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Is this the secret court you are talking about? The one advertised the HRSA web site? https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-c...

No one?

So this doesn't count?

https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/def...

That isn't true. The US government pays out settlements to between 500 and 2500 people each year that have "life changing" reactions to vaccines. This is just for overwhelmingly provable cases. The CDC's own statistics show that some years the people who get hurt by vacancies are more common and severe than the diseases they were trying to prevent.

Sheesh. Lying with statistics much? In fact, having now looked over the numbers, I'll say that you're just outright lying.

If you go back to the actual numbers, straight from the horse's mouth, you'll see on page 3 that over the 12-year period from 2006-01-01 to 2017-12-31, the US administered 3,454,269,356 vaccines. Resulting from those 3.4 billion vaccines, only 4,172 people were compensated due to harm, which—at just 348/year on average—falls well short of even the lower end of the range you were trying to assert. So what is the actual number of settlements per year? Page 7 shows us that the worst year on record had merely 697, not 2500, while the best year had just 9, not 500.

To ground all of this in terms that we may be more familiar with, that's an incidence rate of just 1.2 per 1 million vaccines administered in the US, or a meager 0.00012% chance that you'll experience a "life changing" reaction in response to a vaccine. All of which is to say, while vaccines are not 100% safe (aside: so far as I know, there's no such thing as a 100% safe medical intervention, which makes me question why anti-vaxxers bother with doctors at all), they are literally within a rounding error of 100% safe according to the metric you happened to choose to try and use against them.

As for "the CDC's own statistics", care to link these statistics you've supposedly seen? Because so far as I can find (and I've looked quite a bit), the CDC doesn't break out the statistics you claimed you've seen. Instead, they point the public to "The Health and Medicine Division (HMD) of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine[, ...] an independent, nonprofit organization that works outside of government to provide unbiased and authoritative advice to decision makers and the public". The HMD's numbers also happen to be what get used in the HRSA report I linked earlier. So, go back and look at those numbers from a few paragraphs back. There were 3.4 billion vaccines administered over that 12-year period. That's about 288 million per year. Since you're saying more than half the people had adverse effects in some years, you're claiming that the incidence rate topped out somewhere north of 144 million instances of adverse effects in a single year, or, put differently, that there was at least one year on record where a number of incidents roughly equal to half the population of the US resulted in adverse effects...and somehow we didn't all start rioting over it.

Actually, there's a possibility that's true, though if it is, it's likely because the far-and-away most common adverse effect monitored by the CDC—with "up to 8 out of 10" patients suffering from it—is that they became "fussy or irritable" after the shot was administered. Mind you, this is a shot typically given to infants, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that they cry after being given a shot, and yet that's logged as an adverse effect counting towards your statistics. No one cares about that. Nor do we generally care that the next closest effects are that 1 in 3 people experience a mild fever or see some redness at the injection spot within a few days of the vaccine. And once we get past the handful of common adverse effects like those, none of which are serious, the odds drop off rapidly, with things like anaphylaxis or worse coming in at 1 i

Deaths from Measles since 2000 in US: 4 Deaths from Measles Vaccine (MMR): 457 People disabled from MMR Vaccine: 1,726 Hospitalizations from MMR vaccine: 6,902 Adverse reactions from MMR vaccine: 92,844 They are sooo safe and effective that there is even a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund... https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-c... "Total compensation paid over the life of the program is approximately $3.9 billion." https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/def... Measles is a mild infection that resolve by itself. Google Fact (on the right) - Extremely rare - 188 US cases in 2015 - Short-term: resolves within days to weeks https://g.co/kgs/Wipyhp

Deaths from Measles since 2000 in US: 4 Deaths from Measles Vaccine (MMR): 457 People disabled from MMR Vaccine: 1,726 Hospitalizations from MMR vaccine: 6,902 Adverse reactions from MMR vaccine: 92,844 They are sooo safe and effective that there is even a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund... https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-c... "Total compensation paid over the life of the program is approximately $3.9 billion." https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/def... Measles is a mild infection that resolve by itself. Google Fact (on the right) - Extremely rare - 188 US cases in 2015 - Short-term: resolves within days to weeks https://g.co/kgs/Wipyhp

In the US, vaccination programs kill a few persons per decade, mostly by allergic reaction to eggs, the medium used to grow the vaccine. Each year tens of persons are permanently injured. As a result of legal suits resulting from such deaths and injuries, makers and administrators of vaccines were abandoning the business so in 1986 Congress created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. You cannot sue anybody at all alleging an adverse outcome from vaccination. Instead you must file a claim that is judged by the Board. The delay is years, about 3/5 of the claims are denied, there is no appeal, the average successful claim pays about 3/4 * $1M.

I promote vaccines as by far the best choice for anyone (except in case of known immunosuppression.) My children received all the recommended doses. I myself got the measles as a young child, just like almost everyone born before 1957. I remember the epidemics in a suburb of a large city: thousands of children with the rash. Tens of them died each year. Then the vaccine came, and the measles vanished.

Nevertheless, I can understand why someone who is informed may decide that the risk to their child from the vaccine is unacceptable, especially if enforced by government edict. In 1976 the US Center for Disease Control [that was the name then] deliberately lied to the public about their scientific and medical errors connected to the swine flu vaccination program. As long as I live, I will never trust what CDC says without independent verification.

When I die, my organs will be donated to people who need them. I've specified in my driver's license and my will, that I be an organ donor when I die.

One organ donor can save eight lives. The wait for a kidney can be 5 or 10 years.

When I renew my driver's license, I always check the "Yes" box for "Do you want to be an organ donor?"

Take a look at these pictures of polio survivors. See the "rare" complications of surviving that disease? And who does pay for the treatment that those complications demand? Can you afford a lifetime of care for your child should they get paralysis from polio or brain damage from measles? How much cheaper (and safer) is a vaccine compared to that?

Nothing, even just stepping out your front door, is ever completely safe. We live in a dangerous world. Demanding that vaccines be 100 percent effective and 100 percent safe is an impossibility. That is why vaccine makers are shielded from liability through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, so that those that do have adverse reactions can be compensated and those that make the vaccines don't face financial ruin.

Finally, every time I hear someone say "Follow the money" in regards to vaccination I feel compelled to point out that if all that motivated a corporation was profit, they would profit more selling sixty years worth of treatment and care for all those polio victims rather than just provide two simple shots.

Except you're missing the point. What is that "basic job" in a world where every possible job can be done better by a robot than by a human?

Are you proposing something like a WPA? Are you proposing "make work" jobs, where half the people dig holes in the ground, and the other half fill them in? Are you proposing that the government pay businesses to employ people instead of robots (...and then tax the businesses, to give get the money to give them to hire the people?)

Although I haven't mentioned it, I actually do favor a WPA-like thing, but nothing like digging ditches, but more teaching/peace-core-like (kind of like the National service corps) for people that don't have an economically viable job. Don't like helping people? Well play video games in your basement, there is basic income after all...

The point of higher education is no longer to make people eligible for a job: it is to make them better human beings, and as a side benefit, to give them something to do for five, ten years to keep them off the job market because there aren't any jobs for them, while making them feel valuable in the process.

As I mentioned, the talented already get scholarships (and I have no argument giving more of those), the big question is what we do with those with lesser talents that can't find economically viable jobs... If you are suggesting we spend resources to give everyone participation ribbons to make them feel valuable, well personally I don't think that's a great way to spend resources, and maybe that's a political point where I disagree with folks the most on this subject.

They are largely uneducated rural people

This is patent horseshit. Depending on you define "rural," you'd be looking at about 20% of the population. There's a reason why 2/3 of people live within 100 miles of the borders and it's mostly metropolitan areas.

You're also automatically equating "rural" with "uneducated" with nothing more than your own bias. It's not like people that live in rural areas can't drive. When was the last time you stepped foot outside of your comfortable city dwelling or suburban home? I'm going to guess the answer is never.

It is happening http://www.hrsa.gov/healthit/t...

The manufacturers are already shielded from liability via an injury program the govt runs: http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecom... But mostly it is super expensive and the return on investment is low. Customers only need dosed once a decade, generally. The vast majority of vaccine research is paid for via government grant to a private company that has a fledgling product they want to develop or a government agency directly soliciting research on an area it is worried about.

And having witnessed someone die as a result of a vaccination, I think hospitals should be held liable if such event happens.

No they should not. If individual doctors and hospitals are liable for every side reaction, that will raise the cost of vaccines, and many providers will refuse to administer them. We already have a National Vaccine Compensation System to deal with this issue.

oh look, its the garbage rag the Washington Examiner, dedicated to excusing and covering up the right's mistakes.

Oh, sorry, should I have found some garbage rag dedicated to excusing and covering up the left's mistakes? There are certainly a LOT more of those to choose from.

and yes youre still a crackpot who doesn't know what hes talking about concerning vaccines or pretty much any other topic.

Actually, you are an ignorant douchebag with no clue about anything, and a shill for the vastly harmful pharmaceutical industry.

really? do you have any actual data beyond "I have heard of them too" to corroborate your claim? I'm guessing not because you would be more than gleeful to post any link .

I can't be "gleeful" about people that are harmed by pharmaceutical companies. But for your information, it happens often enough (and since these multinational corporations are IMMUNE from liability for ANY harm, the government has a compensation program to assist people injured by them.

There are vaccines and there are vaccines. I see no problem with the proven ones for really tragic illnesses, such as polio, for instance. But when states start mandating things like Gardisil, which has caused some neurological problems in some patients and with very questionable benefits, it goes too far.

Other posters have pointed out your flawed reasoning. However, here we go again, this time with the actual numbers.

Of 2,236,678,735 vaccines administered during the period, only 1,709 received compensation for adverse effects. That translates to less than 1 in 1.3 million.

Contrast that with the death rate for measles in the US of 3 per 1000 infections. Compare that to death rates of up to 28% who die in the underdeveloped world.

Dead is dead.

What valid health concerns are those?

Vaccines do carry risk of serious side-effects, and sometimes death.

See HRSA vaccine injury claim stats and Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System for data.

Why should anyone go to jail? There's a known, if small, risk; that isn't the same as negligence or malice. We do, however, have the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to provide financial compensation for people harmed by mandated vaccines.

So who goes to jail if there is an unfortunate medical outcome from a vaccine (and there are some)?

In that exceedingly rare circumstance, there is the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

The whole society. In the case of a bad vaccine reaction you'd get a hefty compensation (up to $10 million) and assistance for life ( http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecom... ). Compensations are so huge because genuine bad reactions are _extremely_ rare.

Who's responsible if your child has a bad reaction to the vaccine and dies or is permanently disabled?

The national vaccine injury compensation fund. The US decided that vaccines were so important that if there was an injury due to a vaccine for some reason (and though rare, they do happen), it was better to create a general fund to pay for those injuries than to allow the vaccine manufactures to be sued and potentially be put out of business by an adverse legal decision. This helps ensure that there will continue to be a supply of vaccines available without having to set up nationalized manufacturing facilities (which incidentally you would not be able to sue unless the government explicitly gave you permission. How likely do you think that would be?).

The government, with a fund funded by vaccine makers.

We know that vaccines are save for 9,999 out of 10,000 people, and we know they are dangerous for the other tiny fraction. We did the math and concluded that saving 9999 was more important, but we didn't forget about the other 1. We set up a big lumbering system with a lot of money to compensate those people.

Seat belts sometimes cause a person to die.

Sometimes people choke while eating healthy food.

Some car crashes result from people paying less attention on safer roads.

Some people bonk their heads on safety railings.

Police officers sometimes shoot innocent bystanders.

And yet all of these things make the world nicer to live in. Oh, to live in a world where good choices never had bad outcomes; we can dream.

You say, "government won't take responsibility for the (admittedly unlikely) consequences of a bad result." Please read up on the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, through which the United States Federal Government provides no-fault compensation to people injured by vaccines. The program is funded by a tax on vaccines.

Also, we are not talking about "making sure a few children don't get sick". Without vaccines, annual United States deaths from vaccine-preventable illnesses would likely range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands (higher in epidemic years). See What Would Happen If We Stopped Vaccinations? on the CDC web site for some data on historical death rates. The cost of treating people who came down with these infections would also lead to a massive spike in the cost of health care, which everyone would wind up paying for in the form of higher premiums, lower salaries (since employers would have to pay higher premiums), and higher taxes.

It is very difficult to find this information. However, it is (sort of) available... i don't know of an actual death rate from vaccines exactly. Even this is hard to find, but there is a federal program (the 'Vaccine Injury Compensation Program') which compensates victims who have been harmed by compulsory vaccinations, and a summary chart of claims, accepted claims, and payouts is here:

http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecom...

I had found a different, more accessible document before, but can't really find it now. Similar information though. On the other hand, the statistics for the prevalence of diseases that have vaccines for them is much more available, at CDC:

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pu...

Influenza has the highest compensated total (932 in 8 years). Looking at DTaP might be a better comparison... ~75 million doses in 8 years with 105 compensated cases (including death, but other things too). Combined Diptheria/Tetanus/Pertussis together, the CDC chart only goes to 2011 (so missing a couple years) but it shows no D cases, ~150 or so T cases, and nearly 100,000 P cases over the 7 years in question, with total deaths in that time period: 0 for D, 9 for T, ~18 for P (and none in the last 4 years on the chart, so trend was definitely down).

Would help to have a trend line for the compensated cases too. In any case, the statistics show that as of ~2011, you had a better chance of not dying by not getting the vaccine, but the chance in either case was vanishingly small.

Of course, the issue here is a free rider syndrome - if everyone else gets the vaccine, I can get the benefits (reduced chance of catching a bad disease) while everyone else bears the risks (possible chance of side effects from the vaccine). But if enough people don't get the vaccine, then the numbers change quickly as more people catch the disease.

We vaccinated, but we waited until after age 2 to give their immune system time to build up. Seemed like the best balance.

Government forcing medical procedures on anyone is really not something we want, especially since government won't take responsibility for the (admittedly unlikely) consequences of a bad result.

You mean take responsibility by compensating (the very few) people who are legitimately harmed by a vaccine reaction: National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program

Well, there is also this page about the known possible side effects of various vaccines http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/va.... The MMRV vaccine is known to cause permanent brain damage in very rare cases. Critics of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecom... claim that it serves to conceal information about the real risks of vaccinations, and disincentivises vaccine manufacturers from developing vaccines without severe side effects or from developing tests to identify kids at risk of the more severe side effects.

That being said, my daughter is vaccinated because the rates of serious side effects are so low that it only make sense.

Despite a generally high degree of safety, vaccination still has significant risks. Hundreds of patients each year suffer adverse consequences, mostly allergic reactions to eggs or other aspects of manufacturing process, and a few have died for that or other reasons associated with vaccination. In the US, federal law has taken away the right to sue because of alleged injury involving vaccination, in nearly all cases. Even if the person administering the vaccine does it incorrectly, even if the vaccine is not stored or handled according to manufacturer's instructions, no matter what the circumstances, you may not sue. Instead you must file a claim with National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). Claims are heard by judges alone (no jury) and take years to decide. Something like 60% of claims are rejected; there is no appeal. For an approved claim the average compensation is several hundred thousand dollars. So your rights are significantly different than in general, and this causes some of the antivax sentiment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/

Seriously, I've had like 5 diseases (measles, mumps, varicella, rubella and influenzaa) as a child...and I'm still alive and quite healthy with ZERO side effects of having had those diseases.

Do you know you've had zero side effects? My dad's heard valve was damaged by measles (no vaccine when he was a kid) and he didn't know until he was in his 50s and it stopped functioning properly.

In any case I've ridden in cars and jet aircraft without seat belts and am still around but that doesn't mean I don't use them when they've available.

Big pharma marketing has apparently been successful in creating a nation of hypochondriacs.

Actually vaccines aren't big moneymakers and in in fact stopped being produced at all in the US until Congress stepped in.

I figure there needs to be something similar to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: here, something that makes society safer overall (vaccines) is promoted by reducing the risk of an individual harm (a rare side effect). This says: "Pay in and help make society safer, and if it individually harms you, we've got your back."

So, why not something for driverless cars? You opt into a driverless car with the societal benefit of reduced accidents, and if your driverless car harms you individually (physically or legally), the national defense fund takes over.

Many official government agencies disagree with you.
http://www.hrsa.gov/ruralhealth/policy/definition_of_rural.html

Everything that is not urban is rural - by several popular usages of the word. And yes, words change meaning over time. Get over it. We do not have a central authority for the English language like the French do. Whatever is common usage IS the meaning of the word.

During the 1980s, U.S. parents successfully sued manufacturers, alleging that the whole-cell vaccine also caused long-term brain damage. A 1991 Institute of Medicine report concluded that this was unproven, but by then many pertussis vaccine manufacturers had withdrawn from the market, leading Congress to create a federal vaccine injury compensation program for families who could show a strong case for vaccine damage.

They don't even really need to make a 'strong' case. All that is required is a doctor's certification that X occurred before time T after Y vaccine's administration and the family is awarded Z in compensation. The key here is that families do not need to prove a causal link between the vaccine and the harm just that it happened. In theory this is the balance for congress making it very difficult for citizens to sue vaccine manufacturers. http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/vaccinetable.html

As I understand HIPPA (and I am not a doctor or a lawyer but someone that had to worry about this for a specific project at one time), it covers your health care professional and means nothing to your employer or other agency.

Again... it's corporate anarchy. They have this information and they are going to leverage it. They're WAY bigger than individuals or families, so screw you.

This is somewhat correct. The HIPPA privacy rule applies only to "covered entities" which consists of health insurance clearinghouses, health care providers, and health plans (with some significant exceptions).

The problem is he is pointing out systems like VARS which are woefully inadequate for vaccine related problems. There has been 2.5 billion paid out by the legal system for vaccine related injuries. http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/data.html I guarantee you that for every court case there is at least a 1000 others that doctors have explained away. Think about it for a second.

"Zero detectable health costs"? Look at http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/data.html. So far 2.5 billion has been paid out in court for vaccine related injuries. If you actually think about it for every case brought to court there is probably 100 or maybe a 1000 times more that doctors explain away. Vaccines are not nearly as clean cut as you think.

Steve Jobs made it clear that the donor matching system is corrupt: if you're rich you can register at many transplant locations. Having enough money to travel should not be a basis for medical decisions. The donor match system is national, and we should evaluate donor matches nationally. Optimizing matches by location does not have to be changed, only the influence of money.

http://optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/about/transplantation/matchingProcess.asp

Makers of vaccines are legally protected from lawsuits.

See [new news]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/22/AR2011022206008.html
or [established decades ago]: http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/index.html

Drunk driving vs. flu deaths? Wow....

I wish people would stop comparing vaccines with things wildly unrelated.

There is something about the pro-vaccine lobby that bothers me. There's a trust fund setup to pay compensation to people who are injured by vaccines, that was some sort of compromise because big pharma wouldn't produce vaccines unless they got some sort of liability waiver [emph. added].

I would like some citation for this claim, please, because I think it's a load of crap. Without VICP, pharmaceutical companies would still produce the vaccine. They would just charge more per dose to offset the costs of compensation. Furthermore, the costs of compensation without VICP would be significantly higher for two reasons. First, you have to tack on lawyer fees. Second, sympathetic juries would give disproportionate awards that are based on emotion, rather than a rational evaluation of actual damage. They would see the companies and government as bullies that need punished. The government acknowledged this probability, and put VICP in place as a way to mitigate the financial risks for all.

Well, if vaccines don't cause any harm, why is there a fund? I think they should be honest with people, vaccines can cause some problems, but you'll be worse off if you get Polio.

They are. Have you (or one of your children) received a vaccine in the past 20 years? Every time I or my son have received one, we're given a piece of paper documenting all of the risks and side effects that are associated with that particular immunization. You are simply spreading anti-corporate, anti-government FUD. Why? There is only one side in this debate that has been dishonest, and it hasn't been the pro-vaccine groups.

(Side note: I'm only talking about the controversy regarding long-approved vaccines, such as MMR and DTaP. The process to get new vaccines approved and/or mandated is a different issue. For instance, the makers of Gardasil pulled some pretty shady backdoor lobbying. And there are plenty of other reasons to dislike the pharmaceutical companies, such as how they disproportionately fund high-profit, low-urgency treatments (e.g., erectile dysfunction). But those are tangential to the current debate.)

No, I do not work for a pharmaceutical company, and I have no financial stake in the matter. What really turned me against the anti-vaccine movement was attending a child birth class where the teacher gave this helpful advice: "If you just don't like vaccines, then tell them it's against your religion. You don't have to say anything else or name what your religion is, but they won't give your child a shot." The arrogance, ignorance and irrationality of the anti-vaccine movement is just astounding.

It's curious that the US gov is funding a Compensation Program for those injured by vaccines.

Wakefield’s Lancet Paper Vindicated

Well apperently those sums can lump up to quite a fortune:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services set up the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) in 1988 to compensate individuals and families of individuals injured by covered childhood vaccines. The VICP was adopted in response to a scare over the pertussis portion of the DPT vaccine. These claims were later generally discredited, but some U.S. lawsuits against vaccine makers won substantial awards; most makers ceased production, and the last remaining major manufacturer threatened to do so.

From: Vaccine court.
It seems, that if you open up the flood gate, you can get to the point where it is not financially possible to continue producing the vaccine. And then we have problems.

And another point, according to the above article, The VICP will compensate every case in which a condition listed in the Vaccine Injury Table is proven to have happened after a vaccine was given (by showing a casual connection). The table does not list autism, so my question is: how did they get the claim to be accepted? I guess maybe it was by being regarded as encephalitis/encephalopathy and not autism, and it is only tauted as autism to draw headlines. So we may have another case of bad reporting? If any one has a link to the original ruling, it may be interesting to find out what is being compensated - encephalopathy or autism.

I went there for a combination of reasons including boredom, but the biggest single one was one bully who was difficult to deal with. I dealt reasonably successfully with bullies closer to my size, but this one was tougher, captain of the wrestling team, outweighed me by fifty pounds and was two years older, socially connected, showing off to a girlfriend, and so on. It's hard to remember how much in fear for my life I was then (not sure how justified that fear was.) Sometimes walking away towards something better is the best thing you can do when those around you don't or can't help.
http://homeschooling.families.com/blog/bullying-may-be-a-good-reason-to-homeschool
http://www.stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov/kids/
My Taekwondo instructor showed me how to kill the bully if he ever assaulted me again, but that did not seem like a good idea for multiple reasons, even assuming what the instructor taught was accurate. And I have since studied Aikido which has better ways to handle violence, including redirecting negative energy in more positive ways. Had the bully been the only thing about high school that was a problem, I might have tried harder to get the school to do something else to deal with the situation rather than my leaving, but in general the coursework was not that challenging. I guess that was also before the time of thinking about filing police reports for assaults in schools. Still, looking back from my forties, I can see many ways that I was more of an ass then (e.g. more of a praise-addicted show off and socially oblivious, if generally well meaning) -- not enough to justify bullying and violence if anything does, but certainly enough not to have enough great social connections to prevent bullying on that scale (others were probably afraid of this guy too, and the usual sad story, his father beat him, etc.). Had the teachers in the two classes we shared -- physics and gym -- not been, respectively, burned-out (taking many breaks outside the classroom) and the head of a wrestling team maybe with a chance at some regional competition that year, things might have been different. And while I was smart enough not to try to kill the bully (what a weight to carry), I was not smart enough to make him into a friend.
http://www.wikihow.com/Turn-Enemies-Into-Friends

Still, I had always wanted to go to MIT, and that then did not work out as I had not taken my SATs; Caltech accepted me probably based on my robotics work (including winning a Navy Science Award) and PSATs, but it seemed so far away and expensive and smoggy and earthquakey, so I did not go. So, leaving early essentially cost me a chance to go to MIT, where I had always wanted to go and do robotics. I had never really associated Caltech with robotics (even though I know now they are a great place for that through JPL work).

All the admissions person wanted then at SUNY Stony Brook (leaving in the middle of 11th grade) was proof that you had a B or better GPA. I was disappointed they did not want to see my science fair awards and so on. So, if kids can get into major state universities still, why shunt kids off to community college if they are academically minded? If anything, I think that I would have had an easier time of college starting it even earlier, when I would have been more focused on academics and less on social things and hormones. Maybe academically interested kids should skip high school altogether? Then, by the time hormones kick in, they're off to grad school for their PhD and can date undergrads their age? :-)

With that said, I had a sister who was a residence hall director at SUNY SB, which made it more acceptable (thanks, sis). I also had friends from the chess club and AD&D role playing who had started there the year before. I can see t

Sounds like Guillain-Barré syndrome. Anyways, while I believe you can still sue, since the 1988 there's been an alternative from the US government called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). The Department of Health and Human Services has a page with information on this program at http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/.

Remember, we're dealing with the industry that considers being a victim of domestic violence to be a pre-existing condition and grounds for losing your health care coverage.

You'd put this past them?

A standard isn't software; it's how to exchange information. That includes data formats, but also includes protocols and an awful lot of context. The standards work is a big job, and people have been working on it for years (see HL7). As eln points out below, it's boring as hell, but that doesn't make it unimportant. The industry has been in the process of moving from HL7 v.2 to v.3 for about a decade now.

If you want to get into the software part of the solution, have a look at the OHF Project. There are others, but that's a starting place.

I agree with tnk on the benign reason; the system as a whole will save money, but which individual players will save how much? Hospitals already spend very little on IT compared with other businesses, so spending a big whack that may end saving money for some insurance company isn't going to happen.

You want one big reason for doing this? If it can free up nurses from doing secretarial work chasing down documents in the mail and phoning around, it just might keep enough staff at the hospitals to serve the public. The U.S. department of health and human services prepared this report on the subject. It's worth reading.

I am sure the Federal Government has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in Vaccine injury payments all because there is no truth behind the noise. I am certain this federal website, http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/table.htm, exists for no reason and rarely sees any traffic. I can't imagine that the Medical research community would ever accidently deliver harmful products with unknown side effects. That would be the same folks that brought us leaky breast implants in the 90's and pills that solve the pressing problem of restless legs with the side effect of sleeplessnes, nausea, chest pain and irregular heart beat.

Instead of throwing money at healthcare, figure out why health care is expensive.

That's easy - train more doctors, dentists and nurses. If the U.S. isn't producing enough qualified students, we could easily import them from China and India.

You actually don't have to do rural practice for loan forgiveness. You just have to work in an undeserved community, which can include rural areas, Indian reservations, or the inner city. Most decently sized cities have clinics that serve such a community. If you live frugally and have a competitive application, you could theoretically live in NYC for a few years and leave with no debt.

There is controversy over some vaccines, particularly those in the MMR vaccine. Vaccines can and do have side effects in some people that can include things as serious as stroke and death. Additionally, the medical community always takes a position of "greater good" rather than "individual good" when discussing vaccines. That position makes people very suspicious. And there are serious questions about whether the "Greater Good" is impacted by 1 individual declining.

The fear in the medical community is not that 1 person declines to be vaccinated for their individual personal reasons, but that a lot of people will decline and some of these diseases will take hold again in the U.S.

As a father, I vaccinated my son, but there was the lurking fear that he would have a bad reaction and suffer neurological or serious physical affects. Those are possibilities that the research supports. Death is a statistic that can result from vaccination as can neurological damage. The US Government has setup a national vaccine injury compensation program ( http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/filing_deadlines.htm ) which confirms there are risks involved.

So it really is a roll of the dice. The chances of having those side affects may be slim, but the number of cases of all of the diseases we are vaccinating for in the US has reduced to the point where some of the vaccines should be advised as optional or eliminated, as we have with Polio.

I guess what I'd like to see are good honest statistics on the deaths from each disease we vaccine for, along with open and honest statistics on deaths and complications from the vaccines themselves. I don't want to see news of forced vaccinations- which is simply unconstitutional. That has got to stop before anyone is going to trust what doctors are saying.

Not causative, but if managed care was doing what you say, we'd all be out of jobs by now. We certainly work for less money than in middle america, though.

My point was that managed care is squeezing doctors a lot harder than the so-called lawsuit crisis is.

Truth is that more malpractice cases are settled out of court now than before, because the insurance companies don't want to pay whatever a jury might think is just, and no hospital wants their reputation damaged publicly. There's more of a driver for this in areas w/o tort reform because the jury awards can be so much higher and, therefore, more publicized.

Not necessarily. From what I've seen having worked in the legal field, med mal cases are often defended vigorously, usually by guys with American flags pins on their lapels who truly believe that any lawsuit against a doctor has no merit.

Insurance companies, despite very rare cases with high damage awards (most of which seem to be dropped on appeal) use that to justify charging outrageous premiums to MDs.

In fact, the reason for the high premiums is the insurance companies' losing gambles in the stock market. You are correct that they have been able to pass the buck onto everybody except themselves.

And, if they do settle out of court, that typically means the MD forever carries that blemish on their record and has to report that case everytime they apply for a license, job, etc. The insurance companies have done a good job of passing the buck on to everyone else but them.

I say this: When the National Practitioner Data Bank is made publically accessible, then we can talk about so-called tort reform. The fact that it isn't is further proof that the industry is out to protect its own, not the public. The idea that I can't check the record of someone into whose hands I am placing my very life is a travesty.

Ultimately, the problem will only be solved when the U.S. is led, kicking and screaming, down the path towards some kind of national health care system, like every civilized nation on this planet has done. It's high time that the profit motive is taken out of medicine and doctors can get back to being doctors.

http://newsroom.hrsa.gov/speeches/southwestborder. htm

If U.S. territory within 100 kilometers of the border were a state, its 11 million residents would rank:

        * last in access to health care, with about 30% of the population uninsured;
        * second in deaths due to hepatitis; and
        * third in deaths related to diabetes.

Rates of several serious communicable diseases are far higher there:

        * tuberculosis along the border is six times the national rate;
        * measles and mumps are twice the national rate; and
        * HIV/AIDS is spreading rapidly, especially in the California sector.