Bottom Line Health
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| It may depend on the type of health insurance they have, a new study suggests.
THE STUDY
Eight graduate students posing as new patients in urgent need of care called 499 randomly selected ambulatory clinics in nine US cities. The calls were made to community clinics and private doctors' offices.
Callers read from one of three clinical scenarios that would require follow-up care—pneumonia, high blood pressure or possible ectopic pregnancy. Women using the latter vignette called only obstetrics and gynecology and family medicine clinics. |
| DBS is covered by Medicare and many other forms of health insurance. fkfn F°r more information on Parkinson's dis-— ease, go to the World Parkinson Congress Web site, www.worldpdcongress.org.
What Is Parkinson's Disease?
Parkinson's disease, the second most common degenerative brain disease (after Alzheimer's), affects 1 million Americans and typically begins between the ages of 50 and 79- It occurs when neurons, or nerve cells, that control movement start to die off for unknown reasons. |
| In this case, all the people we studied had health insurance."
Exactly why many of the women stopped getting regular mammograms was beyond the scope of the study, but Doubeni and other experts are making some educated guesses.
Over time, he says, many women, including breast cancer survivors, tend to get nonchalant about mammograms, perhaps because they forget to schedule the exam. |
| Unlike many other clinical trials, most of the STAR*D participants also had coexisting psychiatric and/or medical conditions, or were unemployed or lacked health insurance.
For the first part of the study, more than 700 adults who had not responded to Celexa or who could not tolerate this drug were randomly assigned to receive instead either sustained-release bupropion (Wellbutrin, not an SSRI), Zoloft or venlafaxine (Effexor, not an SSRI) for up to 14 weeks.
Approximately 25% of the participants in the trial achieved total remission, regardless of the drug used. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The laws surrounding food, medicine, advertising, health insurance and health care are designed to keep you and your children in a continued state of disease. Most of the laws on the books today were, in fact, designed and pushed by corporations, so they serve the interests of those corporations -- and it is not in the interests of these powerful corporations to see a healthy population that avoids disease.
Understand this: Americans are intentionally kept in a state of disease precisely because that is what produces the maximum profits for the corporations who own this country. |
Bottom Line Health
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| He concludes, "Health insurance matters—that's the basic message from this study. If you are not a card-carrying member of our health-care system, you have a very difficult time getting access to care."
Still, even having private insurance did not guarantee timely follow-up care, the researchers found.
If you are not a card-carrying member of our health-care system, you have a very difficult time getting access to care.
Brent R. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Launching a national health insurance program that covers everyone and relies on a system of government-issued vouchers that citizens can spend with health insurance companies.
These radical reforms are necessary because the future gap between what the government owes and what it stands to receive in revenues is already monstrously large, and it's growing by the minute. This gap, called the Gokhale and Smetters measure, currently stands at an astonishing $65.9 trillion. (Yes, with a "T".) As Kotlikoff explains, "This figure is more than five times U.S. |
Devra Davis
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 This important association of physicians was determined not to annoy powerful members of Congress from tobacco states, whose votes were needed on various issues about which the AMA cared deeply, including the looming threat of national health insurance.
Eventually the two factions within the ACS reached a compromise: the organization itself would not take the lead in resolving the issue of smoking and cancer, but it would urge others to do so. In 1961 the ACS wrote to President John F. |
Hyla Cass, M.D.
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 Her family was on a fixed income and didn't have health insurance. This really set her stomach acid churning—but, as it turned out, she didn't have much of it to churn. You see, too much stomach acid wasn't Corinne's problem in the first place—it was too little stomach acid.
She learned this after she came to see me and I conducted a special test called a Heidelberg Test. To her surprise, Corinne turned out to be /rypochlorhydric—not making adequate stomach acid. When I told her, she was incredulous. "How can I have been burning my esophagus when I don't have enough acid? |
Thomson Healthcare, Inc.
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 Heart Disease
To clarify the effect of Green Tea consumption on cardiovascular disease and cancer, a large, population-based cohort study was conducted as part of the Ohsaki National health insurance Cohort Study in Japan. The cause of mortalities was tracked in these participants for up to 11 years (and for up to 7 years for cause-specific mortalities). In this time frame, 4,209 people died. Analysis revealed that consumption of Green Tea was associated with a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, as well as from other causes with the exception of cancer. |
Andreas Moritz
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 In 1976, Los Angeles County registered a sudden reduction of its death rate by eighteen percent when many medical doctors went on strike against the increase of health insurance premiums for malpractice. In a study by Dr. Milton Roemer from the University of California, Los Angeles, 17 of the largest hospitals in the county showed a total of 60 percent fewer operations during the period of the strike. When the doctors resumed work and medical activities went back to normal, death rates also returned to pre-strike levels.
A similar event took place in Israel in 1973. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Corporations simply cannot pay skyrocketing health insurance costs and simultaneously remain competitive in the global economy. For a 45-year-old manager working in the U.S., the monthly health insurance bill could easily exceed $700 all by itself -- and that's higher than the entire monthly cost (salary and benefits included) of hiring a similarly skilled worker in many other countries.
Thanks to the massive political influence of Big Pharma, the United States has now become the most expensive country in the world in which to conduct business. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 They're operating in a disease economy, and in a disease economy, it costs way too much for workers because workers are diseased, and you have to cover the costs of treating all that disease so you can have health insurance for all those workers. The United State's health insurance costs are the highest of any nation in the world.
Not only do we have workers who are under-educated in the United States, they are also over-diseased. We have a disease economy, so we think we're creating abundance by selling each other expensive treatments, products and services for disease. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 Those deductions, which were entirely voluntary, were to be used, along with funds from the general treasury, to purchase private health insurance policies only for the senior citizens who wanted them. Bettercare was entirely voluntary, and it would give private insurers a piece of the action.
Members of the Ways and Means Committee were still bickering over which bill to support when Mills launched a preemptive strike on March 2, 1965, calling Wilbur Cohen, an assistant secretary for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, to a meeting of the committee. |
| The Institute of Medicine recently estimated that about eighteen thousand Americans die prematurely each year, simply because they lack health insurance.
It's not as if we haven't tried to fix the system—several times, in fact, over the past century, first in World War I, then again during the Great Depression
1 and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Attempt number five was in the 1960s, when Medicare passed—despite vehement opposition from the American Medical Association. |
| The couple, writes Phillip, "felt blessed that our gold-plated health insurance allowed us unfettered access to all the doctors and specialists we would care to see." But during the ten months that elapsed between the time Robin was diagnosed and her death, the couple saw firsthand how poorly even one of the most respected hospitals could handle care, beginning with the fact that Phillip found himself having to explain to his distraught wife why he hadn't been in the post-op recovery room to comfort her after her lumpectomy. |
| But American businesses are already staggering under the burden of paying for health insurance. They will become increasingly less competitive in a world market as they pay more and more for care that does less and less to improve the health of their workers. For the economy as a whole, wasting seven hundred billion dollars on useless care represents an enormous opportunity cost.
Solving the problem of the uninsured requires a solution to our mounting national medical bill, and we can only get a grip on costs by facing overtreatment head-on. |
| At that time, opposition to universal coverage came largely from private life insurance companies, which had begun to market health insurance too. Many physicians supported government-provided insurance at first, until they realized that the Progressives didn't want simply to insure citizens; they intended to encourage doctors to form prepaid, group practices, modeled after early HMOs like the Mayo Clinic. |
| The bill's passage was shepherded by Representative Wilbur Mills, a Democrat from Arkansas, chair of the House Committee on Ways and Means, and a wily politician who had long opposed the government getting involved in health insurance. Mills changed his mind about Medicare when polls showed that two thirds of Americans supported it, but he intended to protect the financial solvency of the Social Security Administration, which would manage Medicare once it passed, by becoming the bill's sponsor. His defection, Michael J. |
Rhonda D. Orin
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 If you want to know how widespread the problems are, just bring up health insurance at your next party. Everyone will have a story to tell.
It's gotten so bad that even the names of the policies don't make sense anymore. One plan, for example, boasts that it is "A Managed Fee-for-Service Plan with a Preferred Provider Organization and a Point-of-Service Product."
Whatever that means.
And, while the names are a problem, the plans themselves are even worse. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 If you want to use this product, you can, but there will be a price to pay, and the price will be long-term cancer, a lot of pain and suffering, an early death, and you will no longer be covered by health insurance, Medicare or Medicaid. You won't be paid to be a smoker. On the other hand, if you choose to avoid smoking, you can be covered by health insurance, you can live a longer, healthier, happier life, without these negative consequences. The choice is yours to make.
Free choice. It's a tricky thing, you see. |
Dr. Steven R. Gundry
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 As you've learned, plant compounds have tremendous impact on our cellular functioning, but today we consume fewer plant micronutrients than our ancestors did, making supplementing our diet with vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients a form of health insurance. What about the government's recommended daily allowances (RDA) for certain vitamins and minerals? Don't I get everything I need in one bowl of Total cereal? RDAs were established after the introduction of refined white flour led to the discovery of vitamin and mineral deficiency diseases. |
Melody Petersen
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 But as the cost spiraled, prescription medicines became a leading reason why health insurance was no longer affordable.
Those lucky enough to have an employer paying for their insurance may not have noticed how much their medicines cost. Many of the insured often paid a copayment of just ten to thirty dollars for each prescription. One had to look beyond those copays to the actual cost of the prescriptions paid by insurance companies, government programs, and the uninsured to understand the burden created by the industry's practice of unrestrained pricing. |
| To pay for rising health insurance premiums for employees, companies had been forced to raise the prices of their products so that everything from milk to machinery was more expensive. At General Motors, executives estimated that the company's health costs in 2004 accounted for $1,500 of the cost of each vehicle it manufactured. The auto executives said rising drug costs?1.5 billion for GM in 2004—were hurting American automakers'ability to compete with European and Asian manufacturers. |
| In 2006 an American employer paid an average health insurance premium of $ 11,500 for a family of four. That was an increase of 87 percent since 2000. Between those years overall inflation rose by just 18 percent.
Across the United States, many companies had stopped providing health coverage to their employees because of the soaring cost. That meant more Americans either were uninsured or had joined the ranks of those covered by Medicaid, the government program that pays the medical bills of the poor. |
| Nearly 16 percent of the nation's population was without health insurance in 2005, according to the Census Bureau, up from 14.2 percent in 2000. Many of the uninsured were from working middle-class families who earned too much to qualify for Medicaid.
While studies have shown that people lucky enough to have medical coverage are being harmed by too many tests, medicines, and procedures, the uninsured can't get the care they need. |
Ann M. Coulston and Carol J. Boushey
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 With growing competition from other aspects of health care and with continued threats of onerous governmental and health insurance constraints on reimbursement for osteoporosis diagnosis and treatment, it is not at all certain that an explosive increase in fragility fractures and their consequences will be avoided.
References
1. National Osteoporosis Foundation. (1998), "Physician's Guide to Prevention and Treatment of Osteoporosis." Excerpta Medica, Bell Mead, NJ. Available at http:// www.nof.org/physguide/inside_cover.htm.
2. Melton, L. J. III. (1995). How many women have osteoporosis now? |
Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D.
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 I believe we should all be taking at least 400 mg per day, regardless of our dietary intake, as a sound health insurance policy. The only contraindications to magnesium therapy that I know are kidney failure or kidney insufficiency. Since magnesium also helps to relax and "slow" down the heart, patients with very slow heart rates less than 60, should also exercise caution in taking magnesium therapy. In most patients however, magnesium therapy is extraordinarily safe and even in high doses, no side effects have been noted except for a "cleansing effect. |
Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George
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 We don't need to label someone just because it is demanded by a health insurance billing code or a politician's budget.
Our scientific understanding of Alzheimer's disease becomes more complicated every day. The story of brain aging is ultimately your own story to tell, not mine, not your doctor's, and certainly not the self-interested pharmaceutical companies or research institutions that capitalize on our biological classification of AD as a disease. Alzheimer's has been the way Western culture has described brain aging for the past one hundred years. |
Andreas Moritz
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 If the current trend of escalating health expenditures in the United States continues to grow as fast as it has in recent decades, major corporations are likely to end up bankrupt if they continue to offer health insurance as a benefit to their employees. In 2001, the cost of health care in the United States exceeded the $1 trillion mark, and in 2004, total health care spending amounted to $1.9 trillion. That represented 16 percent of the nation's GDP, and there is no end to this trend in sight. Healthcare spending is projected to double to $4 trillion over the next decade. |
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