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Arizona cut off all organ transplants being paid by Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, it's death sentence for people who had already been covered and expected to be covered.
Budget cuts stop Phoenix man from getting new liver Updated 5h 37m ago
By Michelle Ye Hee Lee, The Arizona Republic PHOENIX — A liver-disease patient missed his opportunity for an organ transplant Tuesday, becoming the most dire example yet of an Arizonan denied life-saving medical care because of budget cuts to the state's health-care system for the poor.
Francisco Felix, 32, of Laveen, Ariz., was in the hospital ready to receive a liver that was donated to him late Monday night. But the liver went to another recipient Tuesday morning because he couldn't find $200,000 overnight to pay for the liver transplant, one of seven kinds of transplant surgery the state stopped covering Oct. 1.
Felix was the first liver-transplant patient known to be affected but is not likely to be the last.
Of the about 100 Arizonans enrolled in the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System who are awaiting transplants no longer covered, 60 of them are candidates like Felix with liver disease related to hepatitis C. Transplant is their only cure.
Last month, Goodyear, Ariz., leukemia patient Mark Price became a poster child for the impact of the budget cuts after his doctor found donors who matched his bone marrow a day after Price lost coverage. Price's story gained attention nationally and an anonymous donor later covered all costs for his surgery.
Because bone marrow comes from living donors, the donated marrow was able to be used at a late date.
It's a different story for liver-transplant patients.
The chances of finding a liver donor are slim because these transplants usually are livers from deceased donors and the demand far exceeds the supply.
If a donor is found, the surgery must take place in less than a day.
Patients who lost transplant coverage have been allowed to stay on the waiting list, but when a match is found they are faced with a ticking clock to come up with up to half a million dollars to pay for the procedure.
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
this just proves what i've been trying to tell some of you for years, we already pay for the health care to almost everybody in this country one way or another anywya.
how is a person with liver failure supposed to work?
how is a person with with a failing heart supposed to work?
huh?
we have always payed for this stuff since the 60's- it is amajor part of what has made this country great and the conservatives that want to end it have made some seriously flawed amoral and unChristian decisions.
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
So conservatives are death panels now? I didnt see the part where it said conservatives in the story.
-------------------- It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so. Posts: 6949 | Registered: Apr 2004
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quote:Arizona's Republican governor and legislature, who already control the state's purse strings, want even more independence when it comes to determining which health care services Arizona Medicaid patients receive. Indeed, Arizona's newly elected Senate President Russell Pearce has argued for cutting the state's Medicaid program, even if that means Arizona will lose about $7 billion worth of federal grants.
"If we're saving money, the fact we lose some federal money means nothing," Pearce recently said. "If you can't afford Dillard's, even though they're having a great sale, you can't afford Dillard's."
This is the conservative health care reform plan laid out in black in white. You don't have money you don't get health care. Arizona residents who told the President 'don't touch my Medicaid' and then voted against his party because you bought the lies told about his healthcare reform bill, this is the cost of your ignorance.
-------------------- No longer eligible for government service due to lack of tax issues. Posts: 5178 | From: Up North | Registered: Dec 2005
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i find it difficult to be patient with my kids, but i know that it is necessary to accept their ignorance with indiffernce and respond enthusiastically to tehir thirst for knowledge....
but a large part of the adult population in this country does not deserve patience...
quite frankly? i don't mind being called an elitist. i take it as the compliment it is. cuz it's an admission by certain people that thye just can't figure it out on their own.
these are literally the Death Panels we warned about.
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
These cuts will continue and I predict they will cross not only state, but party lines as well.
It's simply a matter of resources. People are figuring out that we don't have enough for everything we want.
I'm not against universal healthcare on principle, but it has to come at the cost of something else in the budget. You don't simply make money\resources appear out of thin air. If we want to cover cancer treatments for every man, woman, and child in America for 'free', then we need to be willing to pay for roads at a local level, or do without funding for the arts, or stop paying to build libraries in Congressmen's names, or etc, etc, etc....
If you can't pay the bills you already have...you don't go shopping at Dillards.
(And no, Glass, being called an Elitist ISN'T a compliment...sorry.)
posted
Simple. Tax rates back to a respectable level (1980ish), one online medical record per person streamlines admin, compensation rates that are based on costs plus X percentages instead of following the failed "what the market will bear' mantra and we are groovy baby.
No need to withhold lifesaving medical treatment because he is poor and has a bad heart.
-------------------- No longer eligible for government service due to lack of tax issues. Posts: 5178 | From: Up North | Registered: Dec 2005
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posted
Don't like the idea of medical records having easy access for pretty much everyone, online or otherwise.
They always point out how great of idea it is to have easy access to our medical records.
It would be great if they used them for just our benefit.
For me i would like to keep mine for me to hand carry to whom i want viewing them.
I will explain in person any misquotes in the doctors notes!
I will take my chances in an emergency by possibly not having them in my possession.
Have seen these medical records used for all the wrong reasons and using incorrect information within them.
Unless you check all your medical records for correctness and get them changed immediately, watch out for what you wish for, because some day they might come back to burn you. -
Posts: 3875 | From: ca. | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
And no, Glass, being called an Elitist ISN'T a compliment...sorry.
hmmmm....
maybe not to you, but i have been called alot worse- all the real elitists i know are the ones who will be paying the higher taxes if the Dems get their way and tax the top 2%...
down here? they are mebers of the 100,000$ hunt clubs and guess what? they take tax breaks on that too ain't America Great!!!!
i'm not there yet, but it looks like my wife andi combined will be there next year if-when they are passed...
it's really funny to me that most people who are agianst raising the taxes on the "wealthy" (i would still not be wealth y IMO for several more years of making 250K per year) are not the wealthy...
most of the wealthy aren't worried cuz they have made it already... the small business folks already know how to write of most of it off anyway... there's so many loopholes in our tax code that even with the highest marginal rates in the industrial world? we have some of th elowest ACTUAL rates...
of the 275 Fortune 500 companies that made a profit each year from 2001 to 2003 and for which adequate information to draw conclusions is publicly available, only a small proportion paid federal income taxes anywhere near that statutory 35 percent tax rate. The vast majority paid considerably less.
In fact, in 2002 and 2003, the average effective tax rate for all of these 275 companies was less than half the statutory 35 percent rate. Over the 2001-2003 period, effective tax rates ranged from a low of -59.6 percent for Pepco Holdings to a high of 34.5 percent for CVS.
Over the three-year period, the average effective rate for all 275 companies dropped by a fifth, from 21.4 percent in 2001 to 17.2 percent in 2002-2003.
The statistics are startling:
* Eighty-two of the 275 companies, almost a third of the total, paid zero or less in federal income taxes in at least one year from 2001 to 2003. In the years they paid no income tax, these companies earned $102 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But instead of paying $35.6 billion in income taxes as the statutory 35 percent corporate tax rate seems to require, these companies generated so many excess tax breaks that they received outright tax rebate checks from the U.S. Treasury, totaling $12.6 billion. These companies' "negative tax rates" meant that they made more after taxes than before taxes in those no-tax years. * Twenty-eight corporations enjoyed negative federal income tax rates over the entire 2001-2003 period. These companies, whose pretax U.S. profits totaled $44.9 billion over the three years, included, among others: Pepco Holdings (-59.6 percent tax rate), Prudential Financial (-46.2 percent), ITT Industries (-22.3 percent), Boeing (-18.8 percent), Unisys (-16.0 percent), Fluor (-9.2 percent) and CSX (-7.5 percent), the company previously headed by current Secretary of the Treasury John Snow. * In 2003 alone, 46 companies paid zero or less in federal income taxes. These 46 companies told their shareholders they earned U.S. pretax profits in 2003 of $42.6 billion, yet they received tax rebates totaling $5.4 billion. Almost as many companies, 42, paid no tax in 2002, reporting $43.5 billion in pretax profits, yet receiving $4.9 billion in tax rebates. From 2001 to 2003, the number of no-tax companies jumped from 33 to 46, an increase of 40 percent. * In 2001, the Treasury paid corporations $40 billion in tax refunds, a third more than the 1998-2000 average.
quote:Originally posted by The Bigfoot: Simple. Tax rates back to a respectable level (1980ish), one online medical record per person streamlines admin, compensation rates that are based on costs plus X percentages instead of following the failed "what the market will bear' mantra and we are groovy baby.
No need to withhold lifesaving medical treatment because he is poor and has a bad heart.
That's all well and good, Big, but it's only half the equation. By reducing costs, which this would do, it will make it easier to pay for. What it doesn't do, is explain where we get the money to pay for it even at the reduced cost.
You can't allocate funds from a finite budget (no matter how 'reduced' the amount is) without doing one of three things:
1) Go into debt. (seems to be the preferred approach with our Gov) 2) Reallocate resources. That means take away funding from something else to pay for what we want more. 3) Bring in more money. Tax increases, anyone?
This is what has to change, Big. We have to prioritize our expenditures...not just spend money we don't have.
well, lessee, should we give tax rebates to major corporations who are not hiring people anyway with all this "extra money" or should we save peoples lives?
this is a test, it's test of our humanity and our Faith in God IMO....
i truly beleive that people who "do good" get rewarded... call it karma if you will, or call it God rewarding you i don't care. But i know that the USA has in fact found a way to pay for all these treatments in the past, and stopping now is less than zero.
The economy is broken, but it is not broken because of Taxes, the economy was broken because of the banks and fannie and freddie and wall st in general all lending themselves money with as low as a 1% capitalization rate. That was Fannie, and it was not the Dems or the GOP's fault alone, they both worked to set it up that way. The banks were operating at more than 1% capitalization, it was apparently between 5% and 10% capitalization...
They were also using "funny" accounting. They called the cure to thir funny accounting "mark to maerket" which means that they are no longer allowed to affix whatever value they want to, to an asset, (you know like us poor folks have to do) in order to borrow money against it....
Our primary tax problems over the last three years have been a result of the revenues lost because of the collpase of the economy due to the banks and fannie and freddie and wall st...
the fix? increase revenues, like, by taxing Chinese imports... that's actually how the Founders envisioned the Federal Tax revenue Base to begin with, import duties and taxes...
it's in the original Constituion that way..
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
the more organ tranplsnts we do now? the better we get at doing them... in 20-thirty more years? many more transplants will become routine, but we have to do them now to get there...
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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quote:Originally posted by The Bigfoot: Simple. Tax rates back to a respectable level (1980ish), one online medical record per person streamlines admin, compensation rates that are based on costs plus X percentages instead of following the failed "what the market will bear' mantra and we are groovy baby.
No need to withhold lifesaving medical treatment because he is poor and has a bad heart.
That's all well and good, Big, but it's only half the equation. By reducing costs, which this would do, it will make it easier to pay for. What it doesn't do, is explain where we get the money to pay for it even at the reduced cost.
You can't allocate funds from a finite budget (no matter how 'reduced' the amount is) without doing one of three things:
1) Go into debt. (seems to be the preferred approach with our Gov) 2) Reallocate resources. That means take away funding from something else to pay for what we want more. 3) Bring in more money. Tax increases, anyone?
This is what has to change, Big. We have to prioritize our expenditures...not just spend money we don't have.
This is on both parties...
Or print more money to cover, but yes...I understand Econ 101. And you are absolutely correct that both parties need to put the breaks on deficit spending now that we have found a fairly secure bottom to our depression.
Tax increases. Yep. That is what I want. What is more important? A heart, or an extra half-cup of coffee for every taxpayer in the state and 1/10th of a cup of coffee for every taxpayer in the nation? I'm talking Super America here, not Starbucks. (Unless you happen to be in the top 15%, then it'd prolly be Starbucks.)
However, Let's put that point aside for a moment (mostly because I know that argument will inevitably devolve into the individual ownership vs community advancement debate that you and I are polarized on.)
I have been skimming over nuclear energy today (some days I just get bored and pick a subject) and I am quite interested in the Traveling Wave reactor that Bill Gates is helping his former CTO advance. It's called TerraPower.
The idea is basically just a redesign of nuke power tech with strategically planned positioning, insertion, and burning that would drastically increase efficiency of the tech and create much less waste in the process. Indeed it could run on a lot of the waste we store currently after initial start up.
A point that Glass and I and a few others have tried to make regarding health care reform is that these payments that conservatives say we just can't afford are already for the most part built into the system. The problem is they are falling under a hundred different categories and through many high expense-low return systems such as the emergency room. By reorganizing how our health care economics work, creating front end access to the system for low wage earners, and using up-to-date tech to administrate, we will be able to create a much more efficient machine that produces the same results with far less waste.
It might need a little enrichment to kick start the process but once going it should be able to burn in large part off the wastes that had been inherent in the old system for so long. We have seen evidence from a multitude of different models that our standard of care is achievable for a much smaller investment in resources than we currently use. It is economically irresponsible for us not to revamp our methodologies in search of a better system. This is innovative progress and it should not be denied for fear of gremlins.
-------------------- No longer eligible for government service due to lack of tax issues. Posts: 5178 | From: Up North | Registered: Dec 2005
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posted
i can personally attest to to the problems we have with medical records...
i have had my right shoulder, and my right knee rebuilt (not replaced), and i have had fairly serious back issues fro over 15 years...
these fools have taken picture after picture over and over again... when i say, you can just order my old ones from so and so, they say no, they want new ones anyway...
between my knee and my back i've got over 30 MRI's and some of them take an hour and a half...
now the MRI is awesome, when my knee wnt out they didn't beleive me cuz the injury i described supposedly would have my laying on the ground unable to walk, and i was walking but i could feel the loose cartiledge in the joint grinding... aftert eh MRI, the doctors agreed that i needed surgery even tho i had no swelling wahtsoever....
but i've seen the bills on them and it's about 1400$ to do an MRI that's less than an hour... a couple of the two hour ones ran to 2500$ and that doesn't include the billing to read them...
the yrunb test after test over and over again, and they say they do it to protect themselves, but i often sign forms that tell me specifically that MY doctor owns the MRI machine, the blood test lab, and or the physical therapy clininc... in other words, they write their own orders to make even more money..
i am not against this, but i do see the conflict of interest as a major cost concern..
the other issue is that since they don't have the older records in their hands? it's easier to justify another test...
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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check out the story and see how this king rolls. big baller!
-------------------- It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so. Posts: 6949 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
Got to be king to afford a whole floor's worth of VIP recovery rooms. lol
big baller indeed.
Another issue with medical record is that they are too often destroyed if you switch facilities.
Wife tried to get some med records from before we were married and they didn't have em anymore. Said they only have to keep records for six years (I think) and after that if they haven't been accessed they are destroyed.
She lost a whole hell of a lot of information there that might have been very important for future care.
Personally, If I ever have kids, I would also like to be able to choose to link my health records to my kids as well. I know my father had a few different hereditary problems but who knows if I've remembered to tell my doc about em all. OR what if I switch doc's? Will I remember em all when I have to tell the new doc?
There needs to be a better system.
-------------------- No longer eligible for government service due to lack of tax issues. Posts: 5178 | From: Up North | Registered: Dec 2005
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I really don't think the system is that bad, it's just that no one really wants to take the time to get records these days, it all about money.
And we know that electronic medical records are not being pushed because they care about us.
The records can be right in front of them and most do not bother to look.
Ealier today i went to a doctor i see for general stuff.
I had to laugh a little bit when i asked him if he had privileges at a hospital i have been in a few times.
He said no and stated that these days most regular doctors send patients through admitting doctors because they get people in quicker and just do hospital visits.
He also stated that regular doctors cannot make any money by visiting a few of their regular patients at a hospital so they do it this way and that is the bottom line why.
posted
I have never found a personal touch in a doctors office that was wanted or enjoyable. Just sayin....
-------------------- No longer eligible for government service due to lack of tax issues. Posts: 5178 | From: Up North | Registered: Dec 2005
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posted
What I liked growing up is we had a family doctor at a local office. After the military when I began using the VA health care system I remember doctors always coming and going. I have one that has stuck around and he is great actually, he really does care about other people being healthy. He gets on my ass about smoking and drinking and eating a lot of meat.
-------------------- It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so. Posts: 6949 | Registered: Apr 2004
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-------------------- It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so. Posts: 6949 | Registered: Apr 2004
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ain't America Great!!!!
