Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
MARY BROPHY MARCUS, - USA Today
Stephan: This is the latest report on what the Illness Profit System has wrought in America. And once again you can see clearly the choice to place profit above national health, expressed in all these individual cases. It's not hard to see why the World Health Organization rates us as 37th in the world for quality of healthcare.
Close to a third of emergency departments closed shop over the last two decades, a new study shows.
Between 1990 and 2009, the number of hospital emergency departments in non-rural areas in the USA declined by 27%, according to a study in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.
‘That’s a hefty number, and more than I expected,’ says study author Renee Hsia, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
Hsia says she and colleagues did a ‘survival analysis,’ much like researchers do for breast cancer patients. ‘In our study, we used the ER as the patient,’ says Hsia.
They found that the number of emergency departments dropped from 2,446 to 1,779 - an average of 89 closings per year. The figure included only non-rural locations since those in rural areas generally receive special funding from federal sources.
Hsia says researchers also wanted to examine the factors that led to closings. ‘Certain hospitals are at higher risk for losing their ERs than others,’ she says. ERs shut down were more likely to:
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WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI, - Slate
Stephan: Real estate isn't getting much play in the mainstream media. But the crisis continues, and it is resulting in a profound change in America's housing.
The U.S. housing market is going through an adjustment of historic proportions. Before 2006, when the housing slump commenced, American home builders regularly built as many as 2 million new houses annually, rarely less than a million. This amount was needed to keep up with new household formation, immigration, homeowners moving up, and replacement due to obsolescence. Since then the number of new houses built has dropped drastically-the seasonally adjusted annual figure announced by the federal government in February 2011 was about 400,000! What’s going on?
The recession, obviously. High unemployment and unease about the economy have made potential first-time homebuyers leery of entering the market, and many have decided to wait on the side lines. Although house prices have fallen, few are convinced that they have bottomed, and no one wants to buy a house and see its price decline. The large number of foreclosed (or about to be foreclosed) houses on the market, which account for no less than four out of 10 sales of existing homes, likewise dampens demand for new houses. And those willing to take the plunge discover that, despite low interest rates, lenders who were burned by the subprime mess now require large down payments. […]
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PAMELA PAUL, - The New York Times
Stephan: Another facet of the growing failure in the U.S. to create a nurturing environment for the next generation.
Source: 'Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Representations With Physical Pain,
Nobody would deny that being ostracized on the playground, mocked in a sales meeting or broken up with over Twitter feels bad. But the sting of social rejection may be more like the ouch! of physical pain than previously understood.
New research suggests that the same areas in the brain that signify physical pain are activated at moments of intense social loss. ‘When we sat around and thought about the most difficult emotional experiences, we all agreed that it doesn’t get any worse than social rejection,
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, - The Washington Post/Associated Press
Stephan: Ronlyn's 19 year old godson, James, is visiting us from Eire for his first visit to the States. On television tonight he heard a discussion on healthcare in America and was stunned to learn that under our Illness Profit System one in six Americans has no healthcare, and that it is quite possible to go bankrupt even if one does have insurance. 'You mean you could lose your house just because you got sick?' he asked with astonishment. 'Oh yes,' we told him, 'you could even end up being homeless, and these kind of bankruptcies happen to hundreds of thousands of people each year.' He just looked at us and shook his head.
Until we get to single payer and make health not profit the priority little of substance if going to change.
INDIANAPOLIS — Health care costs have more than doubled for some American families over the past nine years, and they show few signs of dropping, according to a report released Wednesday by the actuarial consulting firm Milliman Inc.
The employee portion of costs paid for a family of four covered by the most common form of employer-sponsored health insurance will climb to a projected $8,008 this year from $3,634 in 2002. That amounts to an additional $84 a week from household budgets for health care.
Preferred provider organization plans are the most common form of employer-sponsored coverage.
The rise in health care costs is slower in 2011 compared to recent years, but they are still rising much higher than costs in other consumer areas, said consulting actuary Lorraine Mayne, one of the report’s authors.
‘We don’t see anything on the near-term horizon that’s going to bend that downward,
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JANE MAYER, - The New Yorker
Stephan:
On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act-the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of ‘unauthorized disclosure.
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