http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/march_april_2013/features/the_republican_case_for_waste043314.php
Even people who take their health very seriously calculate costs and benefits. Time spent at the gym, for example, is time we cannot spend playing with our kids, or making the money we need to pay for our ever-rising health insurance premiums. Submitting to a colonoscopy, while minimally costing time, money, and discomfort, may not provide us with any personal benefit whatsoever—all of which we put into the mix before deciding if this is the day we have the test done.In short, in our day-to-day lives we regularly apply a kind of informal cost-benefit analysis to the decisions we make about health care. To take another example, say you decide it’s worth the effort to lose twenty pounds and firmly resolve to do so. Then your mind will instantly turn to mulling what would be the most cost-effective way to go about it: eat less or exercise more, for example, or perhaps take a pill or undergo a liposuction operation or some combination of all of those.In making this decision, you may well act on assumptions that are shortsighted or misinformed. You may ascribe more effectiveness to those interventions that seem easy (taking a diet pill) than to those that seem hard (giving up sweets and sweating it out in the gym more often).Yet here is a curious fact about humans, in the United States, at least. Though we spend more per person on health care than any other people on earth, and with results that are no better and often worse than all other advanced nations, we have allowed conservatives and corporate interests to bind us with laws that explicitly forbid the use of formal cost-benefit analysis to determine how health care dollars are spent. Until we get our heads around this contradiction, we are in big trouble.
we are our worse negotiators and deal finders and who to pick to do it for us. it's much easier to blame and finger point then to admit "I SCREWED UP'.
that is the detriment to our health and well being, we are gullible and rather have someone else do it so w don't have to, we vote and when they turn out to be not as advertised we blame them. i wrote this on this Blog year and a half ago,
MONDAY, AUGUST 23, 2010
can you?
can you blame the sun for not shinning if you stay in the house,can you blame the cool breeze you don't enjoy if you stay in the house can you blame the sky for not seeing the blue and clouds if you stay in the house? Well tell how on God's green earth can you blame this admin. for doing nothing when republicans in the house are sitting on 290 bills waitng to be passed, come on people can't ya see the hmmmmm coming into focus?
Posted by nick johnson at 6:23 PM
The best-known work in this area comes from the Dartmouth Atlas Project. For more than a decade, researchers there have systematically reviewed the medical records of deceased Medicare patients nationwide, including those who suffered from specific chronic conditions during their last two years of life. And by doing so, the researchers have uncovered striking anomalies that point to vast inefficiencies.In Miami, for example, the Dartmouth researchers have discovered that the average number of doctor visits for a Medicare patient during the last two years of his or her life is 106. But in Minneapolis, among Medicare patients suffering from the same chronic conditions, the average number of doctor visits during the last two years of life is only twenty-six. Yet in both cities, all of these patients are equally dead at the end of two years.
impossible to fix in the current atmosphere of republican obstruction. so we need to know the difference in a Pres. failing and the rug being pulled out because w allowed the incorrect rhetoric to stick in our mind'yes we can"s, and so desperate to put the world on one mans shoulders completely discarding he can not do it alone forgetting "yes we can", until we remember look at the news read a paper that's the way it will be.
