, - United Press International
Stephan: I have written over and over about this trend that is getting worse as each year goes by. (See my essay, Where Can I Find a Family Doctor? An Unintended Consequence of Health Reform, http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2810%2900097-2/fulltext.
The illness profit system model that passes, with such pathetic results, for healthcare in this country is slowly destroying primary care in the U.S., as this report makes clear. The implications are obvious.
WASHINGTON — Despite a shortage of U.S. primary care doctors, less than 25 percent of new doctors go into this field, and fewer still work in rural areas, researchers say.
Lead study author Dr. Candice Chen, an assistant research professor of the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, said the study also found only 4.8 percent of the new primary care physicians set up shop in rural areas.
‘If residency programs do not ramp up the training of these physicians the shortage in primary care, especially in remote areas, will get worse,’ Chen said in a statement. ‘The study’s findings raise questions about whether federally funded graduate medical education institutions are meeting the nation’s need for more primary care physicians.’
Chen and colleagues studied the career paths of 8,977 physicians who had graduated from 759 medical residency sites from 2006-08. Three to five years after the program ended, the researchers found 25.2 percent of the physicians worked as primary care doctors, although this number almost certainly was an overestimate because it included graduates who practiced as hospitalists, Chen said.
In addition, the researchers found 198 out of 759 institutions produced no rural physicians at all during the study period.
Currently, the […]
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KRISTEN GWYNNE, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Finally some actual facts about drugs and drug use. This report is, I hope, the first of many making it clear that the War on Drugs is basically a racist jihad against the poor and disadvantaged used to support an entire bureaucracy of police, judges, prosecutors, prisons, prison guards, and everyone else who can figure an angle to get their snout in the public tax money trough under this umbrella. All these people are making a living off the pain and suffering of millions, mostly people of color. Worse this war is responsible, in the same way the alcohol prohibition created the modern Mafia, for creating the Drug cartels. The entire effort is a study in dysfunction, greed, racism, and stupidity, and it has been going on now for decades with no appreciable effect on reducing drug availability.
What many Americans, including many scientists, think they know about drugs is turning out to be totally wrong. For decades, drug war propaganda has brainwashed Americans into blaming drugs for problems ranging from crime to economic deprivation. In his new book High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society, Carl Hart blows apart the most common myths about drugs and their impact on society, drawing in part on his personal experience growing up in an impoverished Miami neighborhood. Hart has used marijuana and cocaine, carried guns, sold drugs, and participated in other petty crime, like shoplifting. A combination of what he calls choice and chance brought him to the Air Force and college, and finally made him the first black, tenured professor of sciences at Columbia University.
Intertwined with his story about the struggles of families and communities stressed by lack of capital and power over their surroundings is striking new research on substance use. Hart uses his life and work to reveal that drugs are not nearly as harmful as many think. For example, most people who use the most ‘addicting
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ROBERT H. FRANK, Economics Professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University - The New York Times
Stephan: Here is what a properly functioning healthcare system committed to creating national wellness not profit looks like. This assessment is based on the data of social outcomes, not the profit above all ideology that informs all American healthcare policies.
We could have such a system, if the political will to create it existed.
Last month, for the 37th time, the House of Representatives voted to repeal Obamacare, with many Republicans saying that its call for greater government involvement in the health care system spells doom. Yet most other industrial countries have health care systems with far more government involvement than we are ever likely to see under Obamacare. What does their experience tell us about Republican fears?
While in Sweden this month as a visiting scholar, I’ve asked several Swedish health economists to share their thoughts about that question. They have spent their lives under a system in which most health care providers work directly for the government. Like economists in most other countries, they tend to be skeptical of large bureaucracies. So if extensive government involvement in health care is indeed a recipe for doom, they should have clear evidence of that by now.
Yet none of them voiced the kinds of complaints about recalcitrant bureaucrats and runaway health costs that invariably surface in similar conversations with American colleagues. Little wonder. The Swedish system performs superbly, and my Swedish colleagues cited evidence of that fact with obvious pride.
The United States spends more than $8,000 a person per year on health care, well more than […]
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Stephan: This is part of both the Great Schism Trend, and the Willful Ignorance Trend. This is the Theocratic Right in action.
Greetings, Wonkademics! So glad you could roll up for our magical history tour! This week, we continue our look at two textbooks for homeschoolers and Christian schools, the 8th-grade text from A Beka Book, America: Land I Love, and Bob Jones University Press’s backpack-burster for 11th/12th graders, United States History for Christian Schools. This time around, we’ll look at how these books approach the story of how a just and merciful God brought civilization and smallpox to the original inhabitants of North America.
As we noted last week, Land I Love is the more aggressive of the two books when it comes to telling students that history is an account of how things turned out exactly like God planned. In a brief section on ‘America Before Columbus,
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Stephan: Information revealing the truth about the level of surveillance just continues to pour out. We are beginning to get a sense of the scale of it. I find it notable that I get most of these stories from non-U.S. media. And if you have been following the stories I have been publishing in SR, and understand what is behind this, it gets really quite freaky.
Facebook and Microsoft were able to reveal limited information on Friday night about the government orders they have received to turn over user data to security agencies.
Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel, said in a statement that they had between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from all government entities, from local to federal, in the last six months of 2012.
The orders involved the accounts of between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users on a broad range of surveillance topics, from missing children to terrorism.
Microsoft said they had between 6,000 and 7,000 orders, affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 accounts, but downplayed how much they had revealed.
Looking on? Facebook received government data requests that involved the accounts of 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users
Data: Microsoft said they had between 6,000 and 7,000 government orders, affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 accounts, but downplayed how much they revealed.
The announcements come at the end of a week when Facebook, Microsoft and Google, normally rivals, had jointly pressured the Obama administration to loosen their legal gag on national security orders.
The companies are still not allowed to make public how many orders they received from a particular agency or on a particular subject.
But the numbers do include all national security […]
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