I guess I could get snarky and say that this definition does more closely match with conservative ideology than liberal….

You can lay the blame on people who push for bills that address all facets of a problem, but from where I sit there is also a problem with people who give politicians the greenlight to pass lousy legislation by giving them the excuse that “it’s better to do something than to wait for the perfect solution”. If this is the message that you give your legislators, they’ll take it and run with it.

And believe me, I’m aware that perfection is always elusive; I’d settle for something in the mediocre to good range, or at least abiding by the standby of “do no harm”.

“There is a simple truth missing from much of this discussion: our healthcare status impacts heavily on our national economic future. Letting things slide because we can’t find the prtfect solution just means there will be no solution, not even an imperfect one, and the nation’s health will continue to deteriorate.”

Huge, huge, huge.

That’s precisely why we can’t get a handle on our immigration problem and why we won’t be getting a handle on our helthcare problem., IMO. Shaun is right: not in my life time.

I have to wonder when, if ever, this country will realize that it consists of real, live people, whose health care needa are not met by the insureres and providers. How low do we have to sink before we become ashamed of ourselves?

As long as competition for profits drives providing health care, the patient will continue to be last on the list of considerations-way after downsizing staff to cut costs and excluding treatments and medications. Competition only works for betterment when it’s not competition among wolves.

In the meantime, countries like France and Germany are doing just fine, as their economies steadily improve, even with the socialized healthcare they provide and Americans love to denigrate. They seem to understand that people matter more than ideologies.

There is a simple truth missing from much of this discussion: our healthcare status impacts heavily on our national economic future. Letting things slide because we can’t find the prtfect solution just means there will be no solution, not even an imperfect one, and the nation’s health will continue to deteriorate.

If I did refer to bacteriophages as bacteria, it was just an error in typing- I do know that they’re viruses. I’m also aware of the risks, and that this type of treatment wouldn’t prevent resistance. However, the more specific a treatment is, the less likely to develop resistant populations (because if the target bacteria are killed without affecting normal flora, the normal flora aren’t being spurred toward evolutionary changes to resist the treatment). Plus, my general thought process is along the lines of what you are saying about varying the treatment; using a completely different approach is better than coming up with new and improved variations on the main theme.

And yeah, I realize there are obstacles to overcome like potential side effects that are inherent to the process- but that’s no different than other emerging biotechnologies like ESCR (not saying the two fields are at equal stages of development- I really don’t know- just saying it’s true of any new process that there are a lot of kinks to work out before it is usable).

1- You aren’t going to get rid of acquired resistance this way, or any way, really. Resistance is just a natural consequence of treatment. The only way to avoid resistance is to constantly change the method of attack, because otherwise bacteria will evolve to become resistant to the antibiotic, to the protein or whatever. ANY treatment that is used often enough and long enough will lead to resistance, though specific treatments are better than wide-spectrum for this, which leads me to…

2- The misuse of antibiotics is rampant and a cause of multiresistant infections. First of all, wide-spectrum antibiotics should ONLY be a last resort, when diagnosis is impossible or the problem too urgent. Those antibiotics are supposed to kill a wide array of bacteria, but use should be kept to a minimum in order to avoid resistant strains from spreading. Instead the opposite occurs. Rather than ordering expensive and slow diagnosis tests a doctor will discharge a patient with a wide spectrum antibiotic, wide spectrum antibiotics are used “just in case” the minute someone sneezes, some doctors even prescribe it for the flu! (note: antibiotics are USELESS against viruses). In addition to this, patients often ignore instructions to finish the box of antibiotics, stopping when they “feel better” without understanding that they’ve just given the infection a sublethal dose of antibiotic, the perfect breeding ground for resistant bacteria.

Also, a system that is profit-based will naturally try to cut costs, and one of the ways is by mistreating patients, especially those who’s deaths can be explained away as “it was their time” (the especially ill and elderly). This combination of cost cutting and lack of accountability is literally deadly. I can see CS where encouraging euthanasia might happen in response to funds being withheld for infections, but they could get into serious criminal trouble if they were caught. That is, if the health INDUSTRY had much accountability, but it doesn’t. It’s bottom line is in dollars, not health.

The nosocomial epidemic is scandalous and the only way to get a hospital’s attention these days is with money — including withholding it.

I disagree on both points.

First, as I alluded to above, the reason that these infections occur is not all the fault of the hospital. Before you accuse me of making excuses, I’m not saying that hospitals don’t need to do better in prevention. But there’s still a point beyond which these things are out of their control, simply by nature of the way we treat infections. Resistance can and will develop, and 100% sterility is not possible. There will thus be bacteria in a hospital environment which will be highly resistant, and some of these bugs will infect patients (who by the way, also by virtue of our Western concept of medicine, often have severely lowered natural immunity as a result of the treatments they’re recieving).

I’m of the mindset that we should punish people and institutions for the things they can avoid or correct, not punish them just because we think someone has to be punished. If there were some way to selectively apply the withholding of funding (tie it to a rigorous inspection process), so that the hospitals were punished when the infections were their fault but not when they were the unfortunate results of our best medical practices, then I’d support this.

And second, why in the world would we think that witholding payment would lead to better care when this does occur? The scenario I described, convincing the family to end treatment, is much more likely (particularly with the elderly).

Which brings me to a larger point:

There will not be meaningful health-care reform in the U.S. until the for-profit aspects of the system are examined, undone and put back together in a way that devalues profit-making for its own sake and values offering the best care to the most people.

I don’t care if Mr. Jesus H. Christ is elected president in 2008. He wouldn’t stand a chance against the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies and major hospital chains that are gobbling up community hospitals left and right. And donate obscene amounts of money (there’s that word again) to Democrats and Republicans.

So there will not be meaningful health-care reform, at least not in my lifetime, and that is an even bigger scandal.

Really the only long term solution is to rethink the way we treat disease. There’s some research going on with bacteriophages- bacteria that eat other microbes- which can be targeted more specifically than antibiotic drugs can. Whereas antibiotics kill a whole spectrum of ‘bugs’, bacteriophages would be much more specific, and the microbes would have much less chance of developing resistance.

Penicillin led the way to our current way of dealing with infectious disease, and because it was cheap and badly needed (to treat wartime wounds) it led to our belief that we could keep devising new, stronger antibiotics. We’re now dealing with the negative consequences of that narrow thinking.

Certainly it would reduce the number of people without access to medical care, but that is a very different statement than it would improve the quality of care provided.

And before anyone attacks me as not touched by the very problem that started this post, I too got severe secondary infections in the late 90′s due to two abdomen operations (the first one of which was an unnecessary procedure due to a misdiagnoses).

In both cases I ended up back in ICU, the second time for 10 days, and almost died. They had to use experimental antibiotics on me to save my life, and a side effect of one was a high tendency to cause Type II diabetes, which happened to me (the drug never passed the clinical trial stage due to this effect).

Even given all that, I have NO desire to see what would happen if we socialize health care (and that IS what it is, just with another name to hide the truth).

In other words I do not want to see a new department level agency created.

Oh, my, you have gone over to the dark side, Somebody.

Healthcare is an incredibly complex problem without an easy fix. Any solutions with a chance of working have to be comprehensive, addressing the actual costs of medical care, efficiency of services, accessibility, supply of providers, supply of medical technology, costs of drug R&D, incentives for young/healthy individuals to get insured, incentives for insurance companies to cover preventative care, separating insurance from employment by providing equivalent tax deductibility for private insurance coverage, and provision of preventative care to the poor under Medicare and SCHIP programs.

In other words, just as with the immigration problem, there’s no easy fix and we’re unlikely to see any progress because the mixture of remedies has elements that are supported by certain special interest groups but opposed by others, which ends up in a stalemate. And if you tinker with one part without the comprehensive changes, you can easily make things worse instead of better.

But overall- creating more bureaucracy to handle the problem? Nah, I don’t think so.

And anyway, Somebody, I don’t get why you single out Hillary as the one to address this. Why not Edwards, Obama, or Romney? (Mind you, I don’t favor any of their plans- haven’t seen a single candidate address the problem the way I think it needs to be addressed- I’m just asking what it is about Hillary that makes you think she’s the best candidate on this issue)

For two days ago in a row, I’m agreeing with Somebody.

Im going to have to go to counseling now.

While I support Universal health care the problem is how to make it work in America without putting millions of people out of work who currently work for the Insurance agencies.

This is going to require a balanced budget. Large Tax increases (ON EVERYONE, not just the RICH) and a huge employer participation. Personally I favor moderate tax increases, and a new national sales tax whose only purpose is to pay for health care and to pay down the deficit.

However even though I am for Universal health care I am NOT for socialized medicine. This means that we need to bring the private sector into the mix and that the government should not be in the business of running this program so much as overseeing it.

In other words I do not want to see a new department level agency created.

I have posted before that our nation is teetering on the edge financially. That the immigration fiasco was a clever way of keeping the tax dollars rolling in while not have to be held accountable. The rocking markets are starting to realize that Im right. If we dont take control. Painful as it might be….there will soon be nothing to take control of.

The staff seems to come in two classes. There are those that try to do a good job, end up being overwoeked and burn out, and those that couldn’t care less about doing a job or seeing to the patients.
No one with authority is around to keep the slackers in line.

We need an aggressive system of inspections, demerits and penalties to keep tabs on what goes on after a patient risks entering a hospital.
It’s outarageous that hospitals would expect the same payment for lousy provision of care as for good.

I’ve always supported Universal Health Care, but that alone won’t imporve the morally corrupt culture of hospital administrations. We need legislation to address that issue, and fast.

They pumped him full of drugs, he got some positive reaction to it, and then they immediately discharged him to his local Rehab facility.

The Rehab doctors asked why my Dad was there as he needed to be back in the Hospital and should never have been released. They did not ship him back and in a few days he died.

We need a National Healthcare system so docs and staff don’t woory about costs as much as thye need to be focused on treatment. But we need to first ensure we have a more competent government than we do now with this Bush Administration.

I’d be inclined to say the staffing was inadequate. Also, about half the nurses seemed fresh out of nursing school without much experience–working without a net. And responsible for the care of ten patients at a time, because the staffing was inadequate.

I’m dubious about the value of legal action. That contributes, in my opinion, to why hospitals prefer to hide mistakes, instead of learning from them. Making changes in procedure might be taken as admission of guilt.

Something has to change.

I admire your willingness to take up the cause of universal health care, crossing over isn’t always easy (you should see the kinds of crap I got for my immigration views on some lefty blogs).
I’m terribly sorry to read about what happened to your mother, have you considered legal action? Sounds like blatant negligence to me. It’s amazing that in addition to the millions of uninsured even the insured are mistreated and abandoned. My own mother was nearly killed in a routine procedure by an incompetent doctor in a Kaiser Permanente hospital, she spent a good 4 months hospitalized because the doctor not only ruptured her intestine but managed to get air inside the cavity as well, closed it up and then allowed it to get terribly infected. She can barely eat now, most of her nutrition comes from certain fruits, vegetables and white fish. We consulted a lawyer that told us that basically yes, it was malpractice, but that no way that we’d win against kaiser their band of lawyers and there releases (apparently you sign away your life if they so much as take your temperature). Luckily here in Spain we can have access to our universal healthcare system and free drugs, because, thanks to Kaiser, she really really needs doctors right now.

I am a Conservative Republican who believes that this country needs Universal health coverage for all. How we pay for it is a difficult challenge but it needs to be addressed and for that reason I will be turning to the democratic party this next election.

Hillary right now has my vote. There is no one in the screwed up Republican party who even comes close to comprehending the true problems facing America today.

The emergency room misdiagnosed her and filled her full of fluids which then required massive amounts of drugs to drain the water off her lungs. They put her in a heart unit with one nurse monitoring a dozen patients. This after the dr. in the emmergency room told us he doubted she would survive the night.

Im thinking why is she not in Intensive Care and instead in a heart unit with one nurse and two staffers who all congregated around the water fountain and told jokes all night while the light in my mothers room flashed for several minutes at a time before they responded.

The next day a cardiologist was summoned. Sunday….heaven forbid……He wanted to know where her living will was. When we said its Sunday and its in her safety deposit box at the bank he spent his entire visit bitching us out for not showing up at the hospital on the weekend waving her living will and declaring….”Euthanize the old hag.”

I kid you not.

I finally had to demand that she see actual doctors the next morning, much to the chagrin of the hospital staff who would much rather tell jokes at the water fountain.

Once out of the heart unit and into the ICU her care was exemplary. After 4 days of not showing the hospital her living will for fear of “Euthanizing the old hag” becoming a reality she was doing better and transferred to a main floor.

Once on the main floor her treatment once again relegated to the most abysmal care I have ever seen in a hospital. Vietnam Vets in the 60′s and 70′s received better quality care then my mother received while this hospital was charging her insurance somewhere on the order of 150,000 dollars for 10 days.

The nurse constantly complained her back hurt and that if I wanted my mother to be turned “we” The family would have to do it ourselves. We found her sitting in the dark, having pulled her iv pic line out of her arm. We found her lying in piles of feces after having had to spend the entire night in this position while the night crew told jokes around the water fountain and hid the call button from her so they would not be distrubed. We found her food tray sitting outside the room while everyone else had eaten. We found her lying on the floor.

NOW mind you this was despite either me or my sister spending on the neighborhood of 12 hours per day in her room advocating for her needs.

I could go on and on and on. But quite honestly the care my mother received in a “quality” hospital was shocking.

Last year I had cancer and was operated on at the VA hospital. The care was superlative. The doctor hustled me out the door as quickly as possible. In my case I checked in Monday afternoon and was home saturday by noon.

His reasoning? Staph Infections. The longer you stay here…….he said……..the more likely you are to get sicker then you were when you arrived. He told me I had a much greater chance of healing at home then if I stayed in the hospital.

This is no surprise and given my mothers treatment It is not surprising that infections are common place. In fact I would say the hospitals are creating a culture in which they encourage these infections so in fact they can receive MORE INCOME> Not convinced? Read the above once again with that in mind.