Coronavirus infections have increased in just a week by 70%, with hospitalizations increasing 36% and deaths rising by 26%.
Public health officials blame the Delta variant for fueling the latest surge in the coronavirus pandemic, the New York Times reported, noting:
Cash is king. That truism may hold for thrifty savers and businesses and individuals buffeted by economic uncertainty. But this realistic view also may be turned on its head for poorer, uninsured patients trying to cope with bankrupting medical bills.
That’s because hospitals — a leading driver of health care costs — gouge with their premium prices those who pay with cash, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The newspaper, working with previously secret pricing data that institutions across the country must disclose now, has given consumers yet another eye-popping view of the elasticity of hospital charges and how they punish the poor:
Just as attorneys generals for more than a dozen states inch toward a multibillion-dollar settlement with a drug maker faulted for its big role in the start of the opioid abuse and drug overdose crisis, that health menace is taking a new, deadly turn in the region around the nation’s capital.
In Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, officials report they are grappling with spiking overdose deaths, numbering in the hundreds, and blamed on the rise of fentanyl. It is a synthetic, prescription painkiller developed to assist late-stage cancer patients. It packs a wallop. And Big Pharma companies pushed for its wider use with aggressive marketing and sales campaign that landed some drug executives in jail.
The excessive promotion of fentanyl also led to its illegal manufacture, notably in chemical factories in China. Its increasing abuse, along with other opioids, also opened the door to big problems with illicit drugs.
The Food and Drug Administration has back-tracked on a major part of its accelerated approval of Aduhelm, a prescription medication targeted at Alzheimer’s patients.
The FDA green light for the drug also has created such consternation among medical specialists, insurers, policy experts, and politicians — including with news reports of hidden, cozy dealings between a top regulator and the medication’s maker — that the acting agency chief has asked the independent inspector general to investigate what happened.
The fury over Aduhelm is occurring even as another drug maker is pushing legal action that authorities argue also could saddle taxpayers with other soaring costs for other expensive drugs.
The rest of the planet may be seeing what roughly half of Americans cannot: The coronavirus pandemic is far from over and it is savaging humanity in a way that is now sadly preventable.
The disease’s global toll now has exceeded 4 million deaths, a number that is likely far under reported, according to the World Health Organization.
The United States still has tallied a disproportionate number of virus fatalities — more than 600,000 deaths.
No matter what the carping critics may claim about the shortcomings of the civil justice system, when Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, and big organizations exploit and harm the vulnerable, lawsuits and what follows may provide a concrete, productive way for the wronged to see remedy and recompense for injuries inflicted on them.
Recent news articles provide more than a billion bits of evidence why, even in terse summaries of what has occurred in big, complex cases:
Federal regulators have taken a welcome initial step to bar insurers and health care providers from holding patients hostage in their all-too-common fee fights, with draft rules out now to crush “surprise” medical bills.
The politically riven, do-nothing Congress shocked critics by ending 2020 with an actual new law, included in legislation dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, that gave patients new protection from nightmares created when insurers and big corporation sought to reduce their health care costs with so-called narrow networks of pre-approved health care providers.
This scheme allowed insurers and companies to negotiate with doctors, labs, hospitals, and others for preferential prices, and, effectively, guarantees of patient business, in exchange. Patients began howling when their long-time caregivers were excluded from insurer networks, which also often also excluded big-name practitioners as well as well-known academic medical centers and big hospitals.
Climate change — to those who indulge in counter-factual thinking and who hold anti-science beliefs — may be an abstraction and a mere theory. But weather extremes became a startling, real, and deadly health threat to tens of millions in a swath of the Pacific Northwest in this country and Canada.
Days of unrelenting, record-shattering heat have been blamed directly for at least 100 deaths, with hundreds more fatalities occurring during the historic torpor, the New York Times reported in a news article describing the toll in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia.
Surges in emergency departments
With every recent holiday, health officials have warned the public to exercise great caution and to maybe even avoid celebrations in hopes of holding down the spread and deadly consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. But not today.
Independence Day, 2021, is different. Optimism prevails across the country about the quelling pandemic. Tens of millions of Americans hit the roads and took to the skies, traveling with gusto for summer vacations. Gatherings, many of them huge and public, are common.
Will this hustle and bustle cause a difficult and divisive surge in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths? And will July 4, 2021, mark not only the country’s 245th birthday, but also the deeper divide of the United States into two nations — one vaccinated and with significant safety from a killer illness, and the other going without vaccines and their protection?
Hoorah, the spectacular Fourth of July fireworks display will return to the National Mall — and with a throng expected to watch in person.
Here’s hoping the celebratory pyrotechnics in Washington, D.C., also will be confined to this and other public displays — and not creating mayhem for the next few weeks in neighborhoods across the region and the country, too.
C’mon, scofflaws with fireworks: The country’s return to normality isn’t license to harm yourself and others, keep the law-abiding up at all hours with firecracker explosions, and to terrify humanity’s four-footed pals for no good reason.
DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog