There is still a great deal of controversy surrounding the role of cell phones in cancer development. The cell phone industry insists that cell phones are safe, and conflicting scientific evidence hardly refutes their claim. Only time will tell if the cell phone is the new cigarette. So, what does the research tell us?
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Abstract
Approximately one million children are abused in the United States each year. The health care worker is in a position to help these children and have a moral, ethical and legal obligation to do so. In the American culture, child abuse is wrong and everyone, including the health care worker, has a moral obligation to report suspected child abuse. However, as a member of a professional society, health care workers are also bound by a code of ethics requiring them to act in the patient’s best interest. Finally, all states and territories have laws requiring certain professions to report suspected child abuse and the health care worker is among those with this legal mandate.
A merger of projects between the Department of Defense and Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory gives the Military Health Service (MHS) the ability to track and isolate disease outbreaks and other biological events worldwide. According to Sean Gallagher, writing for Government Computer News, “If you go to sick call on a military post anywhere in the world,” you’re going to be a “datapoint in the Electronic Surveillance System for Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics” or “ESSENCE,” as it’s more commonly called. ESSENCE is a web-based biosurveillance application used to provide medical awareness to the military medical community.
The ESSENCE system links medical data with geographic information systems, providing a mechanism for the MHS to track the spread of symptoms worldwide to within a zip code or specific military unit. The advantage of this system is the early warning it provides of potential biological outbreaks or attacks. This allows the MHS, and other organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control, to mount timely defense actions to protect the population. Col Kenneth Cox, the Air Force Medical Service director of Force Health Readiness, explains,
“Systems like this identify cases that are consistent with flu-like illness early on, and then–once outbreaks have started at any point around the world, since this system encompass[es] all of our units around the globe–then we can move to protect those people and move vaccines and antiviral drugs around, since they’re in limited supply [and prepositioned] in regional depots.”
The only real issue with the system is security; ESSENCE isn’t impenetrable to cyber-attack.
Originally, the ESSENCE application was served on a web-based platform and provided purely statistical information. The information was anonymous and only aggregated data was available to users. The current version of ESSENCE has been integrated into the MHS architecture and has the ability to isolate events to a specific service member’s medical record. This added new requirements to the application’s deployment, including compliance with federal laws pertaining to patient privacy and the release of medical information. Although more useful, the added capabilities have made the system more attractive to hackers; an acceptable tradeoff considering the knowledge gleaned through this emerging technology.
The spectre of single-payer socialized medicine has once again reared its ugly head. Driven by current political debate and Michael Moore’s movie, “SICKO,” many Americans are jumping on the “free healthcare” bandwagon. In the movie, Moore specifically praised Canada’s single-payer system, and many would like to have something similar in the U.S. Folks defend Canada’s system and the U.K.’s “National Health” by claiming that patients don’t have to worry about paying for healthcare because it’s free. Well, I have news for you…there’s always a cost, and nothing is free.
In a single-payer healthcare system, the government pays the doctor bills. Where does the government get the money to do this? Taxes! In a socialized medicine system, each citizen pays for his neighbor’s medical care in the form of taxes. The government, rather than the individual, the patient, determines how that money is spent. Incidentally, in Canada, when figured as a percentage of GDP, total taxation is 28% higher than the U.S.
Next, to control costs, the government implements waiting lists as a method of restricting access to crucial medical specialty services. This imposes a second, hidden cost to patients in the form of “time.” According to the Fraser Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Canada,
“Canadian doctors say patients wait almost twice as long for treatment than is clinically reasonable, … almost 18 weeks between the time they see their family physician and the time they receive treatment from a specialist.”
As a result of these waiting lists, the mortality rate for otherwise treatable conditions such as breast and prostate cancer are significantly higher in Canada than in the U.S. For example, a Canadian woman who discovers a lump in her breast might wait for months before receiving the surgery and chemotherapy she needs, with the cancer cells multiplying rapidly as each week goes by. However, if she lived in the United States, she could be treated in a matter of days.
An exaggeration? Each year, the Fraser Institute publishes “Waiting Your Turn.” The 2006 edition gives waiting times, by treatment, from a patient’s referral by a general practice doc to his or her treatment by a specialist. The shortest waiting time was for oncology (4.9 weeks); while, the longest waiting time was for orthopedic surgery (40.3 weeks). This was followed by plastic surgery (35.4 weeks) and neurosurgery (31.7 weeks). In fact, wait times in Canada have increased 91% since 1993, and its estimated these excessive wait times cost an average of $1,100 to $5,600 annually per patient.
Canada isn’t alone in this, either. According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, an American non-profit conservative think-tank, one in eight patients in the U.K. will wait more than a year for surgery. If that’s not bad enough, France’s failed health care system resulted in the deaths of 13,000 people, mostly of dehydration, during a heat wave in 2003. While many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched to capacity, hospitals stopped answering phones, and ambulance attendants told people to fend for themselves.
This tax on time is especially cruel because the burden falls hardest on the sickest patients, (those with the least amount of time to spare). Consequently, Canadian patients routinely suffer and die while waiting for their “free” healthcare. The National Center for Policy Analysis notes,
“During one 12-month period in Ontario, … 71 patients died waiting for coronary bypass surgery while 121 patients were removed from the list because they had become too sick to undergo surgery.”
In an article describing why socialized medicine doesn’t work, Dr. Jacques Chaoulli, a Canadian physician writes,
“And if we measure a health care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50%; the European rate is just 35%. Esophageal carcinoma: 12% in the U.S., 6% in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2% here, yet 61.7% in France and down to 44.3% in England — a striking variation.”
Personally, give me a market-driven healthcare system with little to no government intervention. After all, companies like FedEx provide superior service because they’re driven to make a profit. That’s why they concentrate on working efficiently and innovating. That’s why they’re the world leader in ground transportation. People don’t complain about FedEx, but they do complain about services delivered by the government.
Why are there fewer complaints in market-delivered services, than in government-delivered services? The answer is simple: In the market economy, the forces of profit are ruthless, and the threat of loss and bankruptcy make suppliers accountable to customers. For government-delivered services, there’s no such accountability. However, the government is quick to point the finger at businesses such as insurance companies and medical practices, touting them as inefficient, bloated bureaucracies, and the cause of increased healthcare costs in America.
Really?
Researchers at Dartmouth Medical School, who have been studying Medicare’s performance for three decades, suggest that the Medicare system is set up to be inefficient. In the Medicare system, supply, not demand, drives medical care! According to Dartmouth’s 2006 State of the Nation’s Health report,
“high-cost regions boast 32% more hospital beds, 31% more physicians, 65% more medical specialists, 75% more general internists, and 29% more surgeons than low-cost regions. Yet with all of these resources, the outcomes are no better. In other words, more intensive care is driven not by medical need but by what looks very much like excess capacity. Supply is fueling demand.”
In other words, if you build it (the bed), he (the patient) will come.
So, what is the result of this apparent overtreatment? No matter what is driving a doctor’s decision-making (uncertainty, convenience or the automatic tendency to use whatever resources are available—whether time, beds, or technology), none of these factors seem to have much to do with either medical science or the needs of the patient. Dartmouth reports that,
“Each step of the way, an individual doctor may or may not be overtreating a particular patient. But … a big-picture view of aggregate outcomes in high-spending regions shows “higher mortality rates … and no improvement in function.”
With its decades of data, Dartmouth has exposed the incredible waste in the U.S. healthcare system. Dartmouth estimates that up to one-third of the over $2 trillion we spend each year on healthcare is
“squandered on unnecessary hospitalizations; unneeded and often redundant tests; unproven treatments; over-priced, cutting-edge drugs; devices no better than the less expensive products they replaced; and end-of-life care that brings neither comfort nor cure.”
Furthermore, government-run Medicare now enforces 130,000 pages of regulations. No insurance company does that. However, our government certainly imposes the cost of compliance with that paper nightmare on the insurance companies, medical practices and hospitals that try to operate in the black.
Noted American satirist, P. J. O’Rourke said, “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.”
You betcha!
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