The electronic medical record, or electronic health record, is an administrative nightmare that is contributing to the burnout of 78% of all doctors surveyed. People are declaring bankruptcy as a result of medical bills; 40% of all bankrupts mention medical expenses. Our life expectancy, infant mortality, and other vital statistics are getting worse, not better. We lag behind numerous other developed countries in healthcare and spend twice as much as most of them for less result.
The problem with healthcare in this country is due to unrestrained greed on the part of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospital conglomerates, and medical specialties. Every aspect of healthcare is infected with profit-taking enterprises. Each interest in healthcare is represented by lobbyists in Washington and countrywide who push government and individuals to spend more.
To fight the greed of insurance companies especially, we will need to develop systems that gradually take over the functions of insurance, with some kind of buy-in by companies. Insurance will have to change its emphasis from determining if a person is covered at all to co-ordinating the care each patient receives. Companies will have to merge and pool their data. Government will offer insurance companies contracts to manage the data stream.
Medical records must be forced to become available across all platforms. Laws will need to be developed that manage information sharing instead of enforcing complete privacy. In order to facilitate sharing, when you develop records in one location, consent must be given at the outset to share so that reports are automatically sent to other locations that provide care later, when the person appears there. That is, initial consent documents must include a clause that authorizes data sharing on an as-needed basis later on.
One innovation that has made the adoption of electronic medical records easier is the addition of a “scribe” the the usual personnel in a doctor’s office. This person follows the doctor around and transcribes a record of what the doctor reports and what is examined, including prescription and therapy orders. Since the scribe is usually a medical assistant, the cost of the additional person can usually be justified by the improved workflow.
Most important, however, is to co-opt the insurance companies and get them to serve the needs of universal insurance rather than particularized (and much more expensive) plans. The insurance companies have powerful lobbies to protect them from government action and they will need to be handled with care. Plans for reform will need to include a role for the insurance companies even if their basic reason for existence– discriminating who does and does not belong to their particular plan– has been removed.
Finally, a radical idea has been proposed about drugs: the government could take over the production of orphan drugs, vaccines, and other items that are in high demand because of effectiveness but that present little or no profit potential. Drug companies might be willing to trade production of unprofitable drugs by the government (a relief for them) for negotiations on price with Medicare (something they are afraid of).
Some Flowers We Found in the Desert
Reported by CleanTechnica.
Florida is pushing to install 30 million solar panels to supply power for its 10 million customers by 2030 as well. This will address the concerns of a certain president who is worried that we won’t be able to watch TV at night if the wind isn’t blowing.
(photo courtesy pixabay.com)
(image courtesy of pixabay.com)
So reports the Guardian, on the web.
Furthermore:
While global temperatures have increased 0.8C since 1948, Canada has seen an increase of 1.7C – more than double the global average. And in the Arctic, the warming is happening at a much faster rate of 2.3C, the report says.
…
Under a scenario in which global emissions are dramatically reduced, average temperatures will rise only 3C across the country by 2100, including the Arctic region.
But if countries – including Canada – fail to act aggressively, increases of 7-9 degrees are likely, and the Arctic faces the prospect of 11 degrees of warming.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
(image courtesy of pixabay.com)
“[He who must not be named] is world’s worst cheat at golf, players and celebrities say”– NY Post
Read the details here.
Why dignify that statement by repeating it? Because lies have to be confronted, but when dealing with a man who lies fluently a documented ten times a day, they come so thick and fast that they can’t be dealt with singly. It’s like debating someone who uses the “Gish gallop”, a barrage of nonsensical or illogical assertions that are too numerous to allow a response that deals with each of them specifically.
The fact is that *he who must not be named treats different people in different ways. To those who share his ideological worldview, he is the most accessible and friendly of men. His superficial demeanor of open companionship is reinforced by frequent phone calls and flattery. To Republican senators, who can approve or disapprove of his plans and who are in the same Republican mini-universe, he is the most accessible of politicians. To enemies like certain Democratic representatives from his own home-town, New York City, he is an insulting, demeaning, distant adversary who is impossible to understand, much less negotiate with.
The fact that *he suffers from narcissistic personality disorder and sociopathy has been well established by Mr. George “Kellyanne” Conway, husband of one of his closest advisors. Mr. Conway’s famous tweets showing the psychiatric manual for diagnostic purposes reached quite a few people, but changed few minds. Like all sociopaths, though, he can be superficially very friendly if not crossed, and he can readily draw people in to his influence by his charm.
Republican congressmen have publicly said that *he is the most accessible person they have ever dealt with, and this is true because he calls them repeatedly and indulges them with his attention and flattery. *His personal style is the most dangerous of weapons when aimed at ensuring complete unity of the Republican party on most of *his issues.
Meanwhile, the very legitimacy of *his election is suspect. Targeted propaganda efforts by Russian agents in support of *his candidacy as president definitely occurred and were not necessarily limited to the ones discovered in the Mueller investigation. A number of Russian operatives were indicted by special prosecutor Mueller for disinformation campaigns waged over the social media many Americans have come to use instead of traditional news programs.
There are signs that *his slim election victory was facilitated by careful application of propaganda and disinformation to susceptible swing voters in carefully selected districts informed by detailed polling. Large segments of the public whose political knowledge was limited were also subject to nonstop news coverage on television of *his speeches. I noticed a huge concentration on *his speeches and outrageous public statements on television, an equivalent to what *he said was $2 billion in free publicity.
In addition, the polls that established which districts would be most vulnerable to be turned by propaganda were apparently handed to a Russian agent, Konstantin Kilimnik, by Paul Manafort. These private political polls showed which segments of the American public were likely to support the alternative candidates and which were susceptible to being convinced otherwise (“swing” voters). Propaganda efforts could be more effectively targeted at swing voters, although it is uncertain whether that actually happened.
The point is that there was a significant Russian effort, with a budget estimated at a million dollars a month, to infect the American political discourse with propaganda in favor of the Republican candidate for president in the 2016 election, and that makes *his narrow victory suspect in the minds of the conspiracy-minded among us.
That is what, overall, makes the current occupant of the office of president something of a wrecking ball directed at American government. Russians are happy to see our government be crippled by recriminations and investigations instead of forging ahead with forward-looking infrastructure projects. That is how the Russians won the 2016 election– they got a guy who destroys the American administration from within.
Michael Morell (former dep. dir. CIA): “We still do not understand why [he who must not be named] has this affinity for Putin… Mueller took one possibility [criminal conspiracy] off the table… we still don’t know what is going on between these two…”
full quote: “We still do not understand why [] has this affinity for Putin. What happened yesterday [Friday, March 22, 2019] is Mueller took one possibility off the table– that there was a criminal conspiracy. But we still don’t know what is going on between these two leaders, and what is driving their relationship.”
[former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, host of the Intelligence Matters podcast, as told to the author, Natasha Bertrand, in her article in the Atlantic on March 26, 2019.]
(image courtesy pixabay.com and geralt)
