Accessibility of Healthcare

October 20, 2019

Billions from landmark opioids case? It’d be just a start in dealing with crisis

Tens of billions of dollars. Those sound like hefty sums. But will it ever be enough? Will, say, $50 billion offer justice and appropriate recompense to a nation wracked by an opioid and overdose crisis?

These figures aren’t pulled from thin air. They’re part of the reported settlement under negotiations to resolve more than 2,300 lawsuits, all bundled up now and under the sway of a federal judge in Ohio. He will launch a landmark opioids’ trial this week, starting with claims by two Ohio counties, unless Big Pharma firms remaining as defendants and the plaintiffs — including states, counties, cities, and Indian tribes — can strike a deal and settle.

The claimants, of course, themselves represent huge and diverse interests: their millions of individual constituents. And they disagree on how much money is fair, how it should be divided, and more. The drug makers and distributors, having seen some of their peers bail already for significant sums, assert they have reached their negotiating ceiling, somewhere around that magic $50 billion.

October 18, 2019

Flu shot urgency rises with warnings from Down Under and vaping illnesses

by Patrick A. Malone

It’s an imperfect predictor, health officials concede. Still, a nasty season of infections Down Under has increased the urgency of their recommendations to the U.S. public to get the annual flu shot before Halloween and certainly before everyone sits down for Thanksgiving dinner.

Although concern already had been growing about bad months ahead in the United States for flu, an early and “fairly severe” season in Australia has increased officials’ worries, the New York Times reported.

That’s because the Aussies, while not a 100% reliable bellwether, showed the more populous States about flu severity as recently as last season, according to Donald G. McNeil Jr., who has reported on disease outbreaks in more than 60 countries for the New York Times. He wrote this:

October 15, 2019

In U.S. health care, experts assail $1 trillion-plus in waste, fraud and abuse

by Patrick A. Malone

Politicians almost by reflex decry the skyrocketing cost of U.S. health care by blaming much of it on waste, fraud, abuse. They, alas, really may be on to something, newly published research shows.

Health care experts, including a medical leader of health insurer Humana, “combed through 54 studies and reports published since 2012 that estimated the waste or savings from changes in practice and policy,” leading them to some jaw-dropping calculations about how well spent is the $3.5 trillion or so that Americans drop on health care, the New York Times reported.

Answer: Really badly. The researchers, in their published work, estimated that 20%-25% of American health care spending is wasteful. That turns into giant sums, fast, as the newspaper reported, including:

October 4, 2019

With data and disclosures, experts, families, and friends battle suicide’s toll

by Patrick A. Malone

Dogged medical detective work combined with public advocacy to dispel the shame that surrounds suicide — these may be productive ways to attack the public health nightmare of increasing numbers of Americans taking their own lives.

This is a crisis that can’t be hidden or allowed to keep going up, with some experts estimating that roughly 47,000 Americans commit suicide annually. That’s about 129 lives lost each day. Suicide, hitting a record-setting pace, also is a significant problem for the U.S. military.

If you are in crisis or know someone who may be, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or text HOME to 741741. Both work 24/7. More resources are available at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.

October 3, 2019

Health insurance? It’s now about the price of a new car each year.

by Patrick A. Malone

Millions of Americans may sigh at Bertha, Barney, or Betty, or whatever they’ve nicknamed the beat-up family vehicle parked out front: “Wouldn’t it be great, if only we could afford a nicer, newer model?”

A big obstacle to that wish, however, may be the increasingly costly and unaffordable health insurance they get at their workplace. New research finds that the annual premium for family coverage — forked over mostly by companies but also by workers — now averages $20,576, according to an annual survey by the nonprofit, independent Kaiser Family Foundation.

Drew Altman, chief executive of the group, commented to the Wall Street Journal about the spiking burden of workplace coverage: “It’s a milestone. It’s the cost of buying an economy car, just buying it every year.”

October 1, 2019

Health care plagued by cases of a persistent pathology — unmitigated gall

by Patrick A. Malone

There seems to be a never-ending outbreak of a certain kind of pathology in the United States. Big Pharma has it and spreads it around, a lot. So, too, do public health figures. Let’s call this scourge what it is — unmitigated gall.

The problem with this nasty condition is that it afflicts the rest of us. Just consider how stomach-churning these shenanigans can be:

Penalties for bogus prescribing of ‘little red pills’ on elderly dementia patients

September 29, 2019

Is Sanders’ plan to erase $81 billion in U.S. medical debt really all that crazy?

by Patrick A. Malone

Critics have attacked Sen. Bernie Sanders for his proposal to wipe out $81 billion in medical debt, including by changing rules around debt collection and bankruptcy. He also called for “replacing the giant credit reporting agencies with a ‘public credit registry’ that would ignore medical debt when calculating credit scores,” reported the New York Times.

Well, there he goes again, with interesting but hard to execute ideas, critics replied to Sanders’ medical debt idea, dissecting it to pieces.

But dig into some of the news articles and important realities flare up. Even his critics concede that medical debt has become a nightmare for too many Americans, contributing in unacceptable fashion to family stress and anxiety and, more importantly, adding to the nightmare of medical bankruptcy.

September 26, 2019

While it’s still warm and sunny, saunter in for that annual flu shot

by Patrick A. Malone

The weather may be sunny and temperate, the seasonal foliage a slowly changing delight to behold. But the savvy are prepping for sterner days ahead. It’s that time of year when doctors and public health officials urge us all to get that annual flu shot.

It’s never easy to forecast the severity with which influenza will sweep the country. But early indications — including a child’s death already attributed to the illness — suggest this may be a bad year for the bug.

Don’t downplay the harms of this all-too-common sickness: The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there were as many as 43 million flu illnesses in this nation in the 2018-19 season, with more than 20 million cases serious enough to cause patients to seek medical care. The CDC says there were as many as 647,000 hospitalizations and up to 61,200 flu-related deaths. That toll included more than 100 children killed by flu.

September 24, 2019

Administration actions give us all plenty of reasons to not breathe easy

by Patrick A. Malone

Even as investigations deepened into the harms caused by vaping and e-cigarettes, the Trump Administration confounded those concerned with public health and the environment with rollbacks of legal ways to get vehicles to be cleaner and less polluting and of measures to ensure food safety, notably via changes in inspections of long problematic pork producers.

Voters in the 2020 elections may wish to take note of these and other mounting issues — including proliferating “skimpy” health insurance plans — in which the administration zigs and zags on policies that it promises are intended for the public good, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.

President Trump made public his administration’s decision to revoke federal approval of California setting industry-leading vehicle emission standard even as he fund-raised in the Golden State.

September 22, 2019

It’s a season to get ripe view of money-grasping Big Pharma and plutocrats

by Patrick A. Malone

For those who get a rise out of following the plight of plundering plutocrats, forget about pop culture shows like Succession, Dynasty, or Empire. Instead, it may be worth peeking in on the true-life Sackler family saga. It also underscores the truth of this idea: Never get between Big Pharma and a buck.

The Sackler story, turning on the fate of the family’s Purdue pharmaceutical firm and a fortune estimated at $13 billion, has been ripe with recent developments, including a potential settlement of thousands of claims by states, counties, cities, Indian tribes, and others — all claiming billions of dollars in damages due to the maker’s aggressive and less than accurate sales and marketing of its prescription painkiller OxyContin.

With a federal judge in Ohio consolidating and pushing a “global resolution” of a giant number of opioid-related lawsuits, Purdue and the Sacklers announced a tentative settlement of many of the governments-filed claims. Roughly half the plaintiffs were eager to get what money they could — to not only help constituents staggered by damages due to opioids, overdoses, and addictions, but also to refill government coffers depleted by the huge costs of dealing with nightmares caused by the painkillers.