Archive
NYC Allegedly Mishandles 50 Cases of DNA Rape Evidence
Sorry to go to from funny to serious in one post. But, Jesus fuck, this is outrageous.
City Council Members Demand More Transparency From Medical Examiner’s Office
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On top of demanding answers about that particular case, City Council members were looking for more general accountability from the ME following revelations the office mishandled DNA evidence in over 50 rape cases.
This is on top of the picture scandal in the Bronx over a dead body hanging out in a health department truck with household trash bags.
Demand transparency from your state. Demand transparency from your health care professionals.
I’ve spent too much time working in healthcare to know that providers who make mistakes are often not above covering their own tracks.
Sigh.
“Your local pharmacist is not who you think they are.”
Back before my fake freelance writing gig fell through, I tried to maneuver into a niche as a healthcare writer.
One of the articles-for-moms I wrote was about how pharmacists are vastly underutilized as health care providers. (Tl;dr-Lifehacker edition: If you have a medical question or want a second opinion on meds, you should just go up to the counter at a store pharmacy and ask. Pharmacists have 7 years of medical education and they’re free.)
I found a TedxTalk by a pharmacist that addresses this exact underutilization issue:
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Pretty good, although dry to watch if you’re not also a provider.
Pharmacists are important because doctors make mistakes. Doctors make prescribing mistakes at alarmingly high rates. If patients asked more questions and pharmacists spent more time on each individual, it would probably save a lot of lives.
One of the aspects of the profession I noted that the lecturer didn’t address is that the way corporations run retail pharmacies makes the kind of access he idealizes impossible. With immunizations and peripheral paperwork, pharmacists simply don’t have the man-hours to counsel every new patient. Any intern who has done a rotation at a high-volume chain knows this already. But I guess the Talk was already too long to go into a tangent about how for-profit-healthcare is fucking awful.
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Footnote on my ventures in my fake freelance writing career: I was interviewed a few months ago by a health care education group for their company’s blog. They wanted my “expert” opinion on formal education and training for pharmacy technicians.
My answer was, “Don’t go to school because you will be automatically less hireable than precocious college kids willing to work for near-minimum wage.”
They thanked me and then totally did not publish the interview.
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Fact Checking “ObamaCare Yay Or Nay? The Truth About Canada!”
This is response to the following youtube video with over a half million hits:
The video was hosted by the annoying, stand-up comedian and FoxNews commentator, Steven Crowder, for Tea Party movement pimp PJTV.
In addition to being not funny and having obnoxious amounts of dude-man-bro-awesome Dane Cook frat boy, there’s a lot of the “truth” in the video about health care in Canada that’s just anecdotal stylization about waiting.
00:06 “Socialized Health Care! Isn’t it about time we get on board?” First words of the video, followed by clips of people talking about universal health care. I’m going to make probably the most relevant point of the entire America-Canada health care system debate: Canada does not have a socialized health care system. They have a public INSURANCE system, and private insurance and health care providers also exist.
“Socialized Medicine” has sketchy semantic connotations, but generally refers to a health care program run by the government. In the United Kingdom’s publicly- funded National Health Service, most general practitioners are independent contractors, which means that they are self-employed but also have a contract with the government to provide specific services on certain terms. Even the more left-wing proposed legislation (not ObamaCare) in the US, which seeks to establish universal government-backed insurance, does not reach the government involvement of UK’s NHS levels.
Conservatives have recently been attempting to label any publicly-funded (tax payer-funded) system, including insurance, as “socialized medicine.” But with that definition, the United States already has socialized medicine; it’s called Medicare. Medicare is available to the disabled or retired, and it has higher satisfaction and performance rates as opposed to private insurance.
2:15 Steven and his homeboys go to the Clinique Médicale Urgence St-Hubert on a weekend but it’s closed. From all the French, we can establish they are in Quebec, Canada. Funding for the health insurance is provided by the province, not directly from the federal government, so viewers should note Canadian quality may vary by province.
2:57 “Take a number. The nurse will call with the number.” “Triage… which means we wait and get judged by a nurse.” (3:15) They told the staff at the the hospital that they were not urgent. In my experience, in private hospitals in the US, prioritizing by urgency works the same way.
4:24 Steve is denied a plastic glove to play with. Tragic. No rooster blow up doll for you.
5:05 They get tired of waiting at the hospital and leave. With no accompanying footage, Steve tells anecdotal stories about other people in the waiting room.
7:25 They go back to the clinic the next day and the clinician tells them that they don’t offer cholesterol blood tests. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. There’s no point in getting your cholesterol checked by a walk-in clinic, because you should go to primary doctor for a chronic condition.
8:01 The clinician says that it’s $900 for a private clinic check up. What?! That’s about $937 US dollars. That figure doesn’t make sense. The woman’s English was clearly not fluent. There are private clinics that offer MRIs for only $695.
15:22 “The average wait time to see a specialist in Canada is 17.3 weeks.” He didn’t cite a source for that figure, or how it was calculated, if it included outliers. Here’s a study that says 51% of Quebec patients waiting to see a specialist do so within a month.
16:05 “It’s proven to be terribly inefficient.” Using what standard? Certainly not cost. The per capita health care spending of Canada is nearly half that of the United States.
17:05 “Socialism creates a safety net…” Followed up by footage from a Subway. Canadian sandwich shops are Socialist because they cost more? I think I missed the sandwich-standard definition of Socialism in school.
19:58 “Do you still think Obama is moving us in the right direction here?” Thanks, Steve, for actually talking about ObamaCare anywhere in the video.
Most parts of the video I didn’t address were just a series of medical horror stories from random interviewed Canadians. You can find stories like that anywhere about any health care system.
Recap: Canada is not Socialist. Health care in Canada sucks, but health care in America still sucks more. Everyone wants free, efficient doctors. No one still knows anything about ObamaCare. And Steven Crowder is about as funny as Dane Cook and Michelle Bachman’s lovechild.
HIghDEA #1: Health Care Reform
I smoked a bowl and was thinking about our health care system.
I think the key to making government-insured health care work is through a transition by consumer demand. McCain was right about moving health care benefits away from employer-sponsored plans: give tax breaks/credits to those that do move away from employment based insurance. BUT: this will then raise premiums for people with pre-existing conditions or ill health that are dependent on current plans.
To compensate for this, the government should create a baseline guide for insurance encompassing premiums/deductibles/co-pays. Those with shitty primary plans that fail to meet the all of the criteria, will qualify for a cheap, single-payer co-pay assistance plan as secondary insurance insurance. Those that have this co-pay assistance will, after one year, qualify for a premium deduction for a Medicare buy-in.
It will keep primary, private insurance costs in check, and fix the problem of people feeling like they don’t have a choice.
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