. When President Obama said during his health care speech to Congress that he would "look into" malpractice reform and support "demonstration projects" at the state level, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a Republican, responded: "If they want a demonstration project, come down to Mississippi. I'll show you a demonstration project." Mississippi enacted tort reform in 2004, including caps on medical malpractice awards. As a result, the number of medical...

September 18, 2009, 4:00 a.m. Dr. Barack and Mr. ObamaThe backlash is sharp as voters learn that Obama is not the man they thought he was. By Victor Davis Hanson No one imagined that Barack Obama, during his first nine months in office, would be falling in the polls even faster than George W. Bush did prior to 9/11. We all knew what Obama’s weaknesses were as he came into office — a lack of experience in foreign affairs, little knowledge of how private business works, and poor judgment concerning the extremist company he had kept in the past. But...

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee wants levies on insurers to pay for Obamacare and fines for families who don't sign up. To keep Obamacare alive, Baucus has proposed a Rube Goldberg scheme of fees and fines on insurers and the uninsured designed to forcibly bring everyone into the loving and protective arms of the nanny state...

Reform: The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee wants levies on insurers to pay for ObamaCare and fines for families who don't sign up. We can cut costs and expand coverage without sacrificing freedom.To keep ObamaCare alive, Montana Democrat Max Baucus has proposed a Rube Goldberg scheme of fees and fines on insurers and the uninsured designed to forcibly bring everyone into the loving and protective arms of the nanny state. To help finance his Plan B, Baucus would impose annual fees of $6 billion on health insurers, $4 billion on medical-device makers, $2.3 billion on drug manufacturers and $750...