Posted in Uncategorized by thinkingblue on the September 14th, 2009
(It was a heroic story, but to me, it was also deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here’s an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people.)Excerpt from this link http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care
~~~~~~~~~ An alarming article; in my own experience I can count family and friends who have died or almost died due to hospital irresponsibility and negligence. My father developed the clot that killed him while in a hospital. My mother died of the mastectomy before she could die from the cancer. My father-in-law died after hospital staff yanked out his lung and put him in regular care instead of an ICU.. A friend died in child birth because the hospital anaesthesiologist did not realize she was regurgitating and put her under while she was drowning in her own vomit. I wonder, is this sad/bad enough to make the townhallers come to their senses? I THINK NOT! AND THAT’S SADDEST OF ALL! Please read the beginning of this enlightening article below. thinkingblue.blogspot.com
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How American Health Care Killed My Father
Almost two years ago, my father was killed by a hospital-borne infection in the intensive-care unit of a well-regarded nonprofit hospital in New York City. Dad had just turned 83, and he had a variety of the ailments common to men of his age. But he was still working on the day he walked into the hospital with pneumonia. Within 36 hours, he had developed sepsis. Over the next five weeks in the ICU, a wave of secondary infections, also acquired in the hospital, overwhelmed his defenses. My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.
About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption.But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform.
It was a heroic story, but to me, it was also deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here’s an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people.
And what about us—the patients? How does a nation that might close down a business for a single illness from a suspicious hamburger tolerate the carnage inflicted by our hospitals? And not just those 100,000 deaths. In April, a Wall Street Journal story suggested that blood clots following surgery or illness, the leading cause of preventable hospital deaths in the U.S., may kill nearly 200,000 patients per year. How did Americans learn to accept hundreds of thousands of deaths from minor medical mistakes as an inevitability?
My survivor’s grief has taken the form of an obsession with our health-care system. For more than a year, I’ve been reading as much as I can get my hands on, talking to doctors and patients, and asking a lot of questions.
Keeping Dad company in the hospital for five weeks had left me befuddled. How can a facility featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment use less-sophisticated information technology than my local sushi bar? How can the ICU stress the importance of sterility when its trash is picked up once daily, and only after flowing onto the floor of a patient’s room? Considering the importance of a patient’s frame of mind to recovery, why are the rooms so cheerless and uncomfortable? In whose interest is the bizarre scheduling of hospital shifts, so that a five-week stay brings an endless string of new personnel assigned to a patient’s care? Why, in other words, has this technologically advanced hospital missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations?
I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.
Like every grieving family member, I looked for someone to blame for my father’s death. But my dad’s doctors weren’t incompetent—on the contrary, his hospital physicians were smart, thoughtful, and hard-working. Nor is he dead because of indifferent nursing—without exception, his nurses were dedicated and compassionate. Nor from financial limitations—he was a Medicare patient, and the issue of expense was never once raised. There were no greedy pharmaceutical companies, evil health insurers, or other popular villains in his particular tragedy.
Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.
These are the impersonal forces, I’ve come to believe, that explain why things have gone so badly wrong in health care, producing the national dilemma of runaway costs and poorly covered millions. The problems I’ve explored in the past year hardly count as breakthrough discoveries—health-care experts undoubtedly view all of them as old news. But some experts, it seems, have come to see many of these problems as inevitable in any health-care system—as conditions to be patched up, papered over, or worked around, but not problems to be solved.
That’s the premise behind today’s incremental approach to health-care reform. Though details of the legislation are still being negotiated, its principles are a reprise of previous reforms—addressing access to health care by expanding government aid to those without adequate insurance, while attempting to control rising costs through centrally administered initiatives. Some of the ideas now on the table may well be sensible in the context of our current system. But fundamentally, the “comprehensive” reform being contemplated merely cements in place the current system—insurance-based, employment-centered, administratively complex. It addresses the underlying causes of our health-care crisis only obliquely, if at all; indeed, by extending the current system to more people, it will likely increase the ultimate cost of true reform.
I’m a Democrat, and have long been concerned about America’s lack of a health safety net. But based on my own work experience, I also believe that unless we fix the problems at the foundation of our health system—largely problems of incentives—our reforms won’t do much good, and may do harm. To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy. We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government’s role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy.
These ideas stand well outside the emerging political consensus about reform. So before exploring alternative policies, let’s reexamine our basic assumptions about health care—what it actually is, how it’s financed, its accountability to patients, and finally its relationship to the eternal laws of supply and demand. Everyone I know has at least one personal story about how screwed up our health-care system is; before spending (another) $1trillion or so on reform, we need a much clearer understanding of the causes of the problems we all experience.
Posted in Uncategorized by thinkingblue on the September 13th, 2009
Is there no end to Glenn Beck HATRED AND BIGOTRY? Apparently not. And this hypocrite has the audacity to promote something he calls 9/12 project.
When I heard that this joker Glenn Beck was acting as though he was trying to unite WE THE PEOPLE… It made me sick to the degree of needing a puke bucket. Who the hell is this idiot trying to flimflam? We, who have a bit more marbles than the average Fox (you call that NEWS?) viewer… have heard all Becks noxious hyperbole, (that spews almost visibly, like foul breath from this guys pie-hole) before and cant be proselytized by his insanity now!
Becks 9/12 project of Preaching 9 Principles and 12 Values that he says have been lost in the USA today (I could just imagine this crackpot sitting at his Fox Desk, scribbling this crap onto paper trying to make up this slaphappy list … http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/912-… ) Its bona fide BULLSHIT to the smelliest degree.
Like I asked before WHO THE FLYING FUCK IS HE TRYING TO HOODWINK?
See video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUqR9stMBSk
Posted in Uncategorized by thinkingblue on the September 10th, 2009
Hmmm, the other day I was pondering about the brainlessness within the Republican base and I have come to a conclusion about it.
Some, especially media, have been giving these fools a break, acting as though they’re just normal “PASSIONATE” Americans, taking leave of their senses because they are so befuddled due to the fear of losing something that’s precious to them.
BULLSHIT!
Oh they’re frightened, that’s for sure, but it’s not passion they’re expressing its pure unadulterated HATE! Worse than that! It’s BIGOTRY! They hate because never, NOT EVER, within their pea-pickin sized brains, did they fathom a black man as president of the USA… Not just that… “THE” leader of their intolerant America! Yes, there are two Americas’ Virginia, they exist as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist. One tolerant and broadminded, the other intolerant and narrow-minded!
Sincerely, thinkingblue, from the TOLERANT, BROADMINDED USA
PS: Joe (You Lie) Wilson resides in the other America!
Posted in Uncategorized by thinkingblue on the September 10th, 2009
“As far as I am concerned, this is not civics education — it gives the appearance of creating a cult of personality. This is something you’d expect to see in NORTH KOREA or in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” – Republican Senator Steve Russell said about
NORTH KOREA? WTF! I can’t believe this Horse’s Patootie (F**KFACE) has the unmitigated audacity (BALLS) to compare President Barack Obama to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il who has no empathy, sympathy or mercy for his fellow man.
(There are over 20 million North Koreans living a horrible existence. Some starve to death every day. Others are either outright killed by the government or die from the abuse of torture and from being kept in horrible prisons.)
Someone ought to string this Horse’s Patootie (F**KFACE) up by his unmitigated audacity (BALLS). Hey, I’m angry that a SENATOR (elected by we the people) would spout and sputter such hatefule words. thinkingblue.blogspot.com
Posted in Uncategorized by thinkingblue on the September 7th, 2009
Shock and caw: Pesky starlings still overwhelm – I have to admit, I love birds. Especially since moving to a rural area where you can go outside your home and see and hear these wild creatures going about their daily tasks of survival. And they are quite fastidious as well as genius at endurance (we humans should possess such astuteness at survival). So when I see an article about birds I can’t help but open it to a read. Thus, the reason for today’s blog.As much as I enjoy these small darlings who share the Earth with us, there are people who have quite opposite feelings. As a matter of fact they hate the little buggers. How can this be? Well it all boils down to money again… So much of this world’s tribulations can be directly traced back to the almighty buck. It seems these supercilious, masters of survival, can do damage to industry. Yikes, are these poor tiny beasts, in for it now.
The capitalist motto: You don’t mess with business; business messes with you. So little starling you’ve been targeted. But this is one infinitesimal enemy of the Private Enterprise System that won’t go down too easily. Because no matter the weapon devised by the Capitalists these birdies regroup and come back stronger.
Now I know there will be those who will retort my adoration for these animals by telling me I’m nuts, because they’re vermin and cause disease… I have only one comeback for those naysayers on, THEY CAUSE DISEASE… SO DO WE BUB! thinkingblue
By MIKE STARK, Associated Press Writer Mike Stark, Associated Press Writer – Sun Sep 6, 4:36 pm ET
SALT LAKE CITY – The next time the sky darkens with a flock of noisy unwelcome starlings, blame Shakespeare — or, better yet, a few of his strangest fans.
Had the Bard not mentioned the starling in the third scene of “Henry IV,” arguably the most hated bird in North America might never have arrived. In the early 1890s, about 100 European starlings were released in New York City’s Central Park by a group dedicated to bringing to America every bird ever mentioned by Shakespeare.
Today, it’s more like Hitchcock.
Some 200 million shiny black European starlings crowd North America, from the cool climes of Alaska to the balmy reaches of Mexico’s Baja peninsula. The enormous flocks endanger air travel, mob cattle operations, chase off native songbirds, roost on city blocks, leaving behind corrosive, foul-smelling droppings and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage each year.
PS: It’s Labor Day and I have a little story to tell about this day, long ago, in my life. It was 1959, I was forced to quit school (because I was one of 5 kids in a low income family) and work in a factory. It was a textile factory and most of the minimum wage employees there were older woman. I was the youngest at age 16. I remember one Labor Day when everyone was eager for the day to end, so they could look forward to their holiday. I thought about this so called “holiday” and how my paycheck would be short a day’s pay because the owners of this factory did not pay employees for holidays. They also were vigilant at keeping Unions from forming by firing anyone who attempted to start one. As we were cleaning up, getting ready for the loud buzzer that would signify our workday was over. I thought out-loud unhappily, “This isn’t Labor Day for us it’s Layoff Day.” Others heard my disgruntled mutterings and as we left they all said to one another as they bid goodbye, “HAPPY LAYOFF DAY.” Hmmm, I wonder if the bosses ever knew who started that?
Dear Margaret and Helen, I wanted to let you know that I love your blog. I blog also, but I keep getting my knickers in a twist more than I would like to admit. I have been blogging since We, The Idiots of the United States of America, elected Bush/Cheney to serve another 4 years in 2004. Back then, I couldn’t believe it happened… PLEASE PINCH/PUNCH ME for I must be having a nightmare. But it wasn’t a nightmare (sleep) it was a nightmare (reality). So in order to help me retain some sanity I blogged and I blogged… through all those long, horrible 4 years. Then, finally a light was spotted in that darkened tunnel we were forced to live in… A light called Obama! Anyway, just wanted to let you know you are geniuses in my book and to think, all you do is write your mind. I want to learn from you because I spread my frustrations all over the place…
And what did I get for all my efforts? A few wacko, right-wing, Looney Tune responses from the idiots who gave us Bush/Cheney for 4 long, horrible years. BUMMER!
