Health care service in Ghana is of relatively high quality as compared to other African countries. Such indexes as tentative lifespan, mortality level, overall Health care expenditures are better than average indexes across Africa.
A most interesting and insightful article and op ed by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times
Is it accurate and insightful or just slighted propaganda ?
The analogy of the lines and lines of would be ( or denied ) patients at a Tennessee fair grounds – waiting to be assessed or treated is certainly a stark monument to the tales of American private health care – certainly when one invokes the proof source of the Micheal Moore landmark film Sikko, yet one wonders as well at the rigid and self serving bureaucracies of the medical care systems of such countries with “socialized “ or state run medical care systems – such as Canada or Britain who would downright deny and forbid these patients to have any alternative health care by any means. Indeed “private ” operations might well be shut down , or worse their professionals chastised and punished by any of a number of means.
The expression in the former Communist Soviet Unions was “They pretend to pay us …. we pretend to work” along with the maxim everyone had a job but no one could eat ( properly). That was except for the Communist party bosses.
Opponents suggest that a “government takeover” of health care will be a milestone on the road to “socialized medicine,” and when he hears those terms, Wendell Potter cringes. He’s embarrassed that opponents are using a playbook that he helped devise.
“Over the years I helped craft this messaging and deliver it,” he noted.
Mr. Potter was an executive in the health insurance industry for nearly 20 years before his conscience got the better of him. He served as head of corporate communications for Humana and then for Cigna.
He flew in corporate jets to industry meetings to plan how to block health reform, he says. He rode in limousines to confabs to concoct messaging to scare the public about reform. But in his heart, he began to have doubts as the business model for insurance evolved in recent years from spreading risk to dumping the risky.
Then in 2007 Mr. Potter attended a premiere of “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s excoriating film about the American health care system. Mr. Potter was taking notes so that he could prepare a propaganda counterblast — but he found himself agreeing with a great deal of the film.
A month later, Mr. Potter was back home in Tennessee, visiting his parents, and dropped in on a three-day charity program at a county fairgrounds to provide medical care for patients who could not afford doctors. Long lines of people were waiting in the rain, and patients were being examined and treated in public in stalls intended for livestock.
“It was a life-changing event to witness that,” he remembered. Increasingly, he found himself despising himself for helping block health reforms. “It sounds hokey, but I would look in the mirror and think, how did I get into this?”
Mr. Potter loved his office, his executive salary, his bonus, his stock options. “How can I walk away from a job that pays me so well?” he wondered. But at the age of 56, he announced his retirement and left Cigna last year.
This year, he went public with his concerns, testifying before a Senate committee investigating the insurance industry.
“I knew that once I did that my life would be different,” he said. “I wouldn’t be getting any more calls from recruiters for the health industry. It was the scariest thing I have done in my life. But it was the right thing to do.”
Mr. Potter says he liked his colleagues and bosses in the insurance industry, and respected them. They are not evil. But he adds that they are removed from the consequences of their decisions, as he was, and are obsessed with sustaining the company’s stock price — which means paying fewer medical bills.
One way to do that is to deny requests for expensive procedures. A second is “rescission” — seizing upon a technicality to cancel the policy of someone who has been paying premiums and finally gets cancer or some other expensive disease. A Congressional investigation into rescission found that three insurers, including Blue Cross of California, used this technique to cancel more than 20,000 policies over five years, saving the companies $300 million in claims.
As The Los Angeles Times has reported, insurers encourage this approach through performance evaluations. One Blue Cross employee earned a perfect evaluation score after dropping thousands of policyholders who faced nearly $10 million in medical expenses.
Mr. Potter notes that a third tactic is for insurers to raise premiums for a small business astronomically after an employee is found to have an illness that will be very expensive to treat. That forces the business to drop coverage for all its employees or go elsewhere.
All this is monstrous, and it negates the entire point of insurance, which is to spread risk.
The insurers are open to one kind of reform — universal coverage through mandates and subsidies, so as to give them more customers and more profits. But they don’t want the reforms that will most help patients, such as a public insurance option, enforced competition and tighter regulation.
Mr. Potter argues that much tougher regulation is essential. He also believes that a robust public option is an essential part of any health reform, to compete with for-profit insurers and keep them honest.
As a nation, we’re at a turning point. Universal health coverage has been proposed for nearly a century in the United States. It was in an early draft of Social Security.
Yet each time, it has been defeated in part by fear-mongering industry lobbyists. That may happen this time as well — unless the Obama administration and Congress defeat these manipulative special interests. What’s un-American isn’t a greater government role in health care but an existing system in which Americans without insurance get health care, if at all, in livestock pens.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/opinion/27kristof.html?em=&pagewanted=print
Medical Solution
MMedical Solution
www.mmediicalsolution.com
Medical tourism is a cash-rich industry. In Asia alone, studies have shown that some $390 billion are spent annually for health care. Most of this, finds its way into Thailand, India and Singapore, countries which currently lead the way in this field.
Can you imagine if the Philippines can just bite off a 10-percent chunk of this total budget? And that is just for medical tourism, not including the plain pleasure seekers, the bargain hunters, and the sightseers.
Medical tourism consists of medical care, health and wellness, traditional and alternative health care such as acupuncture, herbal medicine, virgin coconut oil, organic food, neutraceuticals and long-term tourism and international retirement health zones where foreign patients can recuperate, rehabilitate and retire. To complete the picture, the components of tourism and shopping have been added to increase the choices of tourists and bring in more.
Among the services that the country offers to foreigners are elective procedures such as cosmetic surgery, liposuction and dental surgery, and life-saving procedures such as coronary bypass surgery, kidney transplants and cancer treatment.
As testimony to the country’s advantages in medical tourism, a general checkup in the United States costs $5,000 while it will cost only the equivalent of $500 in the Philippines. Coronary bypass surgery, which clocks up $50,000 in the United States, will cost only $25,000 locally. And while kidney transplants can reach up to $150,000 abroad, it will only cost $25,000 here.
Even if the plane fare is added, trip to resort and a $100 gift certificate to add to their shopping money after they recover, the Philippine rate will still come out so much cheaper than having the surgeries abroad.
Cost is not only the country’s competitive advantage. The Philippines is also blessed with well-trained and highly skilled medical practitioners that are fluent in English and have received postgraduate training in the developed countries. Nurses and paramedical staff are also one of the best, as attested by the strong demand for their services and skills in foreign countries.
Besides competence, they are also known for their compassion, a key ingredient in caring for patients.
When the patients recuperate from the medical procedures that they came for, the variety of the country’s tourism offerings is also seen as a key advantage to luring medical tourism.
For sure, there will be the staple and indispensable aqua and beach tourism in Cebu, Palawan, Albay, Camiguin, Bohol, Boracay and of course Eastern Visayas. But the country also will offer historical, heritage and cultural tourism in places such as Leyte in Eastern Visayas, Vigan in Ilocos, the Banawe Rice Terraces, Fort Santiago and Intramuros, and the many interesting sites and activities in every province.
And don’t forget the great