- Are therapists becoming social justice warriors?
- Some NY lawmakers want to make organ transplants available to illegal immigrants, while citizens stay on waiting lists. (NYT)
- Illinois offers free health care to some illegal immigrants. Spending already balloons to $1.1 billion – five times the initial projection.
- Mass bill: prisoners would get reduced sentences for donating their organs or bone marrow to other patients.
Category: Health Insurance
Addicted to Drug Money: States Not Spending Opioid Settlement Funds on Addiction Treatment
In was the dawn of the 21st Century when untreated pain became a public health priority. In 1990 Dr. Mitchel Max, then president of the American Pain Society, authored an editorial in the Annals of Internal Medicine lamenting the lack of progress treating pain over the previous two decades. Within a few years Joint Commission jumped on the bandwagon and published Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign. Thus began America’s experiment in aggressive pain treatment and its descent into opioid addiction and overdose deaths.
The High Cost of Poor Mental Health
There is a growing mental health crisis today. Numerous people report being depressed or anxious due to Covid and its aftermath. As the Texas mall shooting illustrates there is a lot of untreated mental illness in the United States. Indeed visits to the emergency rooms (ER) for mental health problems are on the rise. A mental health issue such as a panic attack can mimic other problems. I met a cab driver who said he went to the ER for a heart attack but it turned out to be a panic attack. Purportedly, hundreds of thousands of Medicaid patients seek treatment in emergency rooms for mental health.
Saturday Links
- In just eight years, nearly 78 million Medicare beneficiaries will face an automatic 11% payment cut in their hospital insurance benefits.
- GOP bill would prohibit the use of quality-adjusted-life-year (QALY) and similar measures for health insurance coverage and payment determinations.
- Related concept: The “value of a statistical life” appears to vary by income. In essence, being wealthier equates to being more willing to buy what might make one “healthier.”
- Reason magazine investigation: woman in federal prison dies of medical neglect.