I just finished Cory’s article. One of Yuval Harari’s theses in “Nexus” is that democracies are robust because they correct for systemic flaws. The 
health care system looks like abject insanity from north of the border.
It feels like we’re about to chuck out the Conservative government in Ontario 
in no small part because of the continued degradation of the health care system here. We don’t have a complete pharma-care system, drugs are only covered if you’re poor, and the Cancer Society has just published a report on the average cost of treatment, an average of $33,000 per patient.
That cost looks extreme to us.
And not, as I gather you know, to us USians. The cost can be close to a million, I’ve heard. In US dollars, of course. And as Luigi the Avenger has brought to light, that cost is often largely denied by insurance companies, leaving many patients who can’t afford it to die. And that’s just cancer.
Sorry, you probably know all of that. I’m just ranting, while also hoping that the clarity and rage brought into the open recently keeps burning bright. 
We enjoy our declining lifespan. It smells like freedom.
Does this belong under “Healthcare”? Via @Abe_the_honest 's Mastodon feed.
There’s a lot to unpack and, at the same time, not a lot to unpack. Much of it is a run around various rabbit warrens of the usual excuses for fringe thinking. The key point seems to be that the young man seems to have had spinal fusion surgery after a surfing injury.
I think I took it from “kinda commie memes”
I know I have mentioned the slow-motion collapse of healthcare in this country. Ran across this article that put numbers to it in my field, especially.
These interactions left a permanent imprint on their opinions of the specialty, as we now see in the outcome of this year’s National Residency Match, with 30% of pediatric residency programs going unfilled.
Per the Children’s Hospital Association, though all pediatric subspecialties are experiencing shortages, developmental-behavioral, neurology, genetics, and child and adolescent psychiatry are among the worst with more than 40% of in-hospital positions vacant. Without an immediate intervention, pediatric care in the United States will experience an unprecedented decline.
It is not isolated to Peds, of course, but we seem to be particularly targeted by political types as enemies and defunded at every opportunity. I got no answers, and I feel sort of guilty because I will be able to bail before it gets totally untenable. But this is coming. And despite years of shrieking into the void, it seems no one cares.
Edited to add an adult doc POV:
New “Bear or Man” dropped.
Not to mention people who are suburban but can’t or don’t want to travel miles and miles through dense traffic to huge city centers where the doc’s office is.
I’ve had all my HRT appointments (besides blood draws) through telehealth. I receive care Planned Parenthood and when I started only two of their clinics offered that care; both were hours away.
The risks from giving medications to birthing patients and then testing them for illicit substances have been well documented. A 2022 study by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital found that 91% of women given fentanyl in their epidurals tested positive for it afterward. Other studies have found that mothers can quickly pass these medications onto their babies. A baby’s positive drug test “cannot and should not be used to identify fentanyl drug abuse in mothers,” said Athena Petrides, the lead researcher of one of the studies at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
This is not unknown territory. These are not new issues. This is purely stupid laziness and automatic, zero tolerance bullshit. Every moment this is allowed to continue is another movement away from patient-doctor cooperation and towards subservience. As intended.
As our centennial series continues, and as the shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO led to an outpouring of frustration from consumers, Elisabeth Rosenthal, senior contributing editor at KFF Health News, former ER physician and author of An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back (Penguin Press, 2017), breaks down the perception and reality of health care and health insurance in the United States over the last century.
Cory Doctorow’s article about the guy who shot the United Healthcare CEO and its connections to his story, ‘Radicalized’, has this paragraph:
"Nurses and doctors hate Thompson and United. United kills people, for money. During the most acute phase of the pandemic, the company charged the US government $11,000 for each $8 covid test:
Pluralistic: 06 Sep 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
which refers to this:
We U.S.ians are in the grip of “profit at any price” and the price, it turns out, if we are talking about health “insurance” companies, is beyond comprehension and beyond sarcasm, at least for those of us who still retain our own humanity.
“Make line go up” shareholder attendees and admins didn’t even postpone or stop the United Healthcare annual meeting.
Gosh, I wonder what could be done to let them know just how much they’re abusing the rest of us, and how fed up we are with that. Hmm… 
It seems insane that the insurer would pay that much for a covid test but one thing that that ProPublica story and many others about the industry fail to mention is that there are incentives in place that can actually encourage insurance companies to spend wastefully, because by law their maximum profits can’t exceed more than a certain percentage of the total money being spent. This was a mind-blower for me the first time I heard it, but it explains a lot about why American healthcare costs so damn much. Here’s part of an editorial (written by an oncologist who hates dealing with denials and prior authorization) that explains the phenomenon:
The system is clearly broken. That profit cap rule in the ACA was added for good reasons but going to a single-payer system might be the only way to avoid these kinds of perverse incentives.