Tag Archives: Healthcare

r.j. sigmund on Covid a few days ago i read an article on a university website that Covid activity was ‘showing signs of slowing’, so that’s what i expected to find when i checked the data this morning…”growing less rapidly” might have been a more descriptive assessment… among the CDC’s “early indicators“, “test positivity”, or the percentage of tests for Covid that were positive, rose to 18.1% during the week ending August 10th, up from 17.6%...

The Chronic Challenges of Poverty – Public Health Post Having empty pockets can impact long-term health. Poverty has been linked to obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, among other chronic conditions. The symptoms of chronic diseases are caused by inflammation, part of the body’s immune response. Obesity, stress, autoimmune disorders, and other chronic diseases involve a constant state of inflammation, often causing fatigue, joint or...

GOP’s attack on Americans’ retirement savings just went to the next disgusting level, Opinion, Alternet. “To protect older Americans’ life savings, President Biden pledged in October to crack down on financial advisers who recommend investments just because they pay higher commissions. Then the insurance industry got to work.” Explained: The Controversy Over Tim Walz’s Military Service, Snopes. The claim that Walz “abandoned” his...

by Andrew Sprung xpostfactoid Brian Blase, a conservative healthcare scholar at the Paragon Institute, is out with an analysis of 2024 ACA marketplace enrollment (summarized in this WSJ op-ed) claiming that millions of enrollees have mis-estimated their incomes to claim benefits to which they are “not entitled.” Here are the core claims: In nine states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee,...

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....