Health Care Reform
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September 06, 2007

A New Beginning

With the Support from Meredith...and Robert Kennedy

The Labor Day weekend has passed, and with it Summer to Fall, return to school, and transition. For me, this is a special post-Labor Day. Having announced my intention to “retire” some 6 months ago, it has now arrived. So what's next? More on that in the next few weeks. For now, I'll simply say that there is much to do, and many different ways to do it. But one of my hopes is that the activities planned will allow greater dialogue with more everyday people, especially the young and the experienced. Trish and I are now working regularly with our daughter Meredith, who is heading up development for The Rocking Chair Project from her new location in Hanover, NH. She sent me a quote from Robert Kennedy today.

The first time I read it was some 25 years ago, in a book, during the summer in Greenfield, MA. She was only two then. Its meaning to me now is different I'm sure, than it was then. I have changed, and so has our world. Yet it resonates as strongly, if not more strongly for me, a quarter century later. Sent by Meredith, it carries a challenge, to stay involved, to stay engaged, to resist what is wrong, and foster what is right. These are not timid times. There is much to be done!

“This world demands the qualities of youth;
not a time of life, but a state of mind;
a temper of the will;
a quality of the imagination;
a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.
It is a revolutionary world we live in, and thus,
it (...) is young people who must take the lead.”

- Robert Kennedy

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October 18, 2007

Get the moneychangers out of my medicine cabinet!

Sicko Capitalists

Handing Health Care to the Money Players

ByArnold S. Relman, M.D.

 

“Consumer-driven health care" is a catchy phrase, but there is another considera­tion that should make anyone pause: the concept of health savings accounts. If HSAs grow as predicted, they will constitute a huge new source of tax-exempt private savings that will bring the financial management industry into the health care system. An arti­cle in the New York Times on Jan. 27, 2006, described how "banks, credit unions and money management firms are now quietly positioning themselves to become central players in the business of health care...." Even insurance companies selling the high-deductible plans are setting up their own banks. So HSAs will be another opportunity for the health care system to become a finan­cial playground for investors and investor-owned businesses. Money that ought to be paying for health care will be siphoned off for other purposes. Treating health care as a market puts influence over policy in the hands of those whose primary business is money and not health care.

—From A Second Opinion: Rescuing Ameri­ca's Health Care, by Arnold S. Relman, M.D. Copyright © 2007. Published and reprinted by arrangement with Public Affairs, a mem­ber of the Perseus Books Group.

 

(Taken from p. 35, AARP Bulletin, May 2007)

(Me:) Back in the '90s Public Citizen did a study (Ralph Nader's Co.) proving 25-cents of every "health-care-dollar) went to insurers/brokers. New scams abound! Get your damn capitalists out of my medical/health care!

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October 18, 2007

(Interpretation: Naivate breeds victimization)

Sicko Capitalism

Sorry if I was cryptic: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." George Santayana

Trumps sentimentality every time.

I don't care about your !#%^!? age. Just tell me the truth!

[Profit motive for bypass surgery? (Read

Coronary: A True Story of Medicine Gone Awry]

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