If you are fed up with the cost and quality of U.S. healthcare, here’s why you should support the ousting of Senators Bill Cassidy, (R-La), and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz), Reps. David McKinley (R-W.Va) and Doris Matsui (D-Calif), along with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and AG Dana Nessel.
Among the things I’m grateful for this American Thanksgiving are the brave doctors and other qualified professionals who braved online banishment for daring to speak truth to power. Orwell is proving to be an optimist.
Here’s why you should never provide a hospital or other healthcare provider with your social security number and other personal information they don’t require.
A Kaiser Health News investigation revealed that more than 10,000 patients were diagnosed with Covid last year after being admitted for another condition. Just over 2,000 died between April and September. While the findings are alarming, even more alarming are the tens of thousands of patients who die every year at U.S. hospitals because of hospital acquired infections.
And 2020 was a disturbingly banner year.
Call me old fashioned, but when a former investigator for the U.S. Senate Finance Committee specializing in corruption in science and medicine publishes an expose in a respected medical journal questioning the integrity of some of Pfizer’s pivotal vaccine trials, I consider it BIG news. The expose is even more compelling given that more than a year ago the writer questioned the integrity of the Trump appointee overseeing Operation Warp Speed.
Apologies in advance, but I needed to resort to a couple of Yiddish words to adequately capture the audacity of the American Hospital Association accusing nurse staffing companies of improperly profiting from the pandemic. The nurse staffing business is booming because they pay nurses higher wages and guarantee better working conditions than AHA member hospitals, who long exploited nurses and ignored their patient safety concerns.
Nurse staffing companies overwhelmingly are run by entrepreneurial nurses like LeQuitha Simmons, a former army vet who served in Iraq and understands the law of supply and demand. Simmons isn’t an enemy of U.S. healthcare. The AHA is.
Given my interest in healthcare corruption and wrongdoing I’ve developed a certain immunity to the filth the engulfs me reading a daily parade of stories underscoring why the U.S. has the most expensive, inefficient, and inhumane healthcare system of any developed country. But after reading a story about the intimate relationship between the major organization representing emergency room doctors and private equity, I needed a long, hot shower.
U.S. hospitals are looking to the Philippines, Canada, and elsewhere to poach nurses to replace a critical shortage of U.S. care givers. Contrary to what the corporate media reports, the shortage is the result of bad and abusive managements, not the pandemic.
My argument as to why U.S. healthcare would be vastly better off if the country imported foreign hospital CEOs and nurtured our homegrown nursing talent.
Corporate media journalists delude themselves into believing that those who distrust and despise them the most are ignorant Trump supporters who can’t handle the truth about their leader. In fact, thanks to biased and dishonest pandemic reporting, a swath of new corporate media haters has emerged, and they are among the smartest and most educated people in the U.S. and around the world.
Analyzing pandemic and vaccine data is a highly specialized expertise, a pursuit where amateurs can easily find themselves looking stupid. I learned this lesson the hard way.