A laptop and a cardboard box. These two items could be major tools in improving regular folks’ health throughout this year — and beyond — if they get launched on important tasks, pronto. What needs to happen is for patients to be hyperconscious, persistent, and skeptical enough to start gathering vital records about themselves and….
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For seniors, big changes coming with federal health coverage plans
Editor’s note: The blog will shift in ’23 to more episodic publication. Just a reminder: 2023 will begin what could be consequential changes in aspects of older Americans, notably those age 65-plus and covered by Medicare. As part of law of the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Democrats in the Congress and pushed by the….
Continue ReadingPatients may need to take steps to optimize time with harried doctors
In recent times, one of the issues most complained about by patients comes down to this: Why does my doctor zip through my office visit and fail to give me the attention I need and deserve? To be sure, doctors these days struggle ever more with “efficiency” pushes in medicine by profit-obsessed business interests and….
Continue ReadingCongress races to snowy holiday exit, spending $1.7 trillion on the way out
Editor’s note: The blog will shift in the days ahead to more episodic publishing. Members of Congress raced at the year’s end to avoid the consequences of a brutal snowstorm battering huge swaths of the country. Before hitting the holiday exits, lawmakers approved a whopping $1.7 trillion bill to fund the federal government through the….
Continue ReadingIn hospitals’ struggles with staffing crises, lessons on reaping and sowing
Big hospitals and hospital chains have wailed, with considerable justification, since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic about financial damages they have suffered due to costly shortages of desperately needed health staff. But the institutions fostered this staffing crisis, with profit-ravenous suits in executive suites boosting hospital bottom lines in flusher times by slashing one….
Continue ReadingMisdiagnoses lead to 250,000 ER patients’ deaths annually, U.S. study finds
Doctors working in hospital emergency departments face chaos, violence and high stress every day, and usually they get the diagnosis and treatment right. But, and it’s a big but, as often as one in seventeen ER visits ends with a misdiagnosis, which can have deadly consequences. Those medical misdiagnosis are newly estimated by Johns Hopkins….
Continue ReadingWatchdog agency taking fire for big problems safeguarding food and drugs
In regular places, when alarms blare and it becomes clear that a big, important something is broken and threatens folks’ well-being, those with common sense race to make needed fixes. Washington, D.C., is different. And members of Congress, the White House, and top federal bureaucrats already may be dodging a desperately needed reckoning for the….
Continue ReadingAs U.S. battles latest viral surge, GOP targets military vaccine mandate
The nation’s military defense understandably takes a leading priority in public spending. But congressional Republicans have managed to put plenty of unpalatable elements into a Brobdingnagian appropriations bill that affirms an extreme view, undercutting the value of service personnel protecting themselves from deadly infections. Over the objections of Pentagon brass and the White House, GOP….
Continue ReadingBig investors aid struggling vaping pioneer in $1.7 billion settlement
While regular folks will count their pennies and fret about affording gifts for loved ones during an inflation-plagued holiday season, plutocrats have given the hoi polloi a rare glimpse of the major loot they see in the business of peddling health-wrecking e-cigarettes and vaping. The concerning disclosures are emerging as part of the financial struggles….
Continue ReadingWhile surgeons operate often on the elderly, studies are just starting to detail the risks
Seniors and their loved ones should take note of new and increasing data that researchers are developing about the risks undertaken by elderly patients who choose to undergo significant surgeries — procedures that make up a little less than half of costly operations performed in this country. The numbers about invasive medical work can be….
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