Health Insurance Isn’t Health Care
How often have you heard a politician say that millions of Americans “have no health care,” when he or she meant they have no health insurance? How has a method of financing health care become synonymous with care itself?
The reason for financing at least some of our health care with an insurance system is obvious. We all worry that a serious illness or an accident might one day require urgent, extensive care, imposing an extreme financial burden on us. In this sense, health-care insurance is just like all other forms of insurance—life, property, liability—where the many who face a risk share the cost incurred by the few who actually suffer a loss.
But health insurance is different from every other type of insurance. Health insurance is the primary payment mechanism not just for expenses that are unexpected and large, but for nearly all health-care expenses. We’ve become so used to health insurance that we don’t realize how absurd that is. We can’t imagine paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance, but we all assume that our regular checkups and dental cleanings will be covered at least partially by insurance. Most pregnancies are planned, and deliveries are predictable many months in advance, yet they’re financed the same way we finance fixing a car after a wreck—through an insurance claim.
Comprehensive health insurance is such an ingrained element of our thinking, we forget that its rise to dominance is relatively recent. Modern group health insurance was introduced in 1929, and employer-based insurance began to blossom during World War II, when wage freezes prompted employers to expand other benefits as a way of attracting workers. Still, as late as 1954, only a minority of Americans had health insurance. That’s when Congress passed a law making employer contributions to employee health plans tax-deductible without making the resulting benefits taxable to employees. This seemingly minor tax benefit not only encouraged the spread of catastrophic insurance, but had the accidental effect of making employer-funded health insurance the most affordable option (after taxes) for financing pretty much any type of health care. There was nothing natural or inevitable about the way our system developed: employer-based, comprehensive insurance crowded out alternative methods of paying for health-care expenses only because of a poorly considered tax benefit passed half a century ago.
In designing Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, the government essentially adopted this comprehensive-insurance model for its own spending, and by the next year had enrolled nearly 12 percent of the population. And it is no coincidence that the great inflation in health-care costs began soon after. We all believe we need comprehensive health insurance because the cost of care—even routine care—appears too high to bear on our own. But the use of insurance to fund virtually all care is itself a major cause of health care’s high expense.
Insurance is probably the most complex, costly, and distortional method of financing any activity; that’s why it is otherwise used to fund only rare, unexpected, and large costs. Imagine sending your weekly grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review, and having the grocer reimbursed by the insurer to whom you’ve paid your share. An expensive and wasteful absurdity, no?
Is this really a big problem for our health-care system? Well, for every two doctors in the U.S., there is now one health-insurance employee—more than 470,000 in total. In 2006, it cost almost $500 per person just to administer health insurance. Much of this enormous cost would simply disappear if we paid routine and predictable health-care expenditures the way we pay for everything else—by ourselves.
Read the whole story at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care/2
thanks to Ashley Russell for sharing this article!
Steven M. Sabatier
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Evidence Based Medicine
In regards to the debate found at http://nationalcenterforhomeopathy.org/media/in_the_news_view.jsp?id=789 accessed 9-9-09, I am now rethinking what constitutes "Evidence Based Medicine".
As seen in the debate, some doctors and medical literature argues that Homeopathy is not evidence based.
Wow! Historical accounts during times of epidemic. Now that is evidence based. Homeopathy is not missing "Evidence". Seems like there is plenty of evidence (see below for a sample). What Homeopathy is missing is people who understand the mechanism in terms of conventional medicine and newtonian physics. Some want a meachanism, one that fits into their current understandings.
Will a mechanim ever be understood? Does it matter?
Surely it matters for "Mechanism-Based" medicine. Does it matter for evidence based medicine? I think that what matters for Evidence Based Medicine is *** EVIDENCE!***
Andre Saine, ND
With more than 25,000 volumes, the homeopathic literature is very rich in reports about the results obtained by homeopathy during epidemics. Results obtained by homeopathy during epidemics reveal a very important and clear constancy--namely, a very low mortality rate. This constancy remains, regardless of the physician, institution, time, place, or type of epidemical disease, including diseases carrying a very high mortality rate, such as cholera, smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and pneumonia. This low mortality rate is always superior to the results obtained by the allopathy practiced at that particular time and, as a rule, the allopathy of today. Despite well-documented and official reports, the results obtained by homeopathy have been almost completely ignored by the scientific and medical communities, as if they had occurred in a void of time and space.I will now give five examples to illustrate these results:When cholera first invaded Europe in 1831, the mortality throughout Europe was generally between 40-60%. To the surprise of many, mortality rates reported by homeopathic physicians was generally below ten percent and, commonly, under four percent.I will now present two typical cholera reports, which have an official stamp to them. The first one comes from the territory of Raab in Hungary where, in 1831, a Dr. Joseph Bakody treated 223 patients with mild-to-severe cholera, 14 of whom were in the collapse state. He lost a total of eight patients, a mortality of 3.6%.A similar situation occurred in Cincinnati in 1849. The Board of Health issued an order calling for physicians to report all cases of cholera. The Board received reports of a high mortality rate from the city hospital and allopathic physicians. However, six homeopathic physicians attracted national attention when they reported not one single death out of their first 350 cases of cholera. Two of these homeopathic physicians, Dr. Pulte and Ehrmann would eventually report treating 2,646 cases with 35 deaths, or a mortality rate of 1.3%. Allopaths reported fatal outcomes in 50% of their cases.Now, let's move on and look at pneumonia, whose incidence and virulence has remained quite uniform throughout time. Before the era of antibiotics, the average death rate from pneumonia was 30%. Since the introduction of antibiotics, the death rate has only gone down to 18%. On the other hand, the death rate under genuine homeopathic treatment has always been less than one to three percent, even in patients suffering from the most fulminate type of pneumonia.Let's push our inquiry a bit further and look at the most fatal of all infectious diseases, rabies. I have been able to document more than a dozen well-described cases with unmistakable, fully developed clinical rabies that had uneventful recoveries under homeopathy without any prophylaxis whatsoever to assuage the virulence of the disease.This small sample of reports should be sufficient to illustrate the potential of homeopathy and incite real scientists, honest physicians, and intelligent people to examine homeopathy more seriously. Such extraordinary outcomes are not an exception in homeopathy but are the rule for all 33 infectious diseases I have so far investigated, which include typhus, malignant scarlet fever, meningitis, tetanus, anthrax, septicemia, and malaria.What you have seen today makes it clear--homeopathy is very plausible, and there is both ample clinical and epidemiological evidence that it works. Homeopathy will become an integral part of medicine despite the paradoxical nature of its remedies and all other prejudices against it, simply because homeopathy is safe, efficacious, and cost-effective.”
As seen in the debate, some doctors and medical literature argues that Homeopathy is not evidence based.
Wow! Historical accounts during times of epidemic. Now that is evidence based. Homeopathy is not missing "Evidence". Seems like there is plenty of evidence (see below for a sample). What Homeopathy is missing is people who understand the mechanism in terms of conventional medicine and newtonian physics. Some want a meachanism, one that fits into their current understandings.
Will a mechanim ever be understood? Does it matter?
Surely it matters for "Mechanism-Based" medicine. Does it matter for evidence based medicine? I think that what matters for Evidence Based Medicine is *** EVIDENCE!***
Andre Saine, ND
With more than 25,000 volumes, the homeopathic literature is very rich in reports about the results obtained by homeopathy during epidemics. Results obtained by homeopathy during epidemics reveal a very important and clear constancy--namely, a very low mortality rate. This constancy remains, regardless of the physician, institution, time, place, or type of epidemical disease, including diseases carrying a very high mortality rate, such as cholera, smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and pneumonia. This low mortality rate is always superior to the results obtained by the allopathy practiced at that particular time and, as a rule, the allopathy of today. Despite well-documented and official reports, the results obtained by homeopathy have been almost completely ignored by the scientific and medical communities, as if they had occurred in a void of time and space.I will now give five examples to illustrate these results:When cholera first invaded Europe in 1831, the mortality throughout Europe was generally between 40-60%. To the surprise of many, mortality rates reported by homeopathic physicians was generally below ten percent and, commonly, under four percent.I will now present two typical cholera reports, which have an official stamp to them. The first one comes from the territory of Raab in Hungary where, in 1831, a Dr. Joseph Bakody treated 223 patients with mild-to-severe cholera, 14 of whom were in the collapse state. He lost a total of eight patients, a mortality of 3.6%.A similar situation occurred in Cincinnati in 1849. The Board of Health issued an order calling for physicians to report all cases of cholera. The Board received reports of a high mortality rate from the city hospital and allopathic physicians. However, six homeopathic physicians attracted national attention when they reported not one single death out of their first 350 cases of cholera. Two of these homeopathic physicians, Dr. Pulte and Ehrmann would eventually report treating 2,646 cases with 35 deaths, or a mortality rate of 1.3%. Allopaths reported fatal outcomes in 50% of their cases.Now, let's move on and look at pneumonia, whose incidence and virulence has remained quite uniform throughout time. Before the era of antibiotics, the average death rate from pneumonia was 30%. Since the introduction of antibiotics, the death rate has only gone down to 18%. On the other hand, the death rate under genuine homeopathic treatment has always been less than one to three percent, even in patients suffering from the most fulminate type of pneumonia.Let's push our inquiry a bit further and look at the most fatal of all infectious diseases, rabies. I have been able to document more than a dozen well-described cases with unmistakable, fully developed clinical rabies that had uneventful recoveries under homeopathy without any prophylaxis whatsoever to assuage the virulence of the disease.This small sample of reports should be sufficient to illustrate the potential of homeopathy and incite real scientists, honest physicians, and intelligent people to examine homeopathy more seriously. Such extraordinary outcomes are not an exception in homeopathy but are the rule for all 33 infectious diseases I have so far investigated, which include typhus, malignant scarlet fever, meningitis, tetanus, anthrax, septicemia, and malaria.What you have seen today makes it clear--homeopathy is very plausible, and there is both ample clinical and epidemiological evidence that it works. Homeopathy will become an integral part of medicine despite the paradoxical nature of its remedies and all other prejudices against it, simply because homeopathy is safe, efficacious, and cost-effective.”
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
A Debate: Homeopathy--Quackery or a Key to the Future of Medicine? University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington, Connecticut, October 25, 2007
http://nationalcenterforhomeopathy.org/media/in_the_news_view.jsp?id=789
Article about homeopathy research featuring Rustum Roy from Penn State
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
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