Christian Leftist

The issue came up at a meeting in Vienna for the European Society of Cardiology. Shocker, that. The Discovery web site has an article about it here.

What is shocking is that this wasn’t news during the massive heat wave of 2003, when 35,000 people died in Europe, many of them the sick, the elderly, or others with undiagnosed health problems. That number was well above the normal expected deaths from heatstroke and cardiovascular failure from heat exhaustion.

Once the North Pole reaches that tipping point - when the amount of dark warmer water is heating up the ice so much that there is no way to reverse the melting trend - it will cause a chain reaction of events that will result in all of the other nasty effects that scientists have warned the public about for years…with one notable exception.

It’s going to be a long, long, long, hot summer.

Just something to think about.

In keeping with the spirit of this post on the mess that is the home nursing industry, here’s an article from Yahoo discussing today’s Supreme Court decision that said that health care workers who are employed at home are not entitled to either minimum wages or overtime pay.

Well, that’s one way to make someone’s wiping your Aunt Crotchety’s butt for $4.50/hour more like a human being.

One of the most redeeming aspects of the television news industry is that it can expose the worst possible outcome of any scenario and drive a point starkly home in the space of thirty seconds. That’s what ABC News did on Thursday when it covered the Paris Hilton jail scandal. I don’t think there is an accurate estimate of precisely how much medical suffering goes on in prison, but I’ll hazard a guess and use my treatment when I was in lockup as an example.

If your medical condition requires that you take certain pills on a daily basis to function and it has been proven that going cold turkey on said pills WILL cause severe physiological effects (say, a complete mental breakdown and suicidal tendencies), it is in everyone’s best interests that you receive those medications. When I pleaded for medical attention, the guard took a look at me, snarled, “She’s not dying!” and walk away. Among several other civil rights violations, I was released rather than treated because it would have meant more trouble for the police. If there hadn’t been lawyers filing en masse for a group of us as a whole and a significant media presence surrounding our arrests, other protesters and I would have languished in roach-infested cells as long as the paperwork backups continued, possibly for weeks.

Google the Washington Post articles on Jonathan Magbie, and you’ll understand how cruel and heartless the criminal justice system truly is towards anyone who isn’t as healthy as a horse. That’s just a taste of the horror stories to have emerged from U.S. prisons. I can’t imagine the treatment in countries poorer than our own.

Medical care is not supposed to be a ‘luxury that prisoners don’t deserve.’ It is a basic human need, and there is no excuse that can justify the physical and mental suffering of a patient whose problems are treatable.

Want to know the difference between socialized health care in France and privatized health care in the U.S.? France screws you after you turn 65; the U.S. screws you until you turn 65.

My family received an email a couple of days ago which said that my grandmother is now completely dependent on my uncle and therefore cannot live in her apartment any longer. His family has to do what is sadly the only option left to middle- and lower-class citizens with an elderly parent: send them to a nursing home. The French government isn’t going to grant her their equivalent of Medicare until all of her children AND grandchildren submit their financial histories to them. Read: me and my brother, who is barely old enough to vote, are supposed to tell a foreign company how much we make off of Ebay because they expect us to pay until we bleed before it will consider giving her financial assistance.

Apparently, France expects its young to provide for both themselves, their own families and their parents simultaneously. I suppose it might be easier to do so if we had the luxury of job security and free health care for everyone under 65 like they do. You see, one of the many reasons why unemployment is so high in France is that employers are legally prohibited from firing most of their employees unless rare and critical requirements occur (at least , this is the impression I formed after the riots last spring over proposed changes to the rules left thousands of burnt-out cars in their wake). We here in the U.S.A. lose our jobs for reasons as obtuse as disclosing a keyword we use at a marketing firm or as petty as forgetting to tuck in one’s shirt at Blockbuster. Decent health care here is rapidly becoming as elusive to most of the country as a college education. So excuse me, Monsieur, if I sniff at the notion of paying for a service that should be entirely government-subsidized, no questions asked. Not that we’re any better off here until we receive our Social Security checks, mind you, and that won’t be a sure thing after the baby boomers wreak havoc on our economy, but for now it’s a decent system.

I was a little tetchy after hearing the news, especially since my other grandmother died less than three months ago, and the average patient at an American nursing home or hospice lives less than a year after their admittance. (My advice to those of you with folks in the ‘retirement centers’ — make sure they’re kept well-hydrated. Everything functions better with a healthy amount to fluids in the system, and it’s so ridiculously easy for nurses to overlook it until a patient’s organs start to fail.) So when I saw an article by Gary Rotstein on a study’s recommendations that home health care be funded the same way nursing home care is, I was all ears.

The Pittsburgh-Post Gazette reports, in summary, that efforts to fund home care have been insufficicient. Other states have made home care an entitlement if the senior has qualified for Medicaid and paid down his/her assets. It’s an extremely brief article, musch like any other candid conversation about why health care in America needs to be accessible to every citizen.