[onlooker]

Yes that is why you have such a lousy health outcome especially in relation to our expenditures on health. Absolutely spot on Pops this for profit health system is like any of the other industries it is about the bottom line- profit. So no wonder it is so out of whack. Oh and the whole emphasis on prescription drugs and surgery is misplaced. The main emphasis should be on keeping the patient healthy as long as possible. Prevention is easier then cure. Maybe in a better world we would have had a nutritionist as a primary care physician. Oh well.

[onlooker]

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/07/ ... ients.html
just posting this link which cites that private equity firms are increasingly buying up Primary Care practices of course to try and extract profits from an area of health which does not seem to be very lucrative nowdays. Nothing new here just more of the same health for profit activity. Patients it seems slowly losing access to comprehensive and affordable care. Which by the way is why I am in favor of Obamacare as any help with health coverage is welcomed.

[Pops]

In the US it is very expensive and hard work to become an MD. Consequently Docs specialize and we have a real shortage of GPs — and to be honest, GPs are so timid most of what they do is write referrals anyway.

One of the provisions of the ACA was you no longer need a referral from a GP to see a specialist.

A relative is a facilities manager for a county government and has worked closely with docs over a long period. His take is they are pretty worthless in the day to day because they were selected by the system not to be docs but to survive the system that guarantees a shortage of docs.

[onlooker]

Yep, so true Pops, in fact I have not seen a PCP in over 2 or 3 years. I came to the conclusion that why the heck. He just wanted me to go on prescriptions and that is not for me. When you say survive that makes me think the PCP just do as ordered not straying from the standard take prescriptions and if your health gets bad, we will operate. Just an robot impersonating a doctor, I have found more useful information on my own about taking care of my health on the Net then I ever could have from my doctor.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cid_Yama', 'N')oticed this in the sidebar of the story.

Martin Shkreli: Australian boys recreate life-saving drug
American Greed exposed
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he man who sparked outrage last year by hiking the price of a life-saving drug may have met his match in some Australian schoolboys.

US executive Martin Shkreli became a symbol of greed when he raised the price of a tablet of Daraprim from $13.50 (£11) to $750.

In most countries, including Australia and Britain, the drug retails for less than $1.50 per pill.

Now, Sydney school students have recreated the drug's key ingredient for just $20.

Daraprim is an anti-parasitic drug used by malaria and Aids patients.

The Sydney Grammar boys, all 17, synthesised the active ingredient, pyrimethamine, in their school science laboratory.

"It wasn't terribly hard but that's really the point, I think, because we're high school students," one boy, Charles Jameson, told the BBC.

The students produced 3.7 grams of pyrimethamine for $20. In the US, the same quantity would cost up to $110,000.

The boys said they conducted the year-long experiment to highlight the drug's inflated cost in the US.

"It seems totally unjustified and ethically wrong," student James Wood said. "It's a life-saving drug and so many people can't afford it."

[Subjectivist]

Trace the worst part of this back to 2006. Up until 2005 most medicnes that had been in use in say 1920 were cheap and available because people had been using them long before the FDA was created.

Then in 2006 the FDA changed the rules and put great pressure on common drugs because they do not have the 'regulatory approval' of the FDA because they never went through the very complicated, very expensive approval process. Even worse they won't get that process done because they are all totally genarc, so no comany stands to make a very large profit by manufacturing them.

The change on the sales end was very quietly done, formulas were changed without fanfare to frequently much less effective formulas that suddenly do not work as well leaving the end consumer with no choice but the brand new approved patented alternative.

They even went so far as to force a change in the formuka of Tonic Water to reduce the concentration of Quinine below what they consider a 'therapeutic dose'! Quinine used to be a common ingredient in several over the counter medications for muscle cramps, especially for women like my ex wife who would get horrible charley horse cramps in her legs every week or so. In 2006 the formula was changed and the new OTC formula is just a sedative combined with tylenol. It doesn't stop the soasms, but if you are luck you mght sleep through them zonked on the sleep aid. Many times I lost sleep dealing with those muscle cramps and it was not until years later I found out why.

Our medical system is broken when effective remidies used for a century or more are made illegal by regulatory fiat! In India for example you can still choose to get cheap slaughter house sourced insulin if you are diabetic while in America you can choose only the FDA aproved synthetic analog produced by a single company. Insulin used to be produced by dozens of companies because they could source it from any local slaughter house where they would get the Pancreas for processing. Those companies were competing between themselves keeping the cost minimal and the quality high. The quality is still high, but a current diabetic without health insurance is no longer looking at a minor daily expense.

[Plantagenet]

Something has gone wrong in Obama's FDA.

When a drug gets ridiculously expensive other companies bring out generics that they can sell more cheaply. But the FDA isn't approving the generics anymore. This leaves greed heads like Shkreli free to jack their prices up again and again.

fda-havent-fixed-delays-in-generic-drug-approvals

An israeli company has been trying to get a cheap alternative to the Epipen on the US market for years, but the FDA won't approve it even though it is already approved in the EU and elsewhere. This happens over and over again---something is broken in the FDA.

As of July 1, the FDA had 4,036 generic drug applications awaiting approval, and the median time it takes for the FDA to approve a generic is now 47 months, according to the Generic Pharmaceutical Association, a trade group.

By comparison, the European Medicines Agency, Europe's version of the FDA, has approved thousands of cheap generic drugs, with just 24 generics currently awaiting approval...

If Trump can fix the mess at the FDA, that will be a big step forward in cutting drug prices for US consumers.

Cheers!

[dissident]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', 'S')omething has gone wrong in Obama's FDA.

When a drug gets ridiculously expensive other companies bring out generics that they can sell more cheaply. But the FDA isn't approving the generics anymore. This leaves greed heads like Shkreli free to jack their prices up again and again.

fda-havent-fixed-delays-in-generic-drug-approvals

An israeli company has been trying to get a cheap alternative to the Epipen on the US market for years, but the FDA won't approve it even though it is already approved in the EU and elsewhere. This happens over and over again---something is broken in the FDA.

As of July 1, the FDA had 4,036 generic drug applications awaiting approval, and the median time it takes for the FDA to approve a generic is now 47 months, according to the Generic Pharmaceutical Association, a trade group.

By comparison, the European Medicines Agency, Europe's version of the FDA, has approved thousands of cheap generic drugs, with just 24 generics currently awaiting approval...

If Trump can fix the mess at the FDA, that will be a big step forward in cutting drug prices for US consumers.

Cheers!

[Tanada]

Here is an interesting read for everyone about how the Healthcare Industry warps our thinking to make a profit selling us things we probably don't need for a lot of money.

The same pattern is seen in the vaccines this study refers to, but also in drugs like Statin's to 'reduce cholesterol' and dietary recommendations to 'reduce obesity'. The data are grossly manipulated to make you believe whatever solution the Healthcare Industry can make a profit from, not what is best for the patient.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]The Vaccination Examination and Healthy Lies

Certain hot-button topics are just given and not open for examination. Anthropogenic Climate Change, Vaccines, Chemtrails and Government Conspiracies top the lists. Whenever any of these subjects is broached all people who consider themselves reasonable just shut down, nothing could possibly be said to add to what they know about these subjects.

Therefore these are partisan issues. No reason will be considered, well, unless it is to criticize the people who don’t believe reasonably. Perhaps it all started like this: The people who don’t believe in (for example) vaccines are idiots because vaccines wiped out Small Pox. Then all kinds of other jumped on with all the good things vaccines do and what idiots anyone who has a question about vaccines must be.

So it is difficult to be non-partisan. You must be an idiot to even listen to any argument that doesn’t say All Vaccines Are Good. You can just say Vaccines Save Lives and you are on the right side of the argument and never have to learn anything more about vaccines.

I can now tell you my personal experience about vaccination, but the only reason I would do that is to get you sympathy and break communications barriers to ask you to listen to an argument. But why the fuck won’t you listen to the argument anyway? Don’t you care about critical thinking? Is your partisanship so strong that now you don’t care about arguments, only belittling people who don’t mindlessly believe as you do?

The issue is Vaccine Effectiveness. In fact my problem is larger, all across the health field, where people lie to you, misrepresent and change the meanings of common words, in order to help you. Zostavax, the shingles vaccine, claims 51% effectiveness. That would mean, if words are given their normal definition, that you have a 51% reduced risk of getting shingles if you take the vaccine. I believe that is misleading, and intentionally so.

We all know that smoking causes lung cancer too. And by the same token I think that statement is intentionally misleading. If someone gets lung cancer we immediately think ***did they smoke***?

“As many as 20% of the people who die from lung cancer in the United States every year do not smoke or use any other form of tobacco.” Says the American Cancer Society in an article that attempts to justify the belief that smoking causes cancer. If you search for your lifetime risk of getting lung cancer you will get all kinds of articles explaining how much MORE likely you are to get cancer if you smoke than if you don’t smoke.

So that is the issue with nearly all health care recommendations. You cannot easily find your risk of getting cancer, but it is very easy to find your risk INCREASE with behavior or exposure. By this yardstick the primary cause of drowning is swimming. Nearly everyone who drowns was swimming.

One’s lifetime risk overall of getting lung cancer is about 7% according to the Lifetime Risk Chart of the American Cancer Society . If you smoke or if you don’t smoke. So your increased risk if you smoke is averaged over all other people. So 80% of that 7% chance are smokers, and 20% of them are never-smokers according to the site above. Smoking causes cancer, therefore, in 5% of smokers. And lung cancer kills 2% of neversmokers and that has lots of difficult explanations.

Smoking increases your risk of dying from lung cancer in your lifetime from 2% to 5%. I am not trying to justify smoking, it is dirty and unhealthy in many other ways besides your increased risk of lung cancer. But what I am discussing here is the how the health care industry has brainwashed everyone by giving us statistics that mean very, very little.

Which is what happens with Zostavax. Bringing this issue to many “skeptics” has gotten me banned from further discussions. All a skeptic seems to care about is that vaccines are good and anyone who questions is therefore wrong. There are huge studies, all orchestrated and quoted everywhere. Here is a good example: Zostavax Study

The main thrust of their argument, why they recommend anyone over 60 take the vaccine, is that in a study of 38,000 people, half vaccinate, half with placebo (control group), the claim is 51% fewer people got shingles in the vaccinated group. There is a whole lot of time and space devoted to how the symptoms of shingles (post herpetic neurolgia) were lessened in those who got shingles in the vaccinated group and that confuses lots of people as well. One must be one of the unlucky 49% in order to benefit from lesser symptoms.

So just like the smoking issue, what are the chances I would get shingles without the vaccine? A difficult figure to find, but we can easily know it is less if I take the vaccine. Over one’s life time one has a 33% chance of getting shingles, however the vaccine does not cover the lifetime. It only works for a disputed amount of time. Full strength for 3 years, then it is less effective for a few years, and whether or not one has taken the vaccine is statistically insignificant after 7 years.

The chance of getting shingle go up with age, but the best numbers available are the numbers of this study 38,000 people over 60 meticulously documented and tested. So what are the figures?

Overall the chance of getting shingles in that age group is 7.8/1000 person-years. So any given year a person over 60 has a 0.78% chance of getting shingles. That risk is reduced by 51% for at least three years after taking the vaccine. To a lesser extent one is protected for an additional couple years but no protection at all after 7 years.

The numbers work out to about 2.7% will get shingles in the over 60 group without the vaccine and 1.4% with the vaccine. Another way to put it is the $250 vaccine will help about 1.4% of the people who buy it. for every 70 people who buy the vaccine one is prevented from getting shingles.

[Cog]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lore', 'G')o figure and yet the Australian dollar is currently one of the strongest currencies in the world.

The U.S. is really looking to return to the third world.

[Plantagenet]

Obamacare rates going UP 57% in Iowa this year thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

Whoever named that bill sure had a sick sense of humor

CHEERS!

[AgentR11]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', 'O')bamacare rates going UP 57% in Iowa this year thanks to the Affordable Care Act.
Whoever named that bill sure had a sick sense of humor

[onlooker]

This is all consistent with how hyper capitalism is no longer adequately benefitting many Americans but nevertheless many believe and espoused the notion that if only the free market were given freer reign everything for everyone would work out better. That is simply not true but this propaganda has fed incessantly to Americans for at least 70 years

[Newfie]

It's not universally true, or false. A free market has its benefits and its place. But very little in our culture is truly free market. There all kinds of controls especially through taxes and regulations that drive us to one action or another. And our healt care system is very much not free market. Nor do I believe a free market would rectify all of the problems.

Health care is an important industry in the USA and it contributes significantly to our consumption. It must be protected to preserve that cash flow.

USA health care is over 17% of GDP.
Great Britian is under 10%, similar to most 1st world countries.

What would the effect be on the market if we threw out 7% of our GDP?

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS

[EnergyUnlimited]

Money withheld from healthcare sector would not simply disappear.
They would go to construction, leisure, food, military and other industries.
I know, in US they would probably go *only* to military but it doesn't need to be this way.
So rebalancing healthcare to bring it back to something within realm of reasonable would not be an equivalent of throwing away 7% of GDP.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EnergyUnlimited', 'M')oney withheld from healthcare sector would not simply disappear.
They would go to construction, leisure, food, military and other industries.
I know, in US they would probably go *only* to military but it doesn't need to be this way.
So rebalancing healthcare to bring it back to something within realm of reasonable would not be an equivalent of throwing away 7% of GDP.

[onlooker]

Huge gaps in Healthcare show up in GoFund me sites as attested to in this expose:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/01 ... nding.html

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]Michigan Health Care Regulators Just Restricted Access to Promising New Cancer Treatments

A state commission, acting at the behest of Michigan's largest hospital chain, voted on Thursday to restrict cancer patients' access to promising, potentially lifesaving treatments.

It's another example of the problems caused by little-known state-level health care regulations known as Certificate of Necessity (or, in some states, Certificate of Public Need) laws. These laws are supposed to slow down increasing costs, but they often end up being used to restrict competition, often at the request of powerful hospital chains.

That's exactly what seems to have happened in Michigan, where the state's Certificate of Need Commission voted Thursday to impose new accreditation requirements for health care providers who want to offer new immunotherapy cancer treatments. Those treatments attempt to program the body's own immune system to attack and kill cancer cells, and they have become an increasingly attractive way to combat cancer alongside more traditional methods, such as surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.

One particularly promising type of immunotherapy involves literally bio-engineering T-cells—the foot-soldiers of the body's immune system—and equipping them with new Chimeric Antigen Receptors that target cancer cells. This so-called "CAR T-cell therapy" is every bit as badass as it sounds:

But under the new rules adopted by the Michigan Certificate of Need Commission, hospitals will need to go through unnecessary third-party accreditation processes before being able to offer CAR T-cell therapies. Even after obtaining that additional accreditation, hospitals would have to come back to the CON commission for another approval—a process that effectively means only large, wealthy, hospital-based cancer centers will be able to offer the treatments.

The new rules were "opposed by cancer research organizations, patient advocates and pharmaceutical companies, who argue it would add an unnecessary level of regulation and deny many patients access to potentially life-saving treatment," reports Michigan Capital Confidential, a nonprofit journalism outfit covering Michigan politics.

In favor of the new rules? The University of Michigan Health System, the state's largest hospital system, which argues that the new rules are necessary for patient safety.

To be clear: It's not a question of patient safety. In 2017, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved two CAR T-cell therapies for children suffering from leukemia and for adults with advanced lymphoma. Although the technology is still being developed and other uses of T-cell therapies are yet to be approved by the FDA, the Michigan CON Commission does not do medical testing. Like similar agencies in other states, the extent of its mandate is purely economic, not medical.

Anna Parsons, a policy coordinator with the American Legislative Exchange Council, points out that the safe administration of CAR T-cell therapy does not require hospitals to make new capital investments—which is the only time CON laws should apply. Literally any FDA-certified hospital should be capable of offering these treatments, since all the high-tech bioengineering is done at other locations. The only thing that happens at the hospital is a simple blood transfusion.

Though the specific applications of CON laws differ from state to state, their stated purpose is to prevent overinvestment and keep hospitals from having to charge higher prices to make up for unnecessary outlays of capital costs. But in practice, they mean hospitals must get a state agency's permission before offering new services or installing new medical technology. Depending on the state, everything from the number of hospital beds to the installation of a new MRI machine could be subject to CON review.

As part of that review process, it's not uncommon for large hospital chains to wield CON laws in order to limit competition, even at the expense of patient outcomes.

From 2010 to 2013, for example, the state agency in charge of Virginia's CON laws repeatedly blocked attempts by a small hospital in Salem, Virginia, to build a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), in large part because a nearby hospital—which happened to have the only NICU in southwestern Virginia—objected to the new competition. Even after a premature infant died at the Salem hospital, state regulators continued to side with the Salem hospital's chief competitor, against the wishes of doctors, hospital administrators, public officials, and patients who repeatedly testified in favor of letting the new NICU be built.

Even when the outcomes aren't as tragic as dead babies or untreated cancer patients, CON laws have adverse consequences. In 2016, reseachers at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University found that hospitals in states with CON laws have higher mortality rates than hospitals in non-CON states. The average 30-day mortality rate for patients with pneumonia, heart failure, and heart attacks in states with CON laws is between 2.5 percent and 5 percent higher even after demographic factors are taken out of the equation.

When it comes to CAR T-cell therapy, there does not seem to be any compelling reason for Michigan regulators to use CON laws except to explicitly limit which hospitals can provide those treatments.

"We will never know how many more lives this therapy could have saved if the added time and expense these onerous regulations put in place discourage hospitals and clinics from providing treatment in the first place," Parsons wrote this week in The Detroit News.

[onlooker]

Speaking of Cancer $this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ') Landmark Study Shows Half of Cancer Patients are Killed by Chemo — NOT Cancer

[dissident]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5BYLC3IjBE

The widely prescribed statin drugs are useless in addition to being harmful.