New day...same as any other...

So I am officially one year older today, and I thought, "What would be better then posting about health care?".

"Nothing!", was my answer. So here you go. A nice infographic that illustrates what is wrong with our health care system.

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

-Cheers

A wrong set of priorities.

This is just disturbing.

A teenage girl who was dropped from her high school's cheerleading squad after refusing to chant the name of a basketball player who had sexually assaulted her must pay compensation of $45,000 (£27,300) after losing a legal challenge against the decision.

The United States Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a review of the case brought by the woman, who is known only as HS. Lower courts had ruled that she was speaking for the school, rather than for herself, when serving on a cheerleading squad – meaning that she had no right to stay silent when coaches told her to applaud.

I am sure what to even say about this, honestly. The dripping misogyny is disturbing.

She was 16 when she said she had been raped at a house party attended by dozens of fellow students from Silsbee High School, in south-east Texas. One of her alleged assailants, a student athlete called Rakheem Bolton, was arrested, with two other young men.

In court, Bolton pleaded guilty to the misdemeanour assault of HS. He received two years of probation, community service, a fine and was required to take anger-management classes. The charge of rape was dropped, leaving him free to return to school and take up his place on the basketball team.

Four months later, in January 2009, HS travelled to one of Silsbee High School's basketball games in Huntsville. She joined in with the business of leading cheers throughout the match. But when Bolton was about to take a free throw, the girl decided to stand silently with her arms folded.

"I didn't want to have to say his name and I didn't want to cheer for him," she later told reporters. "I just didn't want to encourage anything he was doing."

Richard Bain, the school superintendent in the sport-obsessed small town, saw things differently. He told HS to leave the gymnasium. Outside, he told her she was required to cheer for Bolton. When the girl said she was unwilling to endorse a man who had sexually assaulted her, she was expelled from the cheerleading squad.

This is one of those stories that makes me feel ashamed. The sort of "sports mentality" that made the superintendent think this was the best way to handle this situation is one reason, that I have very little love for organized sports.

I guess the thought is, it is her fault for being a victim. Further cementing my view of Texas as the shit hole of the universe.

This ruling lacks even basic humanity.

-Cheer

Why go after Unions?

Two graphs that illustrate why we see the republican movement against unions.




Lets repeat together. It is not about balancing budgets.

Between that and the attempts to pass numerous "anti-voter fraud" laws, you might think they were just trying to starve their opposition of resources.

-Cheers

News of the day

It is hard to judge or measure the effect of these events, and I am sure I could write reams on various issues with regard to the death of Osama bin Laden.

Evidenced by the numerous writing battles I have engaged in on Facebook. But I think here, in this space I will instead just be relieved that someone so heinous is no longer walking the earth.

And well this:


-Cheers

The bar...

Is simply higher for a minority then it is otherwise. I do not know why I forgot this. But today I feel sorry for the President. I wish he had not had the state of Hawaii release his "long form" birth certificate. It will only embolden the opposition.

The President has done more then any other, to prove his citizenship. Now he has asked the
state of Hawaii to wave its privacy laws.

The problem is, they will never stop. The main impulse behind the birther movement is bigotry. They do not believe he is legitimate. There is nothing that will dissuade him. Now they will ask for his college records, then his tax forms, probably even his children's birth records.

They will never stop.

-Cheers

Oh no that isn't racist.....

Yep. I am glad, that someone has these facts! I did not know I was on welfare!

Wow....seriously. Wow....

You know sometimes when you call someone racist...they are in fact racist.

-Cheers

Health Care is not like other products...

We here a lot, that we just need to open health care up to the "free market". That the "invisible hand", will do wonders for the health care market.

The problem is, as many have pointed out patients are not consumers (in the normal sense of the word). This is an excellent graph that gets to the kernel of the issue.

This graph was part of an excellent post on the subject here.

Shadowfax list 3 compelling reasons why health care expenditures are not like any other market. Amongst those reasons are:

1. health care is generally not a refusable or electable
2. asymmetry of information (doctors don't know how much a procedure will cost to a given consumer, consumers have no good way to judged varying costs between providers)
3. purchasing power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of "consumers".

While all of the points mentioned are important, the third one is perhaps the single most compelling one.

This is the wooden stake through the heart of the idea that consumer behavior can effect cost containment. The functioning of a free market is dependent on the ability of consumers to vary their behavior to force suppliers to compete. However, you and I can be as scrupulous and cost conscious as we like. We are not sick. (Well, I'm not anyway. I hope you're OK.) The driver of cost is the small fraction of people who have serious medical conditions. It's the old 80/20 rule writ large.

Though the data is a few years old, I doubt the distribution has changed. To emphasize, HALF of all health care costs in the US is concentrated in only 5% of the population, and 80% of costs are accounted for by the top quintile! (source: Kaiser Foundation PDF)

So the effect here is that with such a concentration of costs in such a small segment of the population, the ability of the larger population to move the market is highly restricted. You can make 80% of consumers highly price sensitive, but they can only affect a tiny fraction of healthcare spending. And for the generally well, their costs are probably those which are least responsible for the spiraling inflation. They're not getting $30,000 stents or prolonged ICU stays, or needing complex chronic disease management.

Conversely, those who are high consumers of health care simply cannot be made more price sensitive, since their costs are probably well beyond what they could pay in any event, and for most are well beyond the limits of even a catastrophic health insurance policy. Once you are told that you need a bypass/chemo/stent/dialysis/NICU etc, etc, etc, the costs are so overwhelming that a consumer cannot possibly pay them out of pocket. Since, by definition, these catastrophic costs are paid by some form of insurance, the consumer cannot have much financial interest in cost containment. For most, when they are confronted with a major or life-threatening illness, their entire focus shifts to survival, and they could care less about the cost. Further, many who are in this sick/expensive category have some diminished capacity with regard to their information gathering and decision-making.

So yeah, if ever there were an argument for some sort of single payer/hybrid/NHS style health care system this would be it. Individual "consumers" simply do not have the power to shift costs much, even with perfect information. You need a system which allows the entire market to be affected as a whole. Competition over state lines simply won't accomplish that.

-Cheers