If I was myself concerned with other people reading this I would have stopped replying some time ago. However I have nothing to lose from watching you make a fool of yourself.
Was that a contest you put on with yourself there to see if you could break your previous records for most lies in a single short slashdot post? You probably won...
Your strategy is guaranteed failure. My strategy has little chance of success but it is still better than zero. If you had a better idea I expect you would have shared it by now.
I found your comment amusing to read while I was taking a lunch break at a local party convention. But go ahead and keep telling me how your strategy of non-voting is working out so much better.
The federal government has been reduced to a marketing arm of the insurance industry. Any elected official who goes in not being owned by the insurance industry won't retain those stripes long, or won't retain their office long if they try to keep away from the insurance industry. The passing of ACA was formal acknowledgement of this being truly Game Over.
Talk to me about this again a few years in the future when your insurance company tries to fuck you the way mine tried to fuck me. Then you'll realize what a problem those bastards are.
It appears you and I have very different ideas of what the word "control" means.
When I drive my car, I control it. My car does not have free will, it does not get to go anywhere other than where I want it to. It has no choices. If I was a horse owner I could say the same thing about a horse.
A medicare patient is not controlled in that way, nor is their health care. Yes, there are limits on what medicare will pay for them to do, but the patients are not prohibited from paying for other things themselves. The health care of a medicare patient is no more controlled than is the health care of a customer of any health insurance plan in this country. In fact the medicare patient is arguably less controlled by medicare than is a customer of a regular plan as the regular plan customer would be penalized by their insurance company if they were to start paying for things out of pocket.
Furthermore the notion that medicare is the same thing as having the government actually making decisions for you is completely ludicrous. The statement strongly suggests that choices for each patient are made directly and individually by federal employees and representatives, which is absolutely not true. This mind set is where the myth of the "death panel" came from.
And, while you may believe private insurance wouldn't be any better, that's at least debatable.
As a victim of private insurance, I will tell you this is not debatable. The insurance industry of decades gone by already had enough power to make my life hell in the pursuit of marginally better profit. Now they have even more power and they aren't about to become more generous when they haven't been given a reason to do so. What my insurance company did to me would have caused medicare employees to lose their jobs. Instead the bastards at my insurance company were rewarded for their greed.
I can only make a difference with regards to the congress critters that the insurance industry owns who represent my state and district. I am powerless to prevent the rest of them from being reelected. Furthermore as we well know, even with congress's approval rating in the high single digits, people tend to give their own representatives high marks and live in a bubble of "the other guy is the problem".
Well, as long as you're not blaming the government or even the industry, it's all good.
Have you read to completion anything I have written here, ever? I rarely am not blaming the industry - especially the insurance industry. From my vantage point the health insurance industry is the most morally bankrupt industry of them all; I trust lawyers, used car salesmen, realtors, and stockbrokers all more than I trust anyone from the insurance industry. I have repeatedly pointed out that the fuckers from the insurance industry own our federal government and shoved the ACA down our throats to ensure their business profitability to forever.
My 77 yr old mother has been through numerous surgeries over the last several years, and is in need of more. However, Medicare limits how much time she can spend in rehab after surgery to under 100 days. She's used that up, and has to wait for a cooling off period before re qualifying, in spite of being in dire need of surgery again. It's not the doctors controlling this, it's the fucking government.
That is no different from what any insurance company would do. Health insurance is all about limiting access to health care and discouraging people from using it. If your mother was on a health care plan from a for-profit - and mind you she still could buy into one if she has the money - she would run into the same problem. Every plan on the market has some limits; some are just higher than others.
I'm sorry that your mother isn't happy with medicare, but she wouldn't be seeing anything better with a plan from the market.
and it would be impossible to throw out all the congresspeople who are owned by the insurance industry in any number of election cycles.
So you vote just to go through the motions, eh? Really, what is the point if it is so "impossible" as you say? What a goof!
There is only one representative and two senators who represent me in the federal government. At most I can vote for the representative and one senator at a time. If people who live in other districts prefer to be subjects of the insurance industry I cannot to anything about that. That is how democracy works.
Government does not control healthcare for medicare patients. What it does do is set the prices that they will pay for services
Which is control especially given that they pay for some services and not others
No, because the other services can still be offered. You are free to pursue any kind of health care you want - or none at all if you so choose - as a medicare patient. You just know that medicare will cover some things and not others. It is no different from private health insurance, and I have not heard anyone raise a stink about health insurance "controlling" health care.
and decide who can offer those services
Also no. The group that decides who can offer medical services is primarily the AMA, they decide what makes a person qualified as a physician. The government will decide who they will pay to offer those services but that doesn't mean you can't go elsewhere. There are physicians in this country who don't accept medicare (and some who never have) and they make it through their careers just fine.
For an insurer to offer health care insurance, they have to satisfy regulations, including regulations on what services are offered
We have already seen so many exceptions carved out from that such that the regulation you mention is of nearly no consequence. Further more it would still not be regulating health care as it would not interfere with peoples' ability to get - or not get, if they so choose - health care. You pointed out birth control, I point out that it does not make the use of it mandatory.
and not being able to refuse coverage to people with preexisting conditions.
There is such a huge exception carved into that requirement that it doesn't mean much either. Insurance companies have to offer a plan to people with preexisting conditions, but they are not required to offer a plan that is useful or affordable. To make matters worse as the ACA makes every American an obligate consumer, the patient will eventually have to buy something. If the insurance cartel will only offer coverage to these people at $5k / month, they will eventually be forced to buy it.
People are now required to have health insurance with the IRS as a result getting some access to health care information of every taxpayer in the US.
Have you filed your taxes yet this year? I just filed mine a couple days ago. There was just a check box asking me if I had insurance for myself and my family. There was nothing asking me who I buy that insurance through, what it covers, what it costs, or anything else. In terms of data gathering it was quite useless as it only tells the IRS who is saying they have health insurance - it did not ask for any proof whatsoever.
The federal government also controls directly the health care of current and former military personnel through its Veteran Affairs hospitals.
First of all, no. They are free to use other hospitals and clinics if they so choose. They may have to pay for those on their own if they have no other health insurance, but they are not prevented from going to them. It is worth noting that in many areas the VA has programs set up that if they cannot get in to see a provider soon enough they will be a covered referral to go elsewhere.
Second, it is worth noting that satisfaction rates at VA hospitals are no worse than for any insurance plan. The critics are just louder in the case of the VA.
And of course, there's future proposals, such as single payer plans, which would extend greatly the US government's power over health care. Just because such plans haven't been successful to date doesn't mean that they will never be.
We've discussed this before.
Single payer is not government control of health care, period.
no democrats currently in Washington who are willing to propose anything that even slightly resembles an initiative to "give control of healthcare to the government"
Yeah, there is.
Government does not control healthcare for medicare patients. What it does do is set the prices that they will pay for services; doctors are free to accept or reject those (by accepting or rejecting medicare patients). If tomorrow morning we woke up and found that every person in the US was covered by medicare the government would still not be controlling healthcare, as people would still be free to pay out of pocket (for things that medicare didn't cover or for providers who don't want to accept medicare).
but realistically what we have now isn't that great, either.
What we have now is horse shit. I would rather have medicare. In 2010 congress gave the insurance industry a license to print money; the industry was already disgustingly powerful and they made them even more powerful. I would much rather take my chances on medicare.
One, it is pointless because it won't happen. Two, it is a pointless claim because there are no democrats currently in Washington who are willing to propose anything that even slightly resembles an initiative to "give control of healthcare to the government".
I have two words for you: "Bernie Sanders"
So which do you understand less well then, healthcare control, or Bernie Sanders? Clearly you don't understand either very well that you try to place the two in the same boat.
Let's establish an important fact here - especially since your comment is woefully lacking in facts. Single-payer health care does not mean the government tells your doctor what to do. It does not mean there is a bureaucrat in the office with you second guessing every decision your physician makes. What it does mean is that everyone has the same base level of care (which is currently a completely alien concept in the US) and the government sets the rates they will pay for certain things. You want other things? You can go buy them yourself.
More to the point though, Sanders can't pull off single payer, at least not any time soon. If the DNC would allow him to be the nominee (which they won't) he would wipe the floor with any GOP candidate in the general election (as every single national poll from every single polling group or company has shown). However, President Sanders would still encounter too much GOP opposition in congress to pull off single payer. He can't make it happen simply as a product of his own will.
The ACA is just the government doing what the government does best, fucking up
The ACA is the largest corporate handout in the history of government, period. With the ACA the federal government gave the health insurance industry a license to print money and made us all obligate consumers of their shitty products.
And no, this is about security, not physician choice
Indeed the article here is about security. However in classic slashdot conservative spin, the editor here editorialized it into a baseless attack on the government. The government gets plenty wrong without people making shit up out of nothing.
They also suck at bureaucracy
I'm going to conclude from that statement that you don't actually know any health care providers first hand. Every provider in the US right now spends a huge chunk of their time dealing with bureaucracy. They mastered it in med school - if not sooner - and they face it nearly every hour of every day now as a provider.
and also at not charging an arm and a leg for their services.
If you would set down your kool-aid for a moment and think about this problem you would realize that the physicians have little to do with what is charged for their services. These rates are mostly set by the health insurance industry and various costs that come from dealing with them.
It's that many Democrats want to give control of healthcare to the government.
First of all, that is a pointless claim for several reasons. One, it is pointless because it won't happen. Two, it is a pointless claim because there are no democrats currently in Washington who are willing to propose anything that even slightly resembles an initiative to "give control of healthcare to the government".
Second, what do you even mean by "give control of healthcare to the government"? Even the most socialized of all medical systems still give the physicians at least as much autonomy as our system does.
In other words, you are just parroting standard slashdot conservative FUD.
And we are supposed to trust them with healthcare?
Is beyond absurd. Anyone who read the slightest bit of the Affordable Care Act knows that it does not put government in charge of health care. In fact, it did almost exactly the opposite of that and gave the insurance industry - which was already disgustingly powerful - even more power. The only function of healthcare.gov is to connect the (now obligate) consumer with a company who will sell them a policy.
In other words the ACA is a license for the health insurance industry to print money. They quite nearly had it before, but now it has been fully formalized.
It would have been vastly more useful for the headline to say what their founder was being banned from then to tell me her name. I gained pretty well nothing from seeing her name and was left wondering what on earth the feds were banning her from.
To make it worse, Americans pay some of the highest prices for medications anywhere. This leads a lot of people to experiment with their own modified dosage to save money. [SNIP] Unfortunately I live in the US, where the most common cause of bankruptcy is currently medical bills
My sympathies. If you have the option, leave, and take as many of your families and tax payments with you
Thank you. Unfortunately leaving the US permanently is not as easy as some people suggest. I know this from having looked in to it in the past. Back in 2004 when the second President Bush managed to steal his second election, I started looking to see what it would take to move to Canada. Even with both my wife and I having at least four-year degrees (I have an advanced degree beyond my BSci) moving still required a job offer for at least one of us - we couldn't move first and then start looking for work. On top of that the Canadian government incentivized employers to try to hire Canadians first, which made it that much more difficult for us to get job offers.
Now might other countries be more receptive to Americans? I can't say I looked as at the time we couldn't justify looking further (and hence moving further from our families).
The system there won't improve until there's a revolution, and with all the gun-nuts, you don't want to be there during the revolution.
The gun nuts already had their revolution. They signed off on the revolution that gave the insurance industry license to print money. Then they realized their revolution has the wrong last name on it, so they are tripping on each other to see who can be the first to repeal it and have the same exact crappy bill passed with the name of a republican on top of it.
(1) that is absolutely fucking insane. Illegal? They legislate on such trivialities? Do they not have bettewr things to worry about?
I'm not saying I agree with the law. I just happen to know it to be true. Now, it is one of those laws that one does not have a very high probability of being arrested for violating, but it is the law nonetheless. Carrying prescription medicines in non-prescription containers is against the law in this country.
(2) Most medications are available in "blister packs" - I carry my two regulars in a water-proof pouch (because... well, SCUBA, outdoors, I have these things laying around) as this week (fortnight, month, two months, depending on how long I'll be out of the house for). That pretty much completely obviates the identification concerns about "what is in this pill?"
I'm familiar with blister packs. Here some medications are available in them, some are not. It varies widely for a variety of different reasons. One sticking point on that though is that the blister packs generally do not have the prescription label attached to them, which makes it basically impossible to confirm that the person carrying the blister pack is the patient for whom the medication was prescribed. And if you are in a situation where the pill needs to be cut, the blister pack isn't very useful at that point. I would say that a blister pack would be useful in less than 10% of situations in this country; perhaps they are more common for medications elsewhere.
(even if you are the only one taking it)
That nearly escaped me. You share medications? With someone else? Here, a prescription is for one single, solitary person. Passing a drug to someone else is just... totally fucking insane
I apologize for not phrasing that more clearly. What I was after is that one of the presumptions is that people who are carrying prescription medications around in non-prescription containers are involved in the illegal sale of such drugs. It isn't necessarily a case of sharing as much as selling on the
if getting your medicine protocol right is a matter of life and death, then most people do pay adequate attention to it.
Sure, but there are a lot of medications that end up being multiple-doses-per-day ordeals that won't lead to a quick death if they get it wrong. What if the drug is for Alzheimer's? Or Parkinson's? What if it's a diabetes medication or something for a heart condition? Yeah, they can end up dead if they screw it up repeatedly but the change could be so gradual that the patient won't notice it nearly in time.
To make it worse, Americans pay some of the highest prices for medications anywhere. This leads a lot of people to experiment with their own modified dosage to save money. If your medications cost $100 a month you might try various combinations of split pills to try to stretch a month's worth of medicine out to a month and a half or more. If the prescription is $200 a month you might go even further to try to stretch it out.
Or they end up in hospital (free in our country)
You must live in a country with an intelligent medical system. Unfortunately I live in the US, where the most common cause of bankruptcy is currently medical bills. Our "Affordable Care Act" did absolutely nothing to prevent that from happening.
But what is the problem with taking your medication to work with you, in your pocket?
In this country, unless you are bringing the entire prescribed bottle with you, you are breaking the law (even if you are the only one taking it). There is also the problem of finding something suitable for carrying prescription medication, and still the problem of remembering to take it. Just because it is in your pocket doesn't mean you will remember to take it.
The physician looks at the patient's weight, estimates (from tables, whatever) the mg/kg dosage for the particular body weight, then issues the appropriate prescription for so many pills per day for the patient.
The problem I'm after though is that the physician is still limited to the pills that are in existence. If you have a prescription that is sold in 50mg and 100mg tablets, but the patient is best served by a 75mg tablet that doesn't exist, what is the physician to do? Yeah, you can tell the patient to cut 1/3 of their pills in half so they can take 1.5 pills each day, but that is actually quite a bit to ask of the patient and it won't have consistent results in most cases.
If the doctor wanted me to maintain tighter limits, then he'd have issued 2x5mg pills per day - for morning and evening.
That is another matter that works much better on paper than in practice. I'm not very old but I have more than once in my life been on prescriptions that needed to be taken multiple times a day. Just going from once a day to twice a day is a big change. I'd go in to work and then realize I had forgotten (or trying to remember if I remembered, depending on how hazy that morning was). Going from twice to thrice is almost an even bigger mess.
The pharmaceutical industry did not create the dosage problem. They are responsible for plenty of problems, but the variety of sizes of humans is not one of them.
For that matter, the machine would not be producing the drugs, it would just be packaging them. The drugs go in to the machine in some sort of loose form and the machine prints them into pills. Manufacturing is serious chemistry that would be hard to do in a fully automated manner in the field.
More drugs than people realize should be dosed in proportion to the patient's weight. Physicians often go for the closest size of pill to make it easier for the patient; if we could have a machine automatically print the pills of an exact size every month, that could be an important change.
It would be interesting to see if it can do some of the new tamper-resistant coatings as well.
Slashdot Mirror
If I was myself concerned with other people reading this I would have stopped replying some time ago. However I have nothing to lose from watching you make a fool of yourself.
Well, at least you have the intellect then to realize that it is almost certain that nobody else is reading this discussion this far.
Was that a contest you put on with yourself there to see if you could break your previous records for most lies in a single short slashdot post? You probably won...
Your strategy is guaranteed failure. My strategy has little chance of success but it is still better than zero. If you had a better idea I expect you would have shared it by now.
I found your comment amusing to read while I was taking a lunch break at a local party convention. But go ahead and keep telling me how your strategy of non-voting is working out so much better.
The federal government has been reduced to a marketing arm of the insurance industry. Any elected official who goes in not being owned by the insurance industry won't retain those stripes long, or won't retain their office long if they try to keep away from the insurance industry. The passing of ACA was formal acknowledgement of this being truly Game Over.
Talk to me about this again a few years in the future when your insurance company tries to fuck you the way mine tried to fuck me. Then you'll realize what a problem those bastards are.
When I drive my car, I control it. My car does not have free will, it does not get to go anywhere other than where I want it to. It has no choices. If I was a horse owner I could say the same thing about a horse.
A medicare patient is not controlled in that way, nor is their health care. Yes, there are limits on what medicare will pay for them to do, but the patients are not prohibited from paying for other things themselves. The health care of a medicare patient is no more controlled than is the health care of a customer of any health insurance plan in this country. In fact the medicare patient is arguably less controlled by medicare than is a customer of a regular plan as the regular plan customer would be penalized by their insurance company if they were to start paying for things out of pocket.
Furthermore the notion that medicare is the same thing as having the government actually making decisions for you is completely ludicrous. The statement strongly suggests that choices for each patient are made directly and individually by federal employees and representatives, which is absolutely not true. This mind set is where the myth of the "death panel" came from.
And, while you may believe private insurance wouldn't be any better, that's at least debatable.
As a victim of private insurance, I will tell you this is not debatable. The insurance industry of decades gone by already had enough power to make my life hell in the pursuit of marginally better profit. Now they have even more power and they aren't about to become more generous when they haven't been given a reason to do so. What my insurance company did to me would have caused medicare employees to lose their jobs. Instead the bastards at my insurance company were rewarded for their greed.
I can only make a difference with regards to the congress critters that the insurance industry owns who represent my state and district. I am powerless to prevent the rest of them from being reelected. Furthermore as we well know, even with congress's approval rating in the high single digits, people tend to give their own representatives high marks and live in a bubble of "the other guy is the problem".
Well, as long as you're not blaming the government or even the industry, it's all good.
Have you read to completion anything I have written here, ever? I rarely am not blaming the industry - especially the insurance industry. From my vantage point the health insurance industry is the most morally bankrupt industry of them all; I trust lawyers, used car salesmen, realtors, and stockbrokers all more than I trust anyone from the insurance industry. I have repeatedly pointed out that the fuckers from the insurance industry own our federal government and shoved the ACA down our throats to ensure their business profitability to forever.
My 77 yr old mother has been through numerous surgeries over the last several years, and is in need of more. However, Medicare limits how much time she can spend in rehab after surgery to under 100 days. She's used that up, and has to wait for a cooling off period before re qualifying, in spite of being in dire need of surgery again. It's not the doctors controlling this, it's the fucking government.
That is no different from what any insurance company would do. Health insurance is all about limiting access to health care and discouraging people from using it. If your mother was on a health care plan from a for-profit - and mind you she still could buy into one if she has the money - she would run into the same problem. Every plan on the market has some limits; some are just higher than others.
I'm sorry that your mother isn't happy with medicare, but she wouldn't be seeing anything better with a plan from the market.
and it would be impossible to throw out all the congresspeople who are owned by the insurance industry in any number of election cycles.
So you vote just to go through the motions, eh? Really, what is the point if it is so "impossible" as you say? What a goof!
There is only one representative and two senators who represent me in the federal government. At most I can vote for the representative and one senator at a time. If people who live in other districts prefer to be subjects of the insurance industry I cannot to anything about that. That is how democracy works.
Government does not control healthcare for medicare patients. What it does do is set the prices that they will pay for services
Which is control especially given that they pay for some services and not others
No, because the other services can still be offered. You are free to pursue any kind of health care you want - or none at all if you so choose - as a medicare patient. You just know that medicare will cover some things and not others. It is no different from private health insurance, and I have not heard anyone raise a stink about health insurance "controlling" health care.
and decide who can offer those services
Also no. The group that decides who can offer medical services is primarily the AMA, they decide what makes a person qualified as a physician. The government will decide who they will pay to offer those services but that doesn't mean you can't go elsewhere. There are physicians in this country who don't accept medicare (and some who never have) and they make it through their careers just fine.
For an insurer to offer health care insurance, they have to satisfy regulations, including regulations on what services are offered
We have already seen so many exceptions carved out from that such that the regulation you mention is of nearly no consequence. Further more it would still not be regulating health care as it would not interfere with peoples' ability to get - or not get, if they so choose - health care. You pointed out birth control, I point out that it does not make the use of it mandatory.
and not being able to refuse coverage to people with preexisting conditions.
There is such a huge exception carved into that requirement that it doesn't mean much either. Insurance companies have to offer a plan to people with preexisting conditions, but they are not required to offer a plan that is useful or affordable. To make matters worse as the ACA makes every American an obligate consumer, the patient will eventually have to buy something. If the insurance cartel will only offer coverage to these people at $5k / month, they will eventually be forced to buy it.
People are now required to have health insurance with the IRS as a result getting some access to health care information of every taxpayer in the US.
Have you filed your taxes yet this year? I just filed mine a couple days ago. There was just a check box asking me if I had insurance for myself and my family. There was nothing asking me who I buy that insurance through, what it covers, what it costs, or anything else. In terms of data gathering it was quite useless as it only tells the IRS who is saying they have health insurance - it did not ask for any proof whatsoever.
The federal government also controls directly the health care of current and former military personnel through its Veteran Affairs hospitals.
First of all, no. They are free to use other hospitals and clinics if they so choose. They may have to pay for those on their own if they have no other health insurance, but they are not prevented from going to them. It is worth noting that in many areas the VA has programs set up that if they cannot get in to see a provider soon enough they will be a covered referral to go elsewhere.
Second, it is worth noting that satisfaction rates at VA hospitals are no worse than for any insurance plan. The critics are just louder in the case of the VA.
And of course, there's future proposals, such as single payer plans, which would extend greatly the US government's power over health care. Just because such plans haven't been successful to date doesn't mean that they will never be.
We've discussed this before.
Single payer is not government control of health care, period.
There is no way that co
no democrats currently in Washington who are willing to propose anything that even slightly resembles an initiative to "give control of healthcare to the government"
Yeah, there is.
Government does not control healthcare for medicare patients. What it does do is set the prices that they will pay for services; doctors are free to accept or reject those (by accepting or rejecting medicare patients). If tomorrow morning we woke up and found that every person in the US was covered by medicare the government would still not be controlling healthcare, as people would still be free to pay out of pocket (for things that medicare didn't cover or for providers who don't want to accept medicare).
but realistically what we have now isn't that great, either.
What we have now is horse shit. I would rather have medicare. In 2010 congress gave the insurance industry a license to print money; the industry was already disgustingly powerful and they made them even more powerful. I would much rather take my chances on medicare.
One, it is pointless because it won't happen. Two, it is a pointless claim because there are no democrats currently in Washington who are willing to propose anything that even slightly resembles an initiative to "give control of healthcare to the government".
I have two words for you: "Bernie Sanders"
So which do you understand less well then, healthcare control, or Bernie Sanders? Clearly you don't understand either very well that you try to place the two in the same boat.
Let's establish an important fact here - especially since your comment is woefully lacking in facts. Single-payer health care does not mean the government tells your doctor what to do. It does not mean there is a bureaucrat in the office with you second guessing every decision your physician makes. What it does mean is that everyone has the same base level of care (which is currently a completely alien concept in the US) and the government sets the rates they will pay for certain things. You want other things? You can go buy them yourself.
More to the point though, Sanders can't pull off single payer, at least not any time soon. If the DNC would allow him to be the nominee (which they won't) he would wipe the floor with any GOP candidate in the general election (as every single national poll from every single polling group or company has shown). However, President Sanders would still encounter too much GOP opposition in congress to pull off single payer. He can't make it happen simply as a product of his own will.
The ACA is just the government doing what the government does best, fucking up
The ACA is the largest corporate handout in the history of government, period. With the ACA the federal government gave the health insurance industry a license to print money and made us all obligate consumers of their shitty products.
And no, this is about security, not physician choice
Indeed the article here is about security. However in classic slashdot conservative spin, the editor here editorialized it into a baseless attack on the government. The government gets plenty wrong without people making shit up out of nothing.
They also suck at bureaucracy
I'm going to conclude from that statement that you don't actually know any health care providers first hand. Every provider in the US right now spends a huge chunk of their time dealing with bureaucracy. They mastered it in med school - if not sooner - and they face it nearly every hour of every day now as a provider.
and also at not charging an arm and a leg for their services.
If you would set down your kool-aid for a moment and think about this problem you would realize that the physicians have little to do with what is charged for their services. These rates are mostly set by the health insurance industry and various costs that come from dealing with them.
It's that many Democrats want to give control of healthcare to the government.
First of all, that is a pointless claim for several reasons. One, it is pointless because it won't happen. Two, it is a pointless claim because there are no democrats currently in Washington who are willing to propose anything that even slightly resembles an initiative to "give control of healthcare to the government".
Second, what do you even mean by "give control of healthcare to the government"? Even the most socialized of all medical systems still give the physicians at least as much autonomy as our system does.
In other words, you are just parroting standard slashdot conservative FUD.
And we are supposed to trust them with healthcare?
Is beyond absurd. Anyone who read the slightest bit of the Affordable Care Act knows that it does not put government in charge of health care. In fact, it did almost exactly the opposite of that and gave the insurance industry - which was already disgustingly powerful - even more power. The only function of healthcare.gov is to connect the (now obligate) consumer with a company who will sell them a policy.
In other words the ACA is a license for the health insurance industry to print money. They quite nearly had it before, but now it has been fully formalized.
It would have been vastly more useful for the headline to say what their founder was being banned from then to tell me her name. I gained pretty well nothing from seeing her name and was left wondering what on earth the feds were banning her from.
To make it worse, Americans pay some of the highest prices for medications anywhere. This leads a lot of people to experiment with their own modified dosage to save money. [SNIP] Unfortunately I live in the US, where the most common cause of bankruptcy is currently medical bills
My sympathies. If you have the option, leave, and take as many of your families and tax payments with you
Thank you. Unfortunately leaving the US permanently is not as easy as some people suggest. I know this from having looked in to it in the past. Back in 2004 when the second President Bush managed to steal his second election, I started looking to see what it would take to move to Canada. Even with both my wife and I having at least four-year degrees (I have an advanced degree beyond my BSci) moving still required a job offer for at least one of us - we couldn't move first and then start looking for work. On top of that the Canadian government incentivized employers to try to hire Canadians first, which made it that much more difficult for us to get job offers.
Now might other countries be more receptive to Americans? I can't say I looked as at the time we couldn't justify looking further (and hence moving further from our families).
The system there won't improve until there's a revolution, and with all the gun-nuts, you don't want to be there during the revolution.
The gun nuts already had their revolution. They signed off on the revolution that gave the insurance industry license to print money. Then they realized their revolution has the wrong last name on it, so they are tripping on each other to see who can be the first to repeal it and have the same exact crappy bill passed with the name of a republican on top of it.
(1) that is absolutely fucking insane. Illegal? They legislate on such trivialities? Do they not have bettewr things to worry about?
I'm not saying I agree with the law. I just happen to know it to be true. Now, it is one of those laws that one does not have a very high probability of being arrested for violating, but it is the law nonetheless. Carrying prescription medicines in non-prescription containers is against the law in this country.
(2) Most medications are available in "blister packs" - I carry my two regulars in a water-proof pouch (because ... well, SCUBA, outdoors, I have these things laying around) as this week (fortnight, month, two months, depending on how long I'll be out of the house for). That pretty much completely obviates the identification concerns about "what is in this pill?"
I'm familiar with blister packs. Here some medications are available in them, some are not. It varies widely for a variety of different reasons. One sticking point on that though is that the blister packs generally do not have the prescription label attached to them, which makes it basically impossible to confirm that the person carrying the blister pack is the patient for whom the medication was prescribed. And if you are in a situation where the pill needs to be cut, the blister pack isn't very useful at that point. I would say that a blister pack would be useful in less than 10% of situations in this country; perhaps they are more common for medications elsewhere.
(even if you are the only one taking it)
That nearly escaped me. You share medications? With someone else? Here, a prescription is for one single, solitary person. Passing a drug to someone else is just ... totally fucking insane
I apologize for not phrasing that more clearly. What I was after is that one of the presumptions is that people who are carrying prescription medications around in non-prescription containers are involved in the illegal sale of such drugs. It isn't necessarily a case of sharing as much as selling on the
if getting your medicine protocol right is a matter of life and death, then most people do pay adequate attention to it.
Sure, but there are a lot of medications that end up being multiple-doses-per-day ordeals that won't lead to a quick death if they get it wrong. What if the drug is for Alzheimer's? Or Parkinson's? What if it's a diabetes medication or something for a heart condition? Yeah, they can end up dead if they screw it up repeatedly but the change could be so gradual that the patient won't notice it nearly in time.
To make it worse, Americans pay some of the highest prices for medications anywhere. This leads a lot of people to experiment with their own modified dosage to save money. If your medications cost $100 a month you might try various combinations of split pills to try to stretch a month's worth of medicine out to a month and a half or more. If the prescription is $200 a month you might go even further to try to stretch it out.
Or they end up in hospital (free in our country)
You must live in a country with an intelligent medical system. Unfortunately I live in the US, where the most common cause of bankruptcy is currently medical bills. Our "Affordable Care Act" did absolutely nothing to prevent that from happening.
But what is the problem with taking your medication to work with you, in your pocket?
In this country, unless you are bringing the entire prescribed bottle with you, you are breaking the law (even if you are the only one taking it). There is also the problem of finding something suitable for carrying prescription medication, and still the problem of remembering to take it. Just because it is in your pocket doesn't mean you will remember to take it.
The physician looks at the patient's weight, estimates (from tables, whatever) the mg/kg dosage for the particular body weight, then issues the appropriate prescription for so many pills per day for the patient.
The problem I'm after though is that the physician is still limited to the pills that are in existence. If you have a prescription that is sold in 50mg and 100mg tablets, but the patient is best served by a 75mg tablet that doesn't exist, what is the physician to do? Yeah, you can tell the patient to cut 1/3 of their pills in half so they can take 1.5 pills each day, but that is actually quite a bit to ask of the patient and it won't have consistent results in most cases.
If the doctor wanted me to maintain tighter limits, then he'd have issued 2x5mg pills per day - for morning and evening.
That is another matter that works much better on paper than in practice. I'm not very old but I have more than once in my life been on prescriptions that needed to be taken multiple times a day. Just going from once a day to twice a day is a big change. I'd go in to work and then realize I had forgotten (or trying to remember if I remembered, depending on how hazy that morning was). Going from twice to thrice is almost an even bigger mess.
I always figured we should be able to make systems exposed and unstable for free.
The pharmaceutical industry did not create the dosage problem. They are responsible for plenty of problems, but the variety of sizes of humans is not one of them.
For that matter, the machine would not be producing the drugs, it would just be packaging them. The drugs go in to the machine in some sort of loose form and the machine prints them into pills. Manufacturing is serious chemistry that would be hard to do in a fully automated manner in the field.
What kind of "outbreak" would require any of those medications: Valium, Prozac, Benadryl, and Lidocaine ???
I predict Cleveland Ohio will see such an outbreak this July. We may see one on a national level in November as well.
More drugs than people realize should be dosed in proportion to the patient's weight. Physicians often go for the closest size of pill to make it easier for the patient; if we could have a machine automatically print the pills of an exact size every month, that could be an important change.
It would be interesting to see if it can do some of the new tamper-resistant coatings as well.