Sunday, January 15th, 2012
CHERYL CLARK, Senior Editor - Health Leaders Media
Stephan: Yet more evidence of the failure of the Illness Profit System. This imbalance makes sense if one is running healthcare with profit as the first priority. If national wellness were the primary goal this would not be happening.
In 2009, 1% of the nation’s civilian population required healthcare spending that was slightly greater than in 2008, an increase from 20.2% to 21.8% of $1.26 trillion in treatment dollars, according to the latest Statistical Brief from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
That indicates that more than $1 in every $5 healthcare dollars went to treat one out of every 100 people. The annual mean expenditure was $90,061 for those in that 1%.
But over time, there has been ‘some decrease in this concentration at the upper tail of the expenditure distribution,’ according to AHRQ research experts, Steven B. Cohen and William Yu. In the 1996 version of this report, 1% of the population accounted for 28% of the total healthcare expenditures.
The periodic brief captures trend information that helps planners identify the biggest drivers of healthcare costs ‘and the characteristics of the individuals who incur them,’ the brief says.
The top 5% accounted for half of all healthcare expenditures, indicating that focusing on that segment may yield the biggest savings. On the other hand, according to the report, the bottom 50% of the U.S. population, those requiring the lowest amounts of healthcare spending, accounted for only 2.9% of healthcare dollars […]
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Saturday, January 14th, 2012
TRACY CLARK-FLORY, - Salon/Alter Net
Stephan: The issue of sexuality so differentiates the parties it is a primary indicator. Yet it rarely gets discussed. Consequently the loudest voices carry the day, even though their social values produce notable inferior social outcomes.
So far, the Republican primaries have been a decidedly unsexy affair. Candidates have passionately spouted rhetoric against premarital sex, gay sex – even non-procreative sex within marriage. It’s enough to make you wonder if the country has gone to the prudes.
Rick Santorum, who has compared gay sex to bestiality, outdid himself in an interview that resurfaced last week in which he suggested that states should have a right to outlaw birth control since contraceptives are ‘a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.
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Saturday, January 14th, 2012
BRIAN MONTOPOLI, - CBS News
Stephan: One of the unintended consequences of Citizens United is that politicians can endure as candidates long past their time of sale to the voters. The current situation is an example of how distorted our politics have become, and this poll reflects it. The campaigns of Perry, Santorum, and Gingrich continue to exist only because they are backed by Superpacs. The idea that the Superpac and the candidate are unconnected is so absurd, yet fully blessed by the Supreme Court through Citizens United, that Stewart and Colbert have made it a running skit.
CBS News Poll analysis by the CBS News Polling Unit: Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto.
The nominating process may officially be underway, but Republicans have yet to enthusiastically embrace a potential nominee for president – and despite the late date, most would like to see other candidates enter the race, according to a new CBS News poll.
The survey finds that 58 percent of Republican primary voters want more presidential choices, while just 37 percent say they are satisfied with the current field. The percentage of Republican primary voters that wants more choices has increased 12 percentage points since October.
Mitt Romney, the frontrunner for the nomination, has struggled to break 30 percent support in state and local polls in an election cycle that has seen multiple candidates move ahead of Romney in the polls before seeing their support erode. In this national survey, taken after Romney’s narrow victory in the Iowa caucuses, the former Massachusetts governor leads the field – though he holds just 19 percent support. Only 28 percent of GOP primary voters say they’ve made up their mind, and just 20 percent who’ve made a choice strongly favor their candidate.
It’s mathematically possible for another […]
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Saturday, January 14th, 2012
ROSE AGUILAR, - Truthout.org
Stephan: The American gulag, the manifestation of the new slavery, may finally be coming under reconsideration. Not because of its moral bankruptcy, the deleterious effect it has on society's wellness, or any positive reason, but because of money. That, in itself, tells you something very sad about modern America. The Founders would be appalled to know that 2.3 milllion Americans are in this racist system.
Over the past 15 years, the US prison population has more than doubled. There are 2.3 million Americans behind bars – that’s one in 100. About half of the people in prison are serving time for nonviolent offenses, including drug possession. More than 60 percent of US prisoners are black or Hispanic, according to the Pew Center on the States.
With just over 4 percent of the world’s population, the US accounts for a quarter of the planet’s prisoners and has more inmates than the leading 35 European countries combined.
Corrections is now the second-fastest growing spending category for states, behind only Medicaid, costing $50 billion annually and accounting for $1 of every $14 discretionary dollars. California spends approximately $50,000 per prisoner per year, far more than the state spends on students.
In a May 14, 2011, New York Times op-ed, Michele Alexander, author of ‘The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,’ writes, ‘Thirty years of civil rights litigation and advocacy have failed to slow the pace of a racially biased drug war or to prevent the emergence of a penal system of astonishing size. Yet a few short years of tight state budgets have inspired former ‘get tough’ […]
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Saturday, January 14th, 2012
, - The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Stephan: As the media goes on and on about Mitt Romney's Mormon faith, and it becomes a bigger and bigger factor in the considerations of the White Protestant Fundamentalists who make up much of the base of the Republican Party, I thought it would be useful to look at some actual information about this faith.
Click through to see the many charts that accompany this report.
A large majority of Mormons say religion is very important in their lives, more than four-in-five pray at least once a day and three-quarters attend religious services weekly or more. Almost all Mormons (98%) accept the traditional Christian teaching that Jesus rose from the dead. Mormons are also nearly unanimous in accepting other teachings of their church that are different from the beliefs of other Christian traditions. For example, 94% of Mormons believe that the president of the LDS Church is a prophet and 91% believe that the Book of Mormon was written by ancient prophets and then translated by Joseph Smith. However, more than one-in-five Mormons (22%) say they find some of the church’s teachings hard to accept, and nearly one-in-ten (8%) say they seldom or never attend religious services.
Importance of Religion – how important is religion in your life
More than four out of five Mormons (82%) say religion is very important to them, compared with 56% of the general public. Mormons closely resemble black Protestants (86% of whom say religion is very important to them) and white evangelicals (83% very important) on this question. Mormons are significantly more likely than Catholics (56%) and white mainline Protestants (45%) […]
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