hw 32

The illness and dying unit was very interesting because there are so many aspects to illness and dying which is something we tend to ignore in general. There are so many practices and processes that we follow almost roboticly with out really learning about what we are doing. Because we learned about the healthcare system I felt I was able to understand illness and dying and the handling of this in our society. I always thought of the doctor and medicine and the healthcare system in general as something that was obviously corrupted but could be effective if it was actually for the benefit of people. There is much more to it than this, by studying what the healthcare system actually focuses on as well as all the incentives of, and relationships between those in power really opened my eyes to how terrible our healthcare system truly is.

Hw 31

From abdul:
For Omar, Your most beautiful line was, " We are focused on fixing the problem after it has happened rather then trying to prevent the problem from happening in the first place." I personally believe this is so true, our healthcare system focuses way to much on "fixing" ( which I don't really see) the problem. If we hadn't set the healthcare system to be about profit in the first place we probably wouldn't be in the predicament that we're in now. I feel like as Americans we have this weird proud ego about our country and things that we have, we really shouldn't though it turns out not only does a our food system suck, but so does our healthcare. I'm very curious to learn what else are we doing bad in compared to other countries, besides education of course.

Abdul,
My favorite line was: "this system is flawed because the incentives for the HMOs are all about maximizing profit which can't happen if they pay for everyones healthcare. The less money they spend on procedures in general no matter how important they may be the better it is for them." To me this is the most important part when it comes to paying for healthcare. The incentives of HMO's go directly against the need of people seeking medical care. This obviously leads to some clash between the two. I think you did a very good job of showing this. In addition, by using your uncle to show how truly inhumane the healthcare system can be you gave the post not only factual evidence but a personal reality to open up the eyes of people who aren't really aware of these situations. Well done.

Younger:

"The US is the wealthiest country in the world at the moment(1). It would only be logical for one to think that they would have the best resources for their citizens."

I like this line because it is very true to me. If we are the wealthiest country in the world, there is absolutely no reason for anyone that lives in this country to not have Healthcare. It just makes no sense. Why is it that in England there is free Healthcare for everyone but in the U.S. there isn't? Seriously? This country's government really needs to improve and show us that they care about us because it doesn't seem like they do.....Politics as Usual.
-John Mejia

Older: be up soon

For ben:
Ben,
Your project was very interesting since you decided to explore a subject untouched during our unit. I think you did a very good job of breaking down a few foreign healthcare systems and showing how they were better than the US system and what their flaws were. I think that incentive is the essential point here. Our healthcare incentive is different thatn that of a country with socialized medicine. Your project did a good job at comparing the two. well done.

For Arden:
My favorite line was "An ending you simply cannot escape, death is inevitable. We like to think we are immortal." I think it is a pretty good summary of a feeling most people share in common. You did a very good job of making your blog post feel personal to the reader. I also think that breaking it up into section strengthened your project. good job

HW 30

Healthcare has been one of the biggest topics for debate over the years, as it is one of the most essential things that people need. Somehow we still find that a large population of the country is insured and those that are insured are not being provided substantial care. It is obvious that the US has the money to provide healthcare for all, so how come our healthcare system still has so many flaws. By studying the spending on healthcare a greater understanding of why our healthcare system is not effectively taking care of our population medically.

The US is the wealthiest country in the world at the moment(1). It would only be logical for one to think that they would have the best resources for their citizens. However, this doesn't seems to be the case. According to the World Health Organization, the US ranks 37th in the world for it's healthcare system(2). One would think that wealth and the quality of a countries healthcare system would correlate, but we see they do not. The US spends approximately 2.2 trillion dollars a year on healthcare(3). This is a little over 10 percent of our entire economy(3). It is obvious that our government is funneling an ample amount of money into the system, but how this money is spent is a different story.

Approximately one third of the governments healthcare budget is allocated in administrative costs(4). This means that over 600 billion dollars of our countries healthcare budget is not being spent on medicines, doctors, and any other forms of actual care for the people who this system is supposed to serve. The reason for this enormous expense in our budget is insurance companies. Insurance companies have been able to exploit the people of this country. By having people pay high premiums and denying as many claims as possible they have been successful in increasing their profits incredibly. The downfall to this is of course worse coverage for their clients which in turn leads to a worse healthcare system. As Michael Moore showed in Sicko the more denials an insurance company makes the more profit they make. Most insurance companies are privatized businesses whose sole motive is profit. Therefore, what they are essentially trying to do is make their clients pay in as much as possible on their monthly payments while minimizing the amount that they have to pay for care.

Insurance companies seem do whatever they can to avoid paying for healthcare although that is the service that they are offering. Whether it be denying people because of pre-existing conditions or whatever other reason they can find, they try their hardest to take your money with our reciprocating any services. Michael Moore's documentary SICKO provides a very good example of this. Laura is a middle aged woman who got into a head on collision while driving. The crash knocked her unconcious and she was taken by an ambulance to the hospital. She did have health insurance however they denied her coverage for the ambulance ride, an expensive ride, because it was not pre-approved. Although she was unconscious her ambulance ride was denied because she did not call to get it approved. Stories like this show the unhumane nature of the insurance companies our healthcare system revolves around. However, a third of our entire healthcare budget goes insurance companies like the same ones that denied Laura coverage on an ambulance ride. We are obviously not spending our money as efficiently as we can.

So now it is understood where a third of our budget is allocated, but where does the rest go? Ten percent of our budget is spent on prescription drugs(5). A little bit over 20 percent is spent on physician services, and a bit over 30 percent is spent on hospital care(5). These are the most substantial expenses as all other expenses do not surpass 10 percent of the budget. Spending a large amount on hospital care and doctors makes sense but the culture of healthcare in our society reveals a different story and provides some implication as to why our medical system is ranked so poorly.

Our government is not spending an ample amount on prevention. Therefore, a large amount of our money is going to hospital care. This means we are paying to help people after they get sick rather then taking effective cautionary steps to try to prevent sickness. We have very little programs that teach prevention and in turn we have fallen into a system that is focused on helping the sick after there sick, which is very important, rather than helping people not get sick. This culture not only leads to a massive amount of spending on hospital care but coincides with the grotesque amount of money being paid for administrative services. If less people got sick less administrative services would have to be paid. By increasing the allocating of our budget in the prevention category, which is now a measely 3 percent of our budget, we would not only decrease the amount of people getting sick but we would cut the amount needed to spend on taking care of the already sick, which is of course our biggest expense. Ken Thorpe, a professor at Emory University stated it quite well "Seventy-five percent of what we spend in health care is linked to chronically ill patients; less than 3 percent [is spent] in prevention, we do a great job of taking care of people after they're sick, we do a mediocre job of preventing people from getting sick."(6) Although it is questionable whether we do a great job taking care of the already sick it is obvious that we have too little focus on prevention.

Our country has the money, we have the resources, yet we still don't have an adequate healthcare system. We are spending more than enough money, but we are spending it inefficiently. It is our healthcare culture that is our biggest downfall. We are focused on fixing the problem after it has happened rather then trying to prevent the problem from happening in the first place. It is essential that we make an effort to prevent sickness as it is the only way we will really provide effective and efficient healthcare for all.



1.(International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, october 2010, Nomial GDP list of countries)
2. The world health report 2000 — health systems: improving performance. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2000.
3. President Obama's Fiscal 2010 Budget, Transforming and Modernizing America’s Health Care System, Whitehouse.gov
4. Costs of health administration in the US and Canada, woodhandler, september 21
5. US healthcare costs, Kaiseredu.org
6. US cancer costs in 2020, Lauren Cox

HW 29

Paying for Medical care

Our country's medical insurance system does not match up with our wealth. We have been spending enormous amounts of money on healthcare however, there are still approximately 50 million people without healthcare insurance(Sicko, Michael Moore). Healthcare has become expensive to even those with coverage many times driving them down into debt such as what happened to a family showed in the movie Sicko. Our healthcare budget is being misused. We are throwing money into the system but not using it efficiently. Although we are spending over a 100 billion dollars on our healthcare system we are ranked 37th in the world for healthcare, that should is simply inexcusable for a country that has as much wealth and resources as the US does.

The process of dying

There are different ways of dealing with death. Death is something that we many times would rather ignore. It shows us that we are mortal regardless of what we believe. For this reason we many times refuse to accept our illnesses and pretend we are completely healthy until we reach the point where denial is inevitable. For example Beth's husband had cancer and was feeling very weak but only until his symptoms were at the extreme did he decide to go see the doctor. In our culture we are not taught to deal with death even though it is an inevitable part of everyones life. It is only logical that we will have to deal with death, yet we don't know how to act around people who are ill and dying.

Isolation

Being ill is already very difficult to deal with however the isolation that people many times feel when they are ill makes it even harder. The article "stigma and social identity" by Erving Goffman shows that someone who does not meet certain standards or has something "different" about them are not seen on an equal level by their "normal" peers. This is something that very often happen subconciously. People who are ill are often babied or, in which ever form it may be, are treated different then they normally would. In nursing homes people are confined to a building in which they are surrounded by doctors and nurses, they often can not take care of themselves and need others to do so for them. According to Goffman's article it would only make sense that those taking care of the patients who can't do for themselves would not view them as equals and would not have the same respect for them although they are human. Those people who are taking care of the patients now will eventually need care themselves.

HW 28

For abdul:

I think the best part of this HW was that you showed the actions of someone receiving sufficient medical care, which is a situation we hardly dealt with in this unit. It was interesting how you talked about people reactions to her even after she was out of the hospital and how she reacted to that. The lack of knowing how to act around the ill or recovering is still awkward regardless of the medical treatment they receive. Good job at focusing on a topic we went into little depth about. Maybe there is some relation between the patients behavior and their health for example if your cousin was still sick would they like to be babied or not, how would their wants change depending on their situation.

From abdul: I think the best part of this HW was that you showed the actions of someone receiving sufficient medical care, which is a situation we hardly dealt with in this unit. It was interesting how you talked about people reactions to her even after she was out of the hospital and how she reacted to that. The lack of knowing how to act around the ill or recovering is still awkward regardless of the medical treatment they receive. Good job at focusing on a topic we went into little depth about. Maybe there is some relation between the patients behavior and their health for example if your cousin was still sick would they like to be babied or not, how would their wants change depending on their situation.

From younger:

From older:I liked this passage the best because the effective description you offer sets up the analysis later in the essay to be more powerful. Even though you give the reader a vivid picture of what daily life in the home is like but the small errors in your English discredit your work, make it harder to take seriously. This is not a small problem as you move toward college and find yourself wanting to make points that professors will not like, perhaps. Don't make it easy to dismiss your work as the product of someone who's not serious. I also put your run on sentences below in black. Don't try to stuff too many discrete ideas into one sentence. Give each idea room to breathe.

Hw 27

Although I did not visit an unwell or ill person over the break I can recall me experience this past summer working at a nursing home and with my new insight analyze it differently.During this past summer i worked at a primarily Jewish nursing home in williamsburg. It was a pretty depressing place. A building full of people who were sitting around waiting to die. They had to get passes to leave the building and the majority of them hardly left their floor. The floors had a very strong stench from patients who refused to shower, the rooms had to be cleaned daily, there were constantly spills throughout the building. Half of the patients were in wheelchairs and could hardly get around on their own. Then worst of all were the patients who were to sick to even leave their room. They would lay in their bed and watch T.v and sleep all day, food would be bought to their room, and they hardly got any interaction with other people, besides the housekeeping and the doctors. The quality of life was pretty bad to say the least however that was not the worst part of living in this nursing home.

That attitude of the entire staff as well as almost all of the patients was by far the most depressing thing about the place. The patients were used to being dependant on everybody you could tell there was a sense of shame, a sense that they felt beneath the nursing home staff. The nurses yelled when they got frustrated, the staff seemed disinterested in their problems, and people hardly took the time to interact with these people as if they were people. The staff seemed fed up with the patients, this is not to say that the staff were bad people because the patients were very irratating at times, but it seemed that many people lacked the compassion that these people deserve. It was as if society was throwing these people away and waiting for them to die and overall thats how they were treated.

This situation stems out of social practices more so than mortality and human vulnerability because although these people do need a large amount of help in taking care of themselves, the way we deal with people who are no longer "productive" components of society is very inhumane. It is one thing to help someone and another to look down on them for needing help. We must understand that those lucky enough to it to such an old age will need to be taken care of in some form or another and that this is not something to be looked down upon but simply a part of life. I think there is a big correlation between what a person can contribute to society and how they are treated. A working adult is treated with much more respect and usually seen as an equal by his peers however and old man or a young child is seen as someone who has to be taken care someone less deserving of the respect you give a middle aged adult. Not respect in the sense of being polite but respect in the sense of being treated as if they were a human being and as if their live was of value, because after all these are both true.

HW 26

Sicko - The drug and insurance companies have a tight grip over our healthcare system and are exploiting the american people for profit.

Near Death - even good medical care is not always that good because doctors are trying to save people who are already very sick instead of trying to prevent these sicknesses before they happen.

Mountains beyond mountains- There are alternative ways of dealing with medical issues for the poor but it seems that a clear cut solution is almost impossible due to the clash between profit and healthcare

Beth- People are reluctant to seek medical care. This is a reoccuring theme in our society.

People seem to only seek medical help when it is absolutely neccesary and doctors are there to provide help to those who are already sick. Maybe there should be more emphasis on preventing illness. I think the most important part to study is the healthcare system and it's relationship to the insurance/drug companies because they are outright exploiting people and leaving them to die for their own profits. It's murderous and easily preventable.