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Showing posts from December, 2010

Still dying, still arguing

People are still dying. Since America has this system whereby profit is the engine for curing disease, many will go bankrupt or simply die. On the Huffington Post today there is a story of a little blond 5 year-old girl with leukemia, living in Montana. The father is a disabled vet and the mother works as a house cleaner. Once diagnosed, the first bill was larger than what the family makes in one year. Another family, the Petriekis' family from Indiana, lucked out when Medicaid of Indiana refused treatment because of a bureaucratic snafu (the treatment was labeled "experimental" despite a 73% success rate) but the insurance handling Medicaid claims for that state finally stepped in. A catastrophe narrowly avoided. (One has to wonder if the insurance would have acted if the situation hadn't become widely known.) The cases go on and on...it is not hard to find them. Reading the comments on the Huffington Post is instructive, too. People from the U.S. are embarrassed by