Re: Why do loyal Bushies love big pharma and the insurance industry?

On Jul 1, 10:55 am, Rich Hutnik <getr...@1upandup.com> wrote:

> Apparently Sicko has struck a nerve with some. This nerve has had

> them say America has "the world's best health care system". Well, I

> have a question why do they love big pharma and the insurance industry

> so much? Why do they fail to admit that America's healthcare system

> has issues and needs some reform? Why do they refuse to see America's

> healthcare system ranks near the bottom among western nations,

> according to the World Health Organization? And why do they not seem

> to care? It is a lovefest for big pharma and the insurance industry.

>

> Anyone know why?

> - Rich

"The person most likely to kill you is not a relative or a friend, or

a

mugger or a burglar or a drunken driver. The person most likely to

kill

you is your doctor."

---(Vernon Coleman) author- What Doctors Don't Tell You

Doctors Are Officially Big Killers - Alongside Heart Disease And

Cancer.

Approximately 98,000 Americans die from "medical mistakes" each year

Should you sue your doctor?

Is your doctor trying out a new drug on you? Ask questions?

Over half of the doctors practicing in America did not graduate from

American medical schools. Many attended schools offshore where English

was not the language. More than half of all physicians licensed in

this country are educated in foreign countries. Whole regions of the

US have a majority of physicians in practice who are not graduates of

a US medical school. It is beginning to show. Many of these graduates

were turned down from attending American medical schools, for a

variety of reasons, including low grades in previous schooling.

The medical industry has become a dangerous scam that is without the

kind of regulation necessary to protect our citizens. And, as it

becomes less competative, it becomes more expensive. Medicare is

taking a beating because doctors are claiming procedures that are not

being done. Patients are expected to report these phony claims but

when they do, nothing is done to follow up.

Clearly we need more health care providers to address patients'

growing needs however, the key word is "providers." Efficient and

effective treatment for basic health care issues can be provided by

nonphysicians, such as advanced nurse practicioners or physician

assistants. Importing physicians from other countries or training

more physicians is not necessary when there are many US citizens who

could fill our health care needs. I agree with Daniel S. Greenberg.

Kaiser, VA, and other large health systems use the "provider" model

of care. Clearly, it works. We should train more nonphysicians as

this

would take less training time and dollars.The medical delivery system

of today seems more impressed by how much money rather than how many

lives it can save.

Congress should do something to save money and, at the same time,

protect Americans from these medical scam artists. However, the

politicians are held hostage by the massive lobby campaigns that help

elect them to office. (so they do nothing about it.)

In the meantime, Americans die at the hands of these rip-off artists

with a medical shingle on their office doors.

Some above information from:

Do we need more physicians or efficient health care?

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/17343.html

"SICKO" MAKES THEM SICK

Source: New York Sun, June 20, 200

>From the SiCKO website"A multifaceted counteroffensive against Michael

Moore's film about the health care industry" is beginning, reports

Elizabeth Solomont. To counter the movie Sicko, "free market think

tanks and the drug companies are already mobilizing. ... Several

organizations staging responses to 'Sicko' receive funding from

pharmaceutical companies, including the Manhattan Institute, the

Heritage Foundation, and the Pacific Research Institute," notes

Solomont, citing SourceWatch. "It definitely has to be rebutted," said

the Pacific Research Institute's Sally Pipes. The Pharmaceutical

Research and Manufacturers of America's Ken Johnson called the film a

"biased, one-sided attack." Health Care America, "whose Web site says

it is funded in part by pharmaceutical manufacturers," held a

conference call with reporters, "to discuss what Michael Moore left

out of his movie." A press release from FreedomWorks says the

conservative lobbying group will also weigh in, with its "nationwide

grassroots army ... handing out information at movie theaters

that exposes Moore's hypocrisy, points out the problems associated

with government-run health care, and promotes the FreedomWorks

solution of removing existing government barriers that prevent

Americans from being able to use the free market to choose the care

that suits their individual needs."

----------

Approximately 98,000 Americans die from "medical mistakes" each year,

but if you're thinking about a lawsuit, be warned: Juries sympathize

more with doctors.

WHAT'S KILLING YOU ?

Is your doctor killing you?

Medical malpractice is the 3rd leading cause of death in the United

States. Losing a family member, friend or loved one or seeing them

suffer can be devastating. But finding out that their injury or death

could have been prevented by adequate medical care is even worse.

Medical malpractice is the 3rd leading cause of death in the United

States and the Republicans want to make it illegal to sue your

killer.

Don't let it happen. It could be you or a family member next

Negligence matters, but medical defendants are favored in the

courtroom because of the doctor's superior resources, the social

standing of physicians and social norms against "profiting" by injury,

according to the study "Doctors and Juries" by a University of

Missouri-Columbia law professor who examined 17 years of malpractice

cases.

When the evidence of negligence is conflicting, juries are more

willing to

give physicians the "benefit of the doubt," according to a study by

author Philip Peters..

But what usually seals it for doctors is the expert witness. Juries

agree

with the paid expert reviewers in 80 to 90 percent of these cases- a

better agreement rate than physicians typically have with each other,

Peters said.

Other findings:

Plaintiffs rarely win weak cases. Plaintiffs have more success in

toss- up cases and have better outcomes in cases with strong evidence

of medical negligence.

Juries have the ability to recognize weak cases and agree with

independent legal experts 80 to 90 percent of the time regarding such

cases.

Doctors are victorious in 50 percent of the cases that independent

legal

experts expected plaintiffs to win.

Peters conducted the study becuase legislation is pending in both

houses of Congress to transfer medical malpractice cases from civil

juries to administrative health courts.

"The Institute of Medicine also wants to take malpractice cases away

from juries through a system of binding early settlement offers. Each

of these proposals is premised on the assumption that juries lack the

capacity to resolve medical malpractice disputes fairly," the

research

says

Should you sue your doctor?

The reality is that it's very hard to win any lawsuit against any

major

organization. Judges have little patience for frivolous lawsuits,

hospitals and insurance companies have armies of lawyers, and juries

have little sympathy for people they perceive as whiners and they

don't want their own insurance premiums and healthcare costs going up

because of large awards. Bottom line is, don't plan on getting rich

off a lawsuit - the lawyers will bleed you dry before you even get to

court.

Medical Malpractice Caps are Unwarranted by the Payout of Claims Data

Each year, the debate in state legislatures around this country

regarding the so called need for tort reform and caps on medical

malpractice cases intensifies. Big medical corporations and insurance

companies, who are only motivated about increasing premium revenue and

decreasing payments to victims, lead the fight with big dollar

lobbying campaigns. Unfortunately,these lobbying efforts rarely

contain accurate facts and figures and in the end, leave innocent

victims of malpractice with little or no recourse for even blatent

acts of malpractice.

One of the favorite arguments of the proponents of caps of damages is

the alleged increased cost of physician premiums which they

erroneously suggest are caused by big money payouts. However,

published statistics for state health facts and figures debunk this

myth. The StateHealthFacts.org website, sponsored by the Kaiser

Family Foundation, reports that in the year 2005, the average medical

malpractice payment totalled only $290,982 for the 14,021 reportedly

paid claims. Highlights of this state by state breakdown on the

number of paid claims showed that New York led the nation with 1,768

paid claims and was followed by California (1,117), Florida (1,095),

Pennsylvania (1,061), and Texas (1,018).

Many states were well below the small national $290,000 payout.

Louisiana, which had 299 paid claims in 2005, only averaged $185,897

per paid claim. Similarly, Texas only paid an average of $182,795.

Michigan, which paid 451 claims averaged $130,412 per payout. South

Carolina averaged $161,092 on 171 paid claims.

These documented facts and figures, compiled by an independent and

reliable source, certainly dispell the notion that medical

malpractice

payouts in this country each year are not "runaway verdictsor

payments" that require special legislation to "reel in the trial

lawyers."

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/features_julieshealthclub/200...

http://medmalblog.thecochranfirmno.com/archives/cat-medical-malpracti...

Drug makers pay for lunch as they pitch

The New York Times, 7.28.2006

Free lunches like those at the medical building in New Hyde Park,

N.Y., occur regularly at doctors' offices nationwide, where delivery

people arrive with lunch for the whole office, ordered and paid for by

drug makers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Like the "free" vacation that comes with a time-share pitch attached,

the lunches go down along with a pitch from pharmaceutical

representatives hoping to bolster prescription sales. The cost of the

lunches is ultimately factored in to drug company marketing expenses,

working its way into the price of prescription drugs. Doing business

over lunch is a common practice in many fields, but drug makers have

honed it to perfection, particularly since 2002, when the drug

industry adopted a new code banning many other free enticements - golf

outings, athletic tickets, trips and lavish dinners for doctors. The

code gives approval to modest meals in the course of business. And

conventional wisdom in both the pharmaceutical industry and the

medical profession is that a lunch is too small to pose an ethical

problem. But a growing number of critics say that even those small

lunches should be banned.

Hospital chiefs get paid for advice on selling

The New York Times, 7.17.2006

While the financial relationship between doctors and drug companies

has come under intense scrutiny, much less is known about how hospital

executives interact with companies that sell products as varied as

syringes and financial services. In the case of the Healthcare

Research and Development Institute, executives benefit from payments

made by companies their hospitals do business with.

The medical industry is corrupt from top to bottom and protected by

politicians.

Stay well. Your doctor may own a mortuary as well as a drugstore and

want your business.

Hospitals turn to robots, bar codes to organize pharmacies Baltimore

Business Journal, 3.6.2006

Giant, drug-dispensing robots are in some ways yesterday's news. A

robot in Greater Baltimore Medical Center's inpatient pharmacy has

been operating for five years now, filling orders that are sent out to

units and keeping track of drug inventory. Happy with how that robot

is working out, GBMC officials are now pondering their next move and

are giving serious thought to bar code systems to be used in

administration of medication directly to patients.

Pricing health care? It's not that easy

Chicago Tribune, 8.10.2006

Health insurers are aggressively marketing medical policies with high

deductibles--the amount people pay before coverage kicks in. Many

experts contend these products will motivate Americans to shop for

medical care, as they do for cars or computers. But basic data about

what services cost generally aren't available. Medical providers and

insurers consider this to be highly sensitive competitive information,

and their contracts require that it remain secret.

Fatigue in hospitals: an Rx for danger

The Boston Globe, 9.22.2006

IS ANYONE awake in America's teaching hospitals? Just barely,

according to several new studies. In spite of limits on hospital

residency program hours , interns are still too exhausted to protect

either their patients or themselves. In addition, nurses -- who used

to be alert enough to catch the errors of an inexperienced or

exhausted resident -- are now working too long and making more errors

themselves.

SEE

Gangsters in Medicine:

The Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported that

as many as 106,000 deaths occur annually in US hospitals due to

adverse reactions to prescription drugs that are properly prescribed

by physicians that use them as directed by the drug companies.

Even worse, the National Council for Patient Information and Education

reported that an additional 125,000 deaths occur annually due to

adverse reactions to drugs that the physician never should have

prescribed. In these deaths the doctor did not follow the instructions

on proper administration of the drugs. For example, Glucophage, a

diabetic oral hypoglycemic, should never be prescribed for patients

with Kidney disease or Congestive Heart Failure because it can cause

fatal Lactic Acidosis in these patients. A warning label is

prominently placed on the medication container to warn of this

potential misuse.

According to Dr. Mendelsohn, author of "Confessions of a Medical

Heretic", 2.4 million unnecessary operations are performed every year

and they cost over 12,000 lives

The annual death toll from synthetic prescription drugs, both from the

correctly prescribed and the incorrectly prescribed, amounts to about

231,000 deaths every year. To put this into perspective, this is the

equivalent of a world trade center disaster every week for over a year

and a half or the crash of two fully loaded 747 aircraft every day of

the year.

According to the World Health Report 2000 the United States ranks

twelfth, that is second from the bottom, in their thirteen country

survey of sixteen available health indicators. We are dead last for

low birth weight and neonatal and infant mortality. We rank between

ninth and twelfth for all life expectancy categories between one year

and 40 years. Another study ranked the United States as fifteenth in

the twenty-five industrialized countries studied.

Although the record of the United States Medical community in the cure

of disease is deplorable, the same cannot be said for its ability to

produce income and profit. For example, for the top fifteen

pharmaceutical companies, including such names as Abbot, Wyeth,

Hoffman-La Roche, Merck and others, the second quarter revenue for

2002 was reported as $63,520.6 million and the corresponding reported

income was 11,731.8 million respectively. This is second only to the

defense industry in the United States.

In 1997, the latest year for which we have the figures, the earnings

of physicians were reported by Broad as averaging around $200,000 per

year. The lowest reporting specialty, Rheumatology reported $158,500

and the highest, cardiovascular surgeon, reported $363,300. When

examining the numbers, we noted that the high salaries seemed to be

concentrated in members of the AMA. Those belonging to less powerful

trade unions did not fare nearly so well even though they did most of

the actual patient care work. For example, the median staff salary of

registered nurses was $35,256

The Cardiac surgeon, for example, does nothing whatsoever to cure

cardiac disease. Three to five percent of the heart surgery patients

die on the operating table. Cardiac surgery provides no better three

year survival rate than no treatment at all. A Harvard survival study

of 200,000 patients revealed that the long term survival rate of

patients subjected to surgery was no better than the survival rate of

those that had no surgery.

Of course, your cardiac surgeon will not tell you this when you need

to make a decision on whether or not to elect cardiac surgery.

Never in history have so many accumulated so much wealth for providing

their customers or clients or patients with so little real benefit.

Exceptions to the rule.

Many doctors of integrity are as much victims of the system as are

their patients. Today's doctor is not free to treat disease as his

conscience dictates. He is forced to administer approved protocols

whether they are known to work or not. To deviate from these approved

protocols invites law suits, peer criticism and censure from State

medical licensing boards.

http://www.whale.to/a/smith25.html

Doctor's note? It might cost you

Los Angeles Times, 8.28.2006

Doctors - particularly primary care doctors - are increasingly billing

for services that patients have long expected to get gratis:

prescription refills, photocopies of medical records, phone

consultations, family medical leave forms, medical disability forms,

waivers of insurance premiums, waivers for handicapped plates.

Automotive forms. And life insurance premium forms. Travel insurance

forms. And now, e-mail responses. The practice, almost unheard of five

years ago, has disgruntled some patients and is starting to come to

the attention of consumer advocates, who denounce it as one more sign

of a broken-down medical system.

U.S. healthcare system "dangerous" compared with two dozen

industrialized nations

NewsTarget)

A new study by The Commonwealth Fund's Commission on a High

Performance Health System shows that the U.S. healthcare system ranks

far below those of nearly two dozen other industrialized nations.

The study examined 37 national indicators of health outcomes, access,

equity, quality and efficiency, and ranked each with a score out of

100. The United Stated scored an average of 66 -- a failing grade.

"There are many pockets of excellence in health in this country, but

overall we are performing far below our national potential," says

James Mongan, a physician and chairman of the commission that

performed the study.

The report revealed that of all the countries surveyed, the United

States has the highest infant mortality rate and the lowest life

expectancy for people 60 and older. Nearly one out of every four

American adults reported that they had to wait at least six days to

receive medical care. Hispanics were found to be much more likely to

lack health insurance, and black Americans suffered from higher

infant

mortality rates, as well as higher rates of death for those with

heart

disease, diabetes and cancer.

The study also found that the United States still lacks an error

reporting system to evaluate medical safety six years after a

landmark

report on medical errors. The commission's report also found that in

the past two years, one-third of patients reported medical mistakes

or

errors in medications or lab tests.

The report's authors concluded that if performance in certain

healthcare areas were improved, the country could save as much as $100

billion annually. Natural health advocates say the U.S. system of

healthcare cannot be remedied until focus is shifted from managing

disease to preventing disease.

"The U.S. system of 'sick care' is an economic and health disaster,"

says Mike Adams, author of "Take Back Your Health Power." "The primary

reason is because the drugs-and-surgery approach to medicine avoids

teaching prevention and instead engages in disease mongering to boost

profits for Big Pharma by pushing fictitious diseases like ADHD."

"Look to your health; and if you have it, praise God, and value it

next to a good conscience; for health is the second blessing that we

mortals are capable of; a blessing that money cannot buy"

---Izaak Walton: