Today is Armed Forces Day, though surely it’s ‘Unarmed Forces’ Day… soldiers back from war, who ought be celebrated also… treated with decency to mend up psychic wounds they carry… ones who display injuries just as much in need of healing as a shattered arm, loss of hearing, a leg no longer all there. Same symptomatology in many Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder injuries: shattered; loss of; no longer there in the way one once was…

Borrowing an image from welding, PTSD can also be seen this way: One or more strong welds have come undone; not from weakness in the welds or in the metal, but from the angles the strong welds have been bent to… the tonnage of stress-weight placed on the those welds–- far more bow and weight than this ’strongest of metals known to humankind’ can sustain.

The word ’stress’ in this diagnosis, is not what we feel when driving in gridlocked traffic, nor when competing for a job, nor when we have ten kidlettes discharging candy in the back seat. PTSD stress means, among other things, the psyche has been injured in a sustained way by horrific experiences …so that deeply instinctive elements of psyche are overwhelmed or disabled ….as though they never existed, or have become unreliable for us to put full weight on, /or exist only in an unrelieved black set of memories and griefs.

Shaun Mullen, veteran, writes at Kiko’s House:

PTSD SCANDAL GETS WORSE
I went pretty deep the other day in “Exposed: A Silent Epidemic Is Killing Our Iraq & Afghan War Vets” I urge you to read both this article and accompanying think piece on the anatomy of PTSD if you care about the kind of homecoming the emotionally wounded veterans are receiving.
If the sense of anger and frustration I feel didn’t come through, then I wasn’t doing my job. But then neither is Dr. Norma Perez, physician in charge of PTSD program at a medical facility for veterans who told her staff to refrain from diagnosing the disorder because too many veterans were seeking government disability payments for the condition.

From a shocking article in the Washington Post:
” ‘Given we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,’ Norma Perez wrote in a March 20, 2008 e-mail to mental-health specialists and social workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Olin E. Teague Veterans’ Center in Temple, Tex. Instead, she recommended they ‘consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.’

“VA staff members ‘really don’t . . . have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD,’ Perez wrote.”

In case you’re wondering, adjustment disorder is a less severe reaction to stress than PTSD. Adjustment disorder has a shorter duration, hence is ‘easier’ and cheaper to treat.

Might I add there is a special place in hell for doctors who violate the Hippocratic Oath to save not tortured souls, but money.

This stunning memo from Dr. Perez, seeming to aim to ‘fix’ diagnoses the way horse races are ‘fixed’ in order to keep money in ‘fixer’s’ own pocket, suggests PTSD diagnosis be ‘downgraded’ to “Adjustment Reaction.”

In my experience as a shrink these past three-plus decades, Adjustment Reaction is a diagnosis for a child suddenly changing schools and having a hard time. Adjustment Reaction is a diagnosis belonging to a person going through a garden-variety, uncontested divorce.

Adjustment Reaction is not a diagnosis for men and women who have been to war, and who suffered serious ongoing or sudden trauma. Perhaps most telling in this shell game of diagnoses, treatment for diagnosis of Adjustment Reaction is most often not covered by insurance.

This means, injured vets of this war, would be thrown down into the same trench dug for previous vets, wherein government whistles and pretends agent orange exposure, for instance, is a figment of imagination, instead of a serious incremental illness. This means vets would be encumbered to pay for much needed medical help, from their own meager funds. This means vets will be left on their own -–for life– to deal with catastrophic injuries suffered while in employ of their own government.

Can a person, any person, feign PTSD? Yes, of course. There are scammers of welfare, there are scammers for Social Security benefits, people who are actually fit but lazy. However, most are not scammers. Our soldiers didn’t just slip in an aisle of the grocery store and become disabled. They went to war, a fighting, shooting, deadly war. They managed to come home.

Not all vets with PTSD are invisible to us: those men you see wandering on the streets in their cammies after their war service, they were no scammers either. If anything, the military system A.W., after war, has scammed many of them out of righteous and timely effective treatments for their most serious war wounds long ago.

Some observers might say, Yes, but they’re drug addicts and alcoholics. I’d say, Yes, many are. Now.

Given their lack of a required and timely medical care upon return from deployments, in many ways, since these soldiers didn’t have best medicine, they’ve been primed to settle for the poorest.

Even now, after so long, were they offered good medicine, solid compassionate treatment, many street soldiers might not accept it. Daily i.v. drip of cheap anesthesia can seem enough. To their minds, others on the street often understand more and better than any cleaner, better-dressed, well-fed outsider.

Too, a most poignant feature of severe PTSD is prevalent in the men who wander: they no longer have consistent touch with a core self. They might try but then refuse help, because the spirit and soul of the soldier is in some way still on duty, back on the Mekong delta or outside of Baghdad, or still in some way, marching NPD, Night Perimeter Defense… to keep all of us and their buds safe from harm.

A fine welder does not throw broken welded metal onto the slag heap, and especially does not re-deploy it back into use, pretending OSHA made up its hazards and safety rules just for the heck of it. The rules about fatigued materials, even at the level of OSHA, are about preserving health and saving lives.

A fine welder repairs the welds that have come undone, often cleaning out most the old material and replacing it with new material that can and will hold well… there’s often a phase too, of ‘letting the metal rest’… but assuredly never again bending the strong metals under extreme pressures which are already well known to break the strongest welds.

The military arm of our government ought have no lesser standards, no less ethos.

John McCain says free enterprise will make it more efficient, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to tinker with it, but the evidence keeps mounting that American health care is a disaster that keeps overwhelming not only the uninsured but those who have “coverage.”

The New York Times reports, “Many of the 158 million people covered by employer health insurance are struggling to meet medical expenses that are much higher than they used to be–often because of some combination of higher premiums, less extensive coverage, and bigger out-of-pocket deductibles and co-payments.

“With medical costs soaring, the coverage many people have may not adequately protect them from the financial shock of an emergency room visit or a major surgery. For some, even routine doctor visits might now take a back seat to basic expenses like food and gasoline.”

Meanwhile, none of the presidential candidates is willing to acknowledge that the American health care system is broken by massive inefficiency, insurer greed and widespread fraud.

Even before they win the presidency and wider margins in the Senate and House, Democrat leaders are undermining the campaign promises of Obama and Clinton by making it clear that the next Congress won’t follow through on even their watered-down proposals.

If voters want health care, they will have to hold their Congressional candidates’ feet to the fire by letting them know that they are really hurting and not being treated right by the clients of the health care lobbyists who are blocking reform. Better yet, they should brush aside all the nonsense about “socialized medicine” and get a national conversation going about a single-payer system.

Cross-posted from my blog.

China, meaning those men and women at the top of all things, has sent out a country-wide alert to try to get Chinese citizens to wash their hands more often and to spray disinfectant

– all in order to deal with a disease called Entero-virus 71, described as a hand, mouth and foot virus. (not the same as hoof and mouth disease in cattle)

In one city alone, Entero-virus 71 has killed 22 children in the last week. Tens of thousands are said to be hospitalized across China, and in one city , over 3000 cases are reported. The disease is passed by effluvia: spittle, feces, blister fluids, nasal and throat discharges.

The Chinese nationwide order about this epidemic remarks:

–EV-17 shows signs of spreading further.

–”Health bureaus at all levels must recognize the importance and urgency of preventing the spread of infectious diseases.”

–Preventing the spread of infectious diseases was necessary “to guarantee the smooth staging of the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics and to practically preserve social stability.”

–The order said any person or agency who tried to cover-up or delay disclosure of outbreaks, would be punished.
(During a SARS pneumonia outbreak in 2003, the government at Beijing tried to cover it up, delaying intervention, causing the deaths of many more people, and finally under pressure from world voices, took severe measures.)

–In the same order, China acknowledged that they have many more cases this year of EV-71, and that also the people need to take steps to prevent epidemics of hepatitis A, measles and other infectious diseases commonly spread in warm weather.

–And peak for infectious disease transmission would come in June and July, the government said.

Even as their presidential candidates debate differences between plans for universal coverage, Congressional Democrats are waving white flags in the coming battle to get anything done.

Leaders of the party that should gain decisive control in November, according to The Hill, are busy explaining the expected defeat of health care reform.

“We all know there is not enough money to do all this stuff,” says Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a Finance Committee member and an Obama backer. “What they are doing is … laying out their ambitions.”

New York’s Chuck Schumer, who is for Hillary Clinton, agrees, saying he is “not sure we have the big plan on healthcare…not sure that we’re ready for a major national healthcare plan.”

Read the rest of this entry.

There is no question that America’s health-care system is in crisis and that extends to all 50 states. But if you want to see where U.S. hospitals may find themselves sooner or later, consider the number of hospitals in New Jersey that have closed or are on life support and how Democratic politicians have put themselves in a straightjacket that is exacerbating this perilous situation.

New Jersey, the most densely populated and second wealthiest state, had 112 hospitals 20 years ago. Today it has 74 after six closed in the last 18 months. Meanwhile, four others have announced plans to close and five filed for bankruptcy protection, with about half of the others losing money like an ER patient hemorrhaging blood because of gunshot wounds.

Hospitals should be no more immune to the effects of bad business practices than any other enterprise, and indeed some of the closings are the result of lousy management, including a failure to remain competitive, as the industry lurches away from community-based facilities to those where making profits for shareholders trump all other concerns.

New Jersey hospitals are not merely just another business, but are the key component of a health-care system that is deeply stressed because of, among other things, a growing nursing shortage, rapacious insurance companies and an economy that has forced more people to rely on hospitals because they cannot afford to go to family physicians for even the simplest ailments.

But the biggest reason for New Jersey’s hospital crisis is that the state is cutting way back on funding for them.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

Why is it that Popes don’t usually visit the United States during presidential election years? Lucas Mendez writes for the BBC Brazil, “As neutral as the papal robe is, his messages can and will be used by the candidates … every time Benedict XVI opens his mouth, Democrats and Republicans will interpret and “spin it,” according to their own political ‘gospels’”
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A year after the massacre at Virginia Tech by the troubled Cho Seung-Hui, what has been done to address the root causes of that event - the worst at any American educational institution? Dietmar Ostermann writes for Germany’s Frankfurter Rundschau, “The debate over gun control erupts loudly and often, yet it’s a discussion without consequences. The way people with psychological problems are handled, however, is a silent scandal. Even after Blacksburg, American society is so uncomfortable with the topic that it was quickly suppressed.”

Ostermann goes on, “Even more than the U.S. mania for weapons, this bloody killing spree represents the often tragic consequences of a system in which mental suffering is not only ignored - it is criminalized.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Last night PBS aired Sick Around the World
Can the U.S. learn anything from the rest of the world about how to run a health care system? I learned that proven solutions exist with broad popular support. And while these programs are far less expensive than US health care, the savings comes from eliminating most profit and administrative costs, and adding aggressive cost controls and standardization by the government.

Now all we need are representatives willing to ignore the financial influence of the medical, insurance and drug community and to do the right thing. My money is on the Democrats with the emerging support of the Business Roundtable that finally realizes the global competitive disadvantage of our system.

Everytime I get hot about Health Care reform I make an online donation to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The Swiss report that their very popular health care system passed ten years ago with barely a majority vote.

CNN has been running a series called “Empowered Patient”. The latest installment is entitled How to find the best ER for your child. I feel that this article is seriously out of touch with the way most Americans interact with the health care system in general, let alone the Emergency Department of a hospital.

Most of us choose a hospital based on one of two criteria: it is the hospital our insurance will pay for; or it is the hospital closest to the scene of the accident. Even those of us who have thought about choice of hospital before needing the Emergency Department — it’s not just a “room” anymore — realize that in a real emergency, the kind that could actually result in death, the closest care is usually the best care. In a “sort of” emergency, we have the luxury of considering other factors, such as “how am I going to pay for this” or “what is the hospital’s reputation” or even “do they have a pediatrician on call”.

That being said, the author does have a few good tips for dealing with any medical emergency, not just those involving children: keep a list of current medications (better yet, throw it all in a bag and take it with you); bring something to entertain yourself and anyone who will be stuck waiting with you if you have the time to do so; if you have a chronically ill family member, it is a good idea to keep a “hospital bag” of stuff including the patient’s medical history; if you are leaving a child in someone else’s care, make sure they have a “consent to treatment” form or letter with your signature on it; if you suspect poisoning, bring the poison with you; and finally, call your regular physician on the way to the hospital. Assuming, of course, that you have one.

The New York Times has an editorial on Quality Care at Bargain Prices that noticed the wide range of cost for end of life treatment cross the nation.

Few will be surprised to discover that doctors in high-expenditure institutions are typically paid on a fee-for-service basis, which means they earn more if they do more. Mayo Clinic doctors, by contrast, are on salary and have no financial incentive to do anything more than the patient clearly needs.

There is an old saying that Americans have to live with the decisions of the Supreme Court for the rest of their lives and then some, but that takes on a perverse new meaning for those who are maimed or their lives cut short by shoddily researched and falsely advertised medications that are inadequately vetted by the Food and Drug Administration and let slide by President Bush’s activist Supreme Court.

It is deeply troubling that it is likely that the top court will soon rule the FDA — which has been co-opted by Big Pharma and politicized by the White House to a shocking extent — is the only agency with enough expertise to regulate drug makers and that its decisions should not be second-guessed by the courts.

A blood pressure medication and a cancer drug that is effective in controlling rheumatoid arthritis are coursing through my body as I write this. All have been long proven to be effective, have few side effects of consequence and are reasonably inexpensive when purchased in bulk through my employer’s prescription drug plan.

So I come not to knock all drug makers and all drugs, but to point out that some people have not been so lucky as myself because of an unfortunate confluence of events: Big Pharma’s capacity to be deceitful, its lust for profitable new drugs as opposed to new drugs that may be profitable, and an FDA that has proven time and again in the Age of Bush that it can be co-opted.

The New York Times, in a story that anticipates the Supreme Court ruling, cites the collusion between Johnson & Johnson and the FDA over a life-threatening problem with its once popular Ortho Evra birth control patch.

It turns out that Ortho Evra delivered much more estrogen than standard birth control pills, potentially increasing the risk of blood clots and strokes, according to the company’s own internal documents.

But because the FDA approved the patch, Johnson & Johnson is arguing in court that it cannot be sued by women or their families who claim that they were injured or killed by the product — even though its old label inaccurately described the amount of estrogen it released.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is encouraging Doctors support universal health care: survey

More than half of U.S. doctors now favor switching to a national health care plan and fewer than a third oppose the idea, according to a survey published on Monday.

The survey suggests that opinions have changed substantially since the last survey in 2002 and as the country debates serious changes to the health care system.

Now all we need are capable leaders to make this happen. And I don’t think that the main source of resistance is coming from Democrats.

Health care proposals in Campaign 2008 have often gotten drown out in bitter campaign exchanges — but what about the issue’s specifics? In this Guest Voice post, D. Cupples , co-administrator of the site Buck Naked Politics, takes a stand-back look at Senator Hillary Clinton’s health care proposal. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Moderate Voice or its writers.

Hillary Clinton’s Health Care Plan: One Way To Help Pay For It

By D. Cupples

The New York Times recently did an extensive interview with Hillary Clinton about her health care policy and how she would make health care affordable for us Americans. Some naysayers believe that there is little room in the budget to pay for affordable health care coverage.

There would be a lot more room in the budget, if our public servants would truly crackdown on health care contractor fraud — more about that after a bit about Sen. Clinton’s interview:

“Mrs. Clinton said she would like to cap health insurance premiums at 5 percent to 10 percentof income.

“The average cost of a family policy bought by an individual in 2006 and 2007 was $5,799, or 10 percent of the median family income of $58,526, according to America’s Health Insurance
Plans, a trade group. Some policies cost up to $9,201, or 16 percent of median income.

“The average out-of-pocket cost for workers who buy family policies through their employers is lower, $3,281, or 6 percent of median income, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a
health research group.

A cap on premiums has been part of Mrs. Clinton’s universal coverage proposal since she announced it in September. (NY Times)

Every tax dollar devoted to waste or fraud is one less dollar for legitimate health care services. And private contractors are necessarily involved in state and federal health care programs.

That doesn’t mean that we taxpayers must settle for overcharging, waste or fraud.

Health care contractor fraud was so rampant that Department of Justice (DoJ) finally started cracking down in the ’90s under Bill Clinton.

In 2003, the DoJ said that health care contractors’ settlements were the lion’s share of fraud-suit settlements from 2000-2003 (larger, even, than defense contractors’ settlements).

Since 2000, America’s two largest for-profit hospital chains (HCA and Tenet) have settled massive DoJ fraud suits over allegedly fraudulent conduct that had occurred for years. Contractors tend to settle fraud suits without admitting guilt, because if contractors are found guilty of fraud, the government can bar them from receiving lucrative contracts.

It’s not just the big fish who’ve been sued, and it’s not just hospitals. Below are more than a dozen examples of healthcare contractors that faced lawsuits, their alleged conduct, and the outcomes.
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Out of sight…out of mind. Working on this old adage Britain intends to push the cigarettes under the counter. The Times reports: “Cigarettes are to be forced beneath shop counters with supermarkets and cornershops banned from displaying tobacco products.

“The latest assault on smokers will also see the disappearance of vending machines from pubs and restaurants in an attempt to further limit children’s access to tobacco. Both measures are to be included in a consultation to be launched later this spring. Legislation, if needed, could be introduced this autumn.”

More here…

The Families USA report, Dying for Coverage for Ohio, was released yesterday. Families USA has released similar reports for Arizona, Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. The site contains other resources, including a section called, The Uninsured.

From the press release related to Ohio:

“Our report highlights how our inadequate system of health coverage condemns a great number of Ohioans to an early death simply because they don’t have the same access to health care as their insured neighbors,” Ron Pollack, Executive Director of Families USA, said today. “The conclusions are sadly clear—a lack of health coverage is a matter of life and death for many Ohioans.

“Health insurance really matters in how people make their health care decisions,” Pollack said. “We know that people without insurance often forgo checkups, screenings, and other preventive care.”

As a result, he said, uninsured adults are more likely to be diagnosed with a disease, such as cancer, in an advanced stage, which greatly reduces their chance of survival. The Institute of Medicine found that uninsured adults are 25 percent more likely to die prematurely than adults with private health insurance.

Another recent academic study found that uninsured adults between the ages of 55 and 64 are even more likely to die prematurely. For this group, a lack of health insurance is the third leading cause of death, following heart disease and cancer.

I’m not familiar with what Ohio’s U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown or Congresswoman Betty Sutton (D-13) have said about Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama’s health care plans and I couldn’t find anything direct with a little searching, but I’d like to. I know neither Ohio politician has stated how they cast their votes on 3/4 nor how they’ll vote as superdelegates.

FactCheck.org provides a comparison of the two plans here.

Read Obama’s explanation of his plan here. One of the main criticisms has been that it mandates coverage for all children, but not all adults. But in Obama’s speech in January 2007 to Families USA, while his plan was still in formation, he states something that implies that all adults would have - as in, possess and maintain and keep, not just have an oppotunity to have - universal health care:

Plans that tinker and halfway measures now belong to yesterday. The President’s latest proposal that does little to bring down cost or guarantee coverage falls into this category. There will be many others offered in the coming campaign, and I am working with experts to develop my own plan as we speak, but let’s make one thing clear right here, right now:

In the 2008 campaign, affordable, universal health care for every single American must not be a question of whether, it must be a question of how. We have the ideas, we have the resources, and we will have universal health care in this country by the end of the next president’s first term. [my emphasis]

Read Clinton’s explanation of her plan here. One of the main criticisms has been that it imposes monetary fines on individuals who do not have health insurance and already may not be covered due to financial constraints and that it forces people to buy something they may not want. Ohio Daily Blog posted a copy of the Obama flyer that identifies his primary points of opposition to Clinton’s plan.

The Health Care Blog analysis of Clinton’s plan is here but that blog doesn’t seem to have an analogous critique of Obama’s plan. For comparison, they have this one for John McCain. They also pit Clinton v. Obama here.

What are the statistics in your state of people who literally die because they don’t have health care? Which candidates’ plan do you think will most decrease that number?

From WebMD:

The House passed a broad bill guaranteeing better mental health coverage for people with private insurance Wednesday, handing a victory to patient and medical groups that championed the bill.

…
Many mental health patient groups and medical societies have long fought for the bill. Congress has tried and failed to pass similar legislation for more than a decade. Some groups, including the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, backed the Senate version, saying it was more likely to be signed into law.

…

Many of those same groups remain skeptical that Wednesday’s bill can be reconciled with a significantly weaker version that passed the Senate late last year.

That bill allows insurers to choose which mental illnesses to cover. It also would negate potentially stronger state parity laws. Forty-two states have some form of parity on their books now.

Several conservative senators have already threatened to block the House and Senate from meeting to reconcile the two bills.

Anyone have the list of the senators who have threatened to block the meeting to reconcile? I’d say that the ones who don’t want to meet are probably the ones who need the most mental health help, but that would be too out of character for me.

Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were co-sponsors of S. 558, but I’d like to know their positions on pushing for reconciliation. Given the focus on their dueling universal health care coverage plans during the last few months, mental health parity is a piece that must be considered by them as they continue to campaign.

The Bush Administration opposes the House version.

The Senate version is S. 558. The House version is HR 1424.

Never in medical history the pharmaceutical giants, who reportedly enjoy clout next only to the international arms dealers, have witnessed such sustained assault on their credibility as in recent weeks. (By the way the mysterious silence of the U.N.’s World Health Organization on this issue is intriguing.)

The latest attack was triggered yesterday by an analysis of published and unpublished trials of modern antidepressants, including Prozac and Seroxat, showing they offer no clinically significant improvement over placebos (dummy pills) in most patients. (But doctors said patients on the drugs should not stop taking them without consulting their GPs.)

The Independent reports: “The pharmaceutical industry came under assault from senior figures in medical research yesterday over its practice of withholding information to protect profits, exposing patients to drugs which could be useless or harmful.
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This election season we have heard a lot about “health care reform” and “health insurance reform”. Senator Clinton and Senator Obama have been sparring over the issue most of the month. On the other side of the aisle, Senator McCain has also had to address the issue of health care. Everyone agrees we have a “problem” when it comes to health care and health insurance, but there are wildly varying opinions about what should be done.

We all know that almost 47 million Americans do not have health insurance, and that this number has risen every year since 2001. That’s roughly one out of every 6 people. That is a problem for our workforce because we have workers who may put off or simply not seek medical care, to say nothing of the increased havoc that an epidemic or pandemic might cause in the absence people seeking timely, affordable health care. This is also a problem economically because somebody has to pay the hospital bills when the uninsured become so sick they can no longer avoid the doctor, and because medical expenses are a leading cause of bankruptcy.

So an obvious question to ask is “Why don’t these 47 million people have health insurance?” And there’s a quick, easy, wrong answer: since we also all know that in the United States, most people who have health insurance get it through their employer, there must be a lot of employers who are not providing health insurance to their employees. There’s a germ of truth here: “As costs climb, the number of firms offering health insurance falls. The study found that while 98% of firms with more than 200 workers still provide some sort of employee health benefits, only 60% of smaller companies do.” So the obvious answer — endorsed by Clinton and Obama and Romney and Schwarzenegger to name just a few — is to mandate that your boss get you into a group health insurance plan.

What? Do I hear laughter? That must be from the 4.9% of you who are unemployed, and this is the first good laugh over health insurance you’ve had since getting that sick joke known as a COBRA notice. Or maybe you are one of the 20 million self-employed. Or maybe you are a child. After all, children don’t have employers.

So again the obvious but wrong answer is to mandate all these people obtain coverage for themselves. Oh, and for their children. But this ignores all the other possible answers to “Why don’t these 47 million Americans have health insurance?” If we start looking for other answers, we might hear about skyrocketing premiums for declining benefits; we might learn about people with pre-existing conditions and people who avoid medical tests for fear of uncovering one; we might meet people who had health insurance — until they actually got sick and needed it; we might be saddened to learn about people who died because a paperwork mistake meant they didn’t have the insurance they needed.

Sure, we could have some sort of pool where people who don’t have employer-provided health insurance could buy coverage. But almost none of the plans being circulated would do a thing to make insurance companies cover people who actually need health care at reasonable prices. Our candidates instead ask us to line up and make sure these for-profit insurance companies get their premiums every month.

Most Americans believe we need radical change in the way we pay for medical care; most candidates are offering us bandages for a broken system.

It will be surprising if anyone claims that he/she has not been depressed at some time or the other in life. Our marital/personal/professional life, in this whirling and topsy-turvy modern world, faces extreme challenges in an attempt to retain a modicum of sanity. However, the popular myth that the ‘happiness pills’ help us come out of depression received a severe jolt recently.

“One of the largest studies (in Britain) of modern antidepressant drugs has found that they have no clinically significant effect. In other words, they don’t work,” says The Independent. More here…

While The Times adds: “Millions of people taking commonly prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac and Seroxat might as well be taking a placebo, according to the first study to include unpublished evidence. More than £291 million was spent on antidepressants in 2006, including nearly £120 million on SSRIs. As many as one in five people suffers depression at some point.”

More here…

For the past decade or more lots of strides have been made in the field of alternative medicine. But the medical fraternity and the media refuses to take notice of it or recommends allocation of money to find out the efficacy of such healing processes. This could be owing to the conservative approach or the mighty influence of the powerful pharmaceutical industry that rakes in millions by providing drugs/pills whose efficacy is often questioned (Click here for more) …as now in the case of ‘happiness pills’.

Hearteningly, a large number of people, even in the West, are opting for yoga, reiki, acupressure, acupuncture, flower and aroma therapy…that aim to strengthen one’s positive thoughts, improve the blood circulation and the immune system. For my earlier posts on this subject please click here… And here…

Cascade of losses doesn’t end with death - Bankruptcies for medical reasons on the rise and expected to continue growing as economy dips.

This is barbaric. My instructions to my wife are to not authorize any medical care for me that is not covered by insurance. I can’t bare the thought that after the tragedy of declining health I would leave my wife persecuted by creditors and an undignified quality of life.

I am angry with the GOP for defending and perpetuating this ghoulish system.