Tag Archives: health care

The VA Fails Again

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This time it’s the Marion, IL, Veterans Administration clinic.

In 1971 Kirby Williams went to Vietnam as a US Army draftee and worked as a finance clerk. In 2010 he went to a Veterans Affairs clinic in southern Illinois where a radiologist took a scan of his kidneys.

Unfortunately, the radiologist missed a 2- to 3-centimeter mass in one of his kidneys, and by last December that mass had grown to between 7 and 8 centimeters. Now the 66-year-old has, at most, two to five years to live.

Williams isn’t the only victim.

Within weeks…of starting at the VA [in March of 2016!], he [Dr L Anthony Leskosky, a board-certified radiologist] noticed patients previously diagnosed as healthy had radiology scans from years prior documenting grave conditions. These conditions, such as cancers, aortic aneurysms, bleeding ulcers and obstructions in their small bowel and colon—if left untreated—could cause patients tremendous pain or even premature death.

“In radiology, we compare current scans to old studies, so I was pulling up the last two years of the scans. That’s when I noticed the radiologists had called their previous exams ‘normal,’ but I would see a mass on the older scans, and then on my scan, I would see the mass had enlarged, and in some cases become a spreading cancer. Usually that is not survivable,” Leskosky said.

As many as four to five times a day, Leskosky said, he found serious errors in prior readings….

Leskosky whistleblew on this and too many other such incompetencies, and the VA’s answer was to fire him rather than correct the problem.

That’s damning enough, but read the whole article.

President Donald Trump touts improvements in the VA, and there have been some.  However, they’re too little, too small, and too late, and the VA’s destructiveness continues.  The Veterans Administration must be disbanded and its budget sent to our veterans as vouchers with which they can seek medical care with doctors of their choosing at medical facilities of their choosing.  And get actual treatment.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Human Gene-Splicing

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Some scientists have successfully spliced some genes into a human embryo to correct a mutation that causes heart disease, proving the possibilities open to us and our health (and potentially eliminating health coverage provision as a Progressive-Democrat tool of welfare entrapment [/snark]).

Experts noted that the newly successful process could cure more than 10,000 genetic diseases, including some types of cancer and early-onset Alzheimer’s, sickle cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis.

“We have to be very delicate with how we use this because it’s very, very powerful,” Alice Benjamin, a clinical nurse specialist said on Fox & Friends.

There is a legitimately strong concern with the ethics of this, concerning both the matter of messing with human genetics and upsetting the “natural order to things.”  Benjamin went on to express the latter concern, but as a matter of caution not of objection.

It’s certainly true that caution is needed and a clearly laid out set of guidelines for getting down into human genetics to correct this or that item needs to be developed, along with a clearly laid out set of sanctions for violating those guidelines.

However, we’ve been messing with nature and upsetting the natural order of things ever since we went pastoral and agrarian and started selectively breeding our food animals and plants, deliberating selecting animal offspring and plant seeds for the favorable characteristics of their parents in order to enhance those characteristics in succeeding generations.

In addition to that caution regarding manipulating human genes, though, we also need to consider the ethics of withholding the ability to correct serious genetic defects and meekly allowing the baby to grow, sort of, with a serious disease, or like Charlie Gard, simply leaving the baby to die.

Genetic manipulation moves much more rapidly than selective breeding, and that’s the basis for caution.  Genetic manipulation as messing with nature or upsetting the natural order is what we’ve been doing for the last 8,000-10,000 years, though.

Collapsing Obamacare

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These data are from the Kaiser Family Foundation.  There was such hope by the health care coverage providers at the start; then the realities of the “market” place hit, and hit hard.  Following the early expansion of coverage providers into ObamaMart, the drop-off in companies between 2016 and 2017, and the resulting collapse of choice—in too many counties, even of any availability at all—is stark.  It’s expected to get worse in 2018 and 2019, too.

The State-by-State drop off is presented in the table below, constructed from KFF‘s table at the link.  The average drop-off across all States is nearly 23%.

Obamacare must be eliminated, and a free market set of parameters that would facilitate actual health insurance must be set in place.  Republicans need to get on the stick, and promptly.

Location Number of Issuers in 2014 Number of Issuers in 2015 Number of Issuers in 2016 Number of Issuers in 2017 Per Cent Drop-off
Alabama 2 3 3 1 66.7%
Alaska 2 2 2 1 50.0%
Arizona 8 11 8 2 75.0%
Arkansas 3 3 4 3 25.0%
California 11 10 12 11 8.3%
Colorado 10 10 8 7 12.5%
Connecticut 3 4 4 2 50.0%
Delaware 2 2 2 2 0.0%
District of Columbia 3 3 2 2 0.0%
Florida 8 10 7 5 28.6%
Georgia 5 9 8 5 37.5%
Hawaii 2 2 2 2 0.0%
Idaho 4 5 5 5 0.0%
Illinois 5 8 7 5 28.6%
Indiana 4 8 7 4 42.9%
Iowa 4 4 4 4 0.0%
Kansas 3 3 3 3 0.0%
Kentucky 3 5 7 3 57.1%
Louisiana 4 5 4 3 25.0%
Maine 2 3 3 3 0.0%
Maryland 4 5 5 3 40.0%
Massachusetts 10 10 10 9 10.0%
Michigan 9 13 11 9 18.2%
Minnesota 5 4 4 4 0.0%
Mississippi 2 3 3 2 33.3%
Missouri 3 6 6 4 33.3%
Montana 3 4 3 3 0.0%
Nebraska 4 4 4 2 50.0%
Nevada 4 5 3 3 0.0%
New Hampshire 1 5 5 4 20.0%
New Jersey 3 5 5 2 60.0%
New Mexico 4 5 4 4 0.0%
New York 16 16 15 14 6.7%
North Carolina 2 3 3 2 33.3%
North Dakota 3 3 3 3 0.0%
Ohio 12 15 14 10 28.6%
Oklahoma 4 4 2 1 50.0%
Oregon 11 10 10 6 40.0%
Pennsylvania 7 8 7 5 28.6%
Rhode Island 2 3 3 2 33.3%
South Carolina 3 4 3 1 66.7%
South Dakota 3 3 2 2 0.0%
Tennessee 4 5 4 3 25.0%
Texas 11 14 16 10 37.5%
Utah 6 6 4 3 25.0%
Vermont 2 2 2 2 0.0%
Virginia 5 6 7 8 -14.3%
Washington 7 9 8 6 25.0%
West Virginia 1 1 2 2 0.0%
Wisconsin 13 15 16 15 6.3%
Wyoming 2 2 1 1 0.0%

Rule of Law

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The DC Circuit Court stacked by President Barack Obama (D) seems to be iffy on the thing.  In an appeal concerning whether the monies the Federal government pays to health care plan providers as subsidies so the plan providers will hold down premiums and deductibles can actually be paid—the funds never were appropriated by Congress, so the payments aren’t legitimate, ruled the trial court—the Circuit Court ruled in part:

The States have shown a substantial risk that an injunction requiring termination of the payments at issue here…would lead directly and imminently to an increase in insurance prices, which in turn will increase the number of uninsured individuals for whom the States will have to provide health care[.]

That may well be true, and if true, it would be unfortunate.

However.

The law is clear: monies not actually appropriated by Congress cannot be spent by the Federal government—the money, in a very real legal sense, does not exist.  It’s also illegal to take funds from other, actually extant, appropriations to spend on non-appropriated-for activities.

The decisions whether to appropriate, and then to spend, are solely political decisions, and judges cannot—may not under our Constitution—decide in any way other than what the law actually says; in particular, they don’t get to rule in accordance with what they wish the law to say.  Doing the latter is nothing other than judge-made law.

In this case, the appellate court plainly has chosen rule by men—via judge-made law, here—over rule of law.

A Bit More on Health Care Coverage

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Senator Susan Collins (R, ME) is worried about health care plan availability to our poor, which she thinks would be endangered were President Donald Trump to act on his thoughts regarding cutting off the funds the Feds pay to health coverage plan providers to get them to charge (artificially) lower deductibles and copays from the poor.

It really would be detrimental to some of the most vulnerable citizens if those payments were cut off. They’re paid to the insurance companies, but the people that they benefit are people who make between 100% and 250% of the poverty rate.

Couple things about this. One is that folks making more than the poverty rate…aren’t poverty-stricken.

The other is that, if the money really is intended to help folks pay for health care coverage plans, the money should go directly to those folks and not to the insurance companies. That way there would be no loss to internal friction in the middlemen of health care plan providers—a friction loss extant even in the most honest and well-intended of providers.

And one more: these aren’t insurance companies selling insurance policies.  It isn’t insurance when risks are transferred by Government fiat and at fees that bear no relation to the risks being transferred.

Collins knows these things full well.