America losing patience with a failing healthcare system
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Onus is on workers to buy health insurance as rising costs force firms to end perk.
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A blistering audit claims the state&#39;s Medicaid system is in such disarray that 1.4 million pills are missing, thousands of people who are dead or lack Social Security numbers are getting millions of dollars in benefits and abuse of mental patients may be
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What was in many ways a great display of American medicine was also an example of whatâs wrong with our health care system.
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Patients in accident and emergency units are still failing to treat people quickly enough, according to the latest figures.
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It&#39;s time Gray Matters put up or shut up, instead of merely complaining about what passes for the American health care system.
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Medication mistakes injure well over 1.5 million Americans every year, a toll too often unrecognized and unfought, says a sobering call to action.
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Many Americans who have relied on pain pills say their faith in the system intended to protect them has been eroded.
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On health care, President Bush says he stands with the doctors and Americans who are struggling to find affordable medical services. Democrat John Kerry says Bush has stood idle as medical bills have skyrocketed during his presidency.
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The United States has the best health care system in the world, but financial barriers prevent too many Americans from getting the affordable coverage they need.
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While the Bush administration's words of support for a high-technology future for health care have been plentiful, the dollars, it seems, are scarce.
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US Democratic Senator John Kerry said Wednesday night that the health care system in the United States had gotten worse under President George W. Bush overthe course of the last four years.
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Americans are cramming their medicine chests ever fuller in the struggle to lower cholesterol, treat depression, reduce inflammation and ease other illnesses.
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President George W. Bush and White House rival John Kerry are pushing competing remedies for the crippled US healthcare system, with some 45 million Americans are unable to afford health insurance.
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Around the United States, there are perplexing geographic variations in medical expenses and the quality of care.
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Our health care system is a frustrating mix of routine miracles and scandalous failures. The miracles abound; Bill Clintonâs recent open-heart surgery was cutting-edge a few decades ago.
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The government proposals for public health reform dominated the headlines all week. But past attempts to address the health of the nation have tried and failed, experts say.
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The U.S. government needs to step up its push for electronic health records because they are not being adopted quickly enough, a group of health advocates said Friday.U.S. healthcare providers continue to make errors that hurt tens of thousands of patients each year, and e-health records could prevent many of those problems, said Dr. Alan Lotvin, senior vice president of oncology for Magellan Health Services Inc. The U.S. healthcare system is failing patients &quot;despite the fact we have the knowledge and the technology to really do a much, much better job.&quot;About 3.5 percent of all U.S. hospital stays have a drug error associated with them, leading to more than 100,000 significant medical problems and nearly 30,000 deaths each year, said Lotvin, speaking at an e-health forum sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Health IT Now Coalition.U.S. residents should have a &quot;sense of outrage&quot; when confronted with these prescription errors, which would largely be prevented with e-health records, Lotvin said. He compared the U.S. health-care system&#39;s record to Amazon.com, which received 2,000 orders per minute during the 2005 holiday shopping season.&quot;I use Amazon a lot -- I have never gotten the wrong book,&quot; he said. &quot;We can&#39;t seem to get the pills from the pharmacy in the basement to Mrs. Smith in room 631 correctly. This is not acceptable.&quot;Lotvin called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would mandate that healthcare providers report their error rates. He also called for a law that would require healthcare providers that have made mistakes on a patient to pay for any subsequent care required. Many medical errors can result in long hospital stays or expensive procedures, and in many cases, patients or their insurance providers pay, he said.&quot;You break it, you fix it,&quot; he said. &quot;That&#39;s a very simple concept. It&#39;s been around in china shops for years.&quot;In addition, the ITIF, in a report released Friday, recommended several steps Congress could take to encourage the adoption of e-health records:*&#160;Congress should pass legislation that supports the adoption of national health data standards. The report mentioned two bills that provide funding and organization at a national level, the Wired for Health Care Quality Act in the Senate, and the Promoting Health Information Technology Act in the House of Representatives.*&#160;Congress should pass a bill to support the creation of health record data banks, data centers where individual patients could store and control their health data. The Independent Health Record Trust Act in the House would regulate data bank operators, prohibiting them from charging fees to health-care providers for accessing or updating an e-health record upon permission of the patient.*&#160;The U.S. government should lead by example by covering the monthly access fees at health record data banks for patients covered by government-funded programs such as Medicare and the State Children&#39;s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).*&#160;Congress should allow patients free access to e-health records held by healthcare providers. Currently, medical privacy laws allow patients to get paper copies of their medical records, but healthcare providers can charge fees for copying and mailing those records. Congress should phase out those fees, a measure that would encourage doctors to move to electronic records, ITIF said.Currently, only about 25 percent of U.S. doctors use e-health records, and only about 10 percent of them have e-health records fully integrated into their practices, ITIF said. But in Sweden, 90 percent of doctors use e-health records, and in Denmark, 88 percent do, according to the ITIF.That shows that adoption in the U.S. is a matter of the right policies and incentives, said Robert Atkinson, ITIF&#39;s president. &quot;This is not rocket science,&quot; he said.More people need to push Congress to create incentives for e-health records, added Nancy Johnson, a former U.S. representative and co-chairwoman of the Health IT Now Coalition.&quot;Why, when we know this would help so much, are we not doing it?&quot; Johnson said. &quot;We know how to deliver a higher quality of care, and we&#39;re not doing it.&quot;