Something tells me that Massachusetts isn’t the only state where this is happening or can happen.

Similar scenarios have occurred repeatedly in hospitals across Massachusetts. Nurses can become desensitized to the constant blaring of monitor warnings, many of them false alarms – a phenomenon called alarm fatigue.

So what is needed here? Retraining perhaps? In any case the Boston Globe has done some great reporting here. They found that eleven deaths since 2005 can be attributed to alarm fatigue. This may also be something that the manufacturers of medical devices might need to address.

I just found it amazing that someone would have to work this much to pay the rent.

With Mr. Fok unable to work, the others had to pay the $1,200 monthly rent without him. He said his sons paid only the electric bill, so they could run the computer and air-conditioner; for the rest, his wife worked 13 hours a day, seven days a week at $5 an hour. She had little time to visit him in the hospital — and no time to take care of him should the hospital discharge him.

Oh and the rest of this article highlights the broken healthcare system. Which in this case cost a hospital one million dollars. I’m not saying Mr. Fok did not need healthcare but the way the system was set up it ended up hurting the hospital. This story is one of immigration law and healthcare.

Mr. Fox was scared to divulge information about his family because they were all undocumented except for a daughter who was born here and is therefore a US citizen. By not telling the hospital about his family it made it difficult to get Mr. Fok covered under Medicaid.

New York’s Department of Social Services allows Medicaid and other welfare benefits to illegal immigrants who can demonstrate that the government does not intend to deport them, or who have an immediate relative who is a citizen and files an application on their behalf.

So the patient had nowhere to go. There wasn’t a nursing home that would take him because he was undocumented and did not have Medicaid.

The teabagger darling Nikki Haley, like other GOP governors who put their feet in their mouths is taking federal money while at the same time denouncing that money.

While the state’s top Republican officials are united in their public opposition to the sweeping overhaul, the Palmetto State is at the same time using millions of dollars from the law. The money is flowing to agencies in the cabinet of Gov. Nikki Haley — who like many Republicans has railed against the law as “Obamacare” on a regular basis — along with local communities and public and private employers.

Silly Republicans I guess the tea party is more naive than I thought.

In South Carolina, after Republican support for a Democratic lawmaker’s bill that would have created a state exchange wilted in the face of tea party pressure during the current legislative session, Haley issued an executive order creating the South Carolina Health Exchange Planning Committee to study the issue.

The 12-member group, which is being funded by a $1 million exchange planning grant from the health-care overhaul, subsequently removed the word “exchange” from its name.

The hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Removing the word exchange from the name?

Maybe—but probably not by much. Even routine medical care—such as having a baby or treating diabetes for a year—can cost more about $9,000 and $7,000 respectively. And catastrophic events, like a heart attack, can easily top $75,000. Yet for many non-management workers at McDonalds restaurants, that’s all their health plan covers.

McDonalds so called “mini-med” plan is one of 200 given special federal exemptions from the new health-care reform law because.  The waivers are necessary, some companies claim, because otherwise the plans might be too expensive to be practical.

via Consumer Reports Health Blog: Is $2,000 a year of health-insurance coverage better than nothing?.

So they are complaining that even two thousand dollars a year is too much? I know that at least Starbucks has a decent health plan and you can’t tell me that McDonald’s isn’t in line to compete with Starbucks! Yes, I realize that the restaurants are franchises and these plans are doled out by their owners, but this is pathetic. They have the audacity to call it “mini-med?” If anyone should be for universal health coverage it should be these McDonald’s franchise owners they should team up with Wal-Mart and the big auto makers who also wanted it at one point.

But it turns out that Mackeys claims, which also fueled conservative opposition to the Democrats health-care bill, were misleading. In a memo that he sent to all employees last month, obtained by Mother Jones, Mackey concedes that Whole Foods is actually sinking under the weight of its health care expenses. In the past seven years, he writes, the cost of the company’s health care plan as a percentage of its sales has gone up 60 percent. This year’s tab is “equal to about 10% of the total Team Member compensation of $2 billion,” Mackey complains. “On average over the past three years we have spent more on health care costs than we have made in total net profits!”

via Whole Foods CEO: Yes, We Have No Obamacare | Mother Jones.

You sir sound like the big auto corporations and Wal-Mart who were saying the same thing! Some of them actually joined with then SEIU President Andy Stern to push for a healthcare coverage solution that was national in its scope. Mr. Mackey you could have been a part of that. As much as I dislike Wal-Mart even they while not providing healthcare for part timers–which is a large amount of their workforce–told them how to sign up for healthcare from “big guv’mint.”

Last year, the 636,000 customers who bought individual health plans from Anthem Blue Cross in California only got an average of 72 percent of their premiums back in the form of actual health care, according to a study of rate filings commissioned by Health Care for America Now, a reform advocacy group. The rest went to administrative expenses, corporate profits, agent commissions, and executive salaries.

Angela Braly, the CEO of Anthem’s corporate parent WellPoint, took home $12.8 million in direct compensation that same year, according to the Wall Street Journal’s annual report on CEO pay. WellPoint reported profits of $2 billion in the first nine months of this year alone. And earlier this year, the company provoked outrage when it sought to hit those long-suffering California consumers with rate increases as high as 39 percent.

via Consumer Reports Health Blog: Fighting back against bloated insurance premiums.

I still feel that healthcare insurance corporations do more harm than good. At least come 2011 they will have to spend at least eighty percent on healthcare and stop denying claims because of preexisting conditions.

“The average insurance plan for a family of four costs $13,250,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “Some insurers report spending as little as 60 percent of their premium dollars on care. Those plans would have to refund nearly $3,500 to that family.”

It’s rather sad that the tea party can’t see anything good in that statement. They don’t want “big guv’mint” telling them what to do but they’d rather Wellpoint drag them over burning hot coals.

If you lose your job after June 1, you’ll see more than just your paycheck disappear. You also won’t get the 65% federal subsidy to cover your COBRA health insurance premium.

That’s because House Democrats last week opted not to extend the subsidy in order to bring down the cost of a jobs and tax bill winding its way through Congress. Continuing the provision through Dec. 31 would run $7.8 billion.

via No extension of federal subsidy of COBRA premiums – Jun. 6, 2010.

I’m not sure this is such a good move.

“I’m unemployed. I don’t have money to pay for medical bills,” said Stephanie Kohnke, a St. Paul, Minn. resident who lost her job in May and is waiting to be approved for the subsidy. “This is the worst time to lose that safety net.”,

COBRA let me also say it not cheap either! The premiums are still expensive.

In her statement Saturday, Keehan made it clear she thinks any qualms about abortion language in the Senate version can be resolved, and in any event are not enough to justify opposition to what Catholic leaders say is a pro-life issue and a “human right” — universal and affordable health care. Keehan attended a March 3 briefing by President Obama at the White House, an event she said clarified her decision to support the bill.

via Catholic Health Group Accepts Abortion Language in Reform Bill — Politics Daily.

The right wing religious fundamentalists in both parties are being used by health insurance corporatists to kill the healthcare bill. I’m glad that Sister Carol Keehan has not allowed the likes of Aetna, Humana, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, GHI and UnitedHealthcare to continue their evil sociopathic attack on reform.

I tend to put the anti-vaccination crowd up there with the “birthers” and the “truthers.” Now the Lancet gives us the ammunition.

Yesterday, the medical journal the Lancet retracted a 12-year-old paper by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, which helped fan a scare about vaccines and autism.

Now discredited, the report looked at just a dozen children who developed behavioral and intestinal problems. Eight of them had been recently vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella.