Tag Archives: Healthcare

There should not be political issues with or in healthcare. Healthcare is a social responsibility to be brought to all people in this nation without regard to citizenship. Yet we still find many citizens resistant to healthcare availability. And why should there not be? If they are sick, why not cure them so as to prevent the spread? Healthcare is not a privilege; it is a right for every person who walks this nations grounds. The following to...

I have been picking up more healthcare commentary which depicts the difficulty in providing healthcare at a sustainable cost. This brief commentary depicts one of the problematic issues for people. I believe this sentence makes the issue very clear. Copay accumulators are programs health plans use to prevent copay assistance from counting toward patients’ deductibles or out-of-pocket maximums. They do not count towards a deductible which the patient...

by Sheela Ranganathan, Maanasa Kona Health Affairs There is a growing interest among policymakers to protect patients from medical debt and its negative downstream effects, in April 2023. Three of the three credit reporting agencies (CRAs)—Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion voluntarily agreed to stop reporting any medical debt under $500. In April of this year the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) found that, despite these changes,...

What if you had an accident and the closest Emergency Room was over 30 minutes away or what if you were sick and there were no physicians or hospital beds in your community? Millions of Americans are facing this situation because rural hospitals are being forced to close. Why More Than 30% of Rural Hospitals Are at Risk of Closure, MedCity News As told by CHQPR, more than 700 rural hospitals in the U.S. are at risk of closing due to their...

This is the boring stuff on healthcare. How to consider the costs of a rural emergency department care in a small rural hospital when it is not in constant use? And what happens when the population is small and the costs equal or exceed the funds taken in by its operation. The article provides a good foundation portraying those costs. The article suggests rural hospitals suffer greatly from the same amount of payment as what may be experienced in...

This is the start of a series of posts or commentary on access to hospitals in rural areas. First point, since they do not have the volume a hospital in the city has, their costs make be higher. The infrastructure and labor involved has to be spread over 24 hours of availability and not just when needed. In other words, you can not turn it on and off as needed. Availability to another source of care may be time limited depending on the patient too....

The US economy appears to be emerging from the recent recession (pace the Fed interest rate decisions). There’s a general consensus that that recession was largely caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and consequent supply chain disruptions. What lessons might be learned on how to maximally blunt the impact of future pandemics while minimizing negative economic consequences?Here’s a cross-sectional analysis including all 50 US states plus the District of...

by r.j. sigmund  FLiRT variants no one seems to be talking about it, but Covid is worse than ever, even if it’s not as deadly . . . among the CDC’s “early indicators“, “test positivity”, or the percentage of tests for Covid that were positive, rose to 16.3% during the week ending July 27th, up from 14.3% the prior week, and up from 3.4% nine weeks ago . . . test positivity is now the highest it’s been in 2 1/2 years . . . at the same time,...

Here’s Where VP Pick Tim Walz Stands on Healthcare Issues, MedPage Today Presidential nominee Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as her running mate. Here’s a look at Walz’s track record on healthcare. I am not going to call Kamala a Democrat although we all know she is of that political lean. I believe Kamala will represent all people including Republicans. Sixty-year-old Tim Walz was first elected Governor of Minnesota in...

The advent of CAR-T and CRISPR technologies are set to revolutionize cancer and genetic disease therapies, respectively. But with great hope comes great costs. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that approximately 100,000 people in the US have sickle cell disease, making it the most prevalent inherited blood disorder. Remarkably, the new gene therapies offer very promising early efficacy: exa-cel and lovo-cel demonstrated 93.5%...