Help us change that! Ask your Florida lawmakers to introduce the Medical Harm Disclosure Act to require each hospital to document and publicly report when their patients are harmed. Someday you may need your local hospital – shouldn’t you have the right to know?

Send an email to your FL lawmakers now – we have a model bill they can introduce today to make health care safer!

Each year, millions of patients suffer medical harm. When medical harm is made public, life-saving change can happen. That was the case when actor Dennis Quaid went public about the massive overdosing of his twins at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.

His babies were given two overdoses of the blood-thinning drug Heparin, 1,000 times the dose of what they should have had. The vial that the drug came in looked very similar to the correct drug. After Quaid’s ordeal went public, the hospital took steps to help prevent future dosing errors, such as requiring several pharmacy workers to verify medications.

Help us prevent these kinds of deadly medical errors! Email your lawmaker to introduce a hospital-specific reporting bill now.

Shining a light on preventable medical harm can dramatically improve the quality of our health care, saving 100,000 lives and tens of billions of dollars each year. Thank you for joining us in this common-sense Florida campaign!

Sincerely,
Lisa McGiffert
SafePatientProject.org

A deliberate profit maximizing strategy that resulted in poor healthcare delivery and caused immense suffering and death.

Not only did federal agents raid Rick Scott’s Columbia/HCA hospital chain across America, and was the company fined $1.7 billion for defrauding Medicare, but the hospital chain also provided sub-standard care to many of their Medicare patients.

Mark Woods of the Florida Times union has a host of questions about care received by his father in one of Rick Scott’s Columbia/HCA hospitals, in 1996. Just days after his father walked out of that Columbia/HCA hospital, he died.

Long before Mr. Scott took his $300 million parachute and moved to Florida, long before I had any idea where he stood on any political issue, I had a box filled with questions, topped by this one: Was it possible that my father’s care was symptomatic of something larger?

Apparently so.

In the 1990s, while some nurses and administrators were complaining about corner cutting, CEO Scott spent more than $1,500 per bed, per year on marketing.

Rick Scott is good at propaganda while stealing money from our government and stealing the lives of patients that were entrusted to his company.

We cannot entrust the governorship of Florida to this outright crook.

Vote Alex Sink for Governor!!

Galbraith is calling for a three-year window during which workers aged 62 and older could retire on full Social Security — i.e. the same monthly benefit they would normally get if they retired at age 67. Right now, if you start your retirement benefits at 62, your monthly benefit is reduced about 30 percent — for the rest of your life. That’s a brutal disincentive to retiring early.

Older people who have already lost their jobs and are unlikely to find another would no longer have to continue in a “futile and debilitating search,” Galbraith said.

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And those who are still working but would rather not could retire and make way for a younger person who needs the job more than they do. Galbraith said that would be particularly attractive to people in physically demanding occupations. “Many of the people in those jobs would take the opportunity to get out, if they could afford it,” he said.

There are two ways to reduce the unemployment rate. One is to reduce the labor pool; the other is to put people to work. This would do both.

Galbraith’s idea is not exactly gathering political steam. There’s no proposed legislation. Not even any buzz, really. But, he said, “it’s something that I’ve found to be very popular in speaking to working audiences and it’s common sense.”

Essentially, it’s a government-sponsored version of what a lot of private employers do on their own when they want to turn over the labor force: They offer people early retirement.

“We both can afford it and should do it,” Galbraith said.

The affordability, of course, is a matter of debate. Some of the money would be a wash, with federal funding obligations simply shifting from unemployment insurance to Social Security. Similarly, many older unemployed people who have signed up for Social Security disability benefits would presumably shift to retirement benefits. In both cases, for the people involved, that would mean being able to move off of programs that are both stigmatized and uncertain.

Positive investment rather than debilitating austerity!

Florida’s ‘Amendment 4′ Would Give Voters Say on Overbuilding

The builder’s lobby is using the following scare tactics to continue their reckless overbuilding. They claim:

1. This ‘Vote on Everything’ amendment would force Floridians – not the representatives they elect – to decide hundreds of technical comprehensive plan changes each year.”

Amenment 4 is limited to require voter approval only for land use changes, and what’s more:

When a major vote comes up for a large new development that will further increase their housing inventory, the voters have the power to outweigh political lobbying by developers.

That’s precisely the point of Amendment 4………to stop future overbuilding………the overbuilding that’s not already planned!

2. the Vote on Everything amendment would cause Florida’s economy to permanently collapse.

This statement is ludicrous for a number of reasons. First, an economy cannot by definition “permanently” collapse. Second, developers already have an approved pipeline of over 550,000 residential units and 1.4 billion square feet of commercial space.

If Amendment 4 fails, it will mean that the same broken system that has hurt our quality of life (and our economy) because of overdevelopment will continue. The broken system is one in which local elected officials are influenced by developer money, and developer lobbyist money will continue to exclusively decide land-use changes, with citizens not having a vote.

Vote YES on amendment 4!!

Myth: Social Security is going broke.

Reality: There is no Social Security crisis. By 2023, Social Security will have a $4.3 trillion surplus (yes, trillion with a ‘T’). It can pay out all scheduled benefits for the next quarter-century with no changes whatsoever.1 After 2037, it’ll still be able to pay out 75% of scheduled benefits–and again, that’s without any changes. The program started preparing for the Baby Boomers retirement decades ago.2 Anyone who insists Social Security is broke probably wants to break it themselves.

Myth: We have to raise the retirement age because people are living longer.

Reality: This is a red-herring to trick you into agreeing to benefit cuts. Retirees are living about the same amount of time as they were in the 1930s. The reason average life expectancy is higher is mostly because many fewer people die as children than did 70 years ago.3 What’s more, what gains there have been are distributed very unevenly–since 1972, life expectancy increased by 6.5 years for workers in the top half of the income brackets, but by less than 2 years for those in the bottom half.4 But those intent on cutting Social Security love this argument because raising the retirement age is the same as an across-the-board benefit cut.

Myth: Benefit cuts are the only way to fix Social Security.

Reality: Social Security doesn’t need to be fixed. But if we want to strengthen it, here’s a better way: Make the rich pay their fair share. If the very rich paid taxes on all of their income, Social Security would be sustainable for decades to come.5 Right now, high earners only pay Social Security taxes on the first $106,000 of their income.6 But conservatives insist benefit cuts are the only way because they want to protect the super-rich from paying their fair share.

Myth: The Social Security Trust Fund has been raided and is full of IOUs

Reality: Not even close to true. The Social Security Trust Fund isn’t full of IOUs, it’s full of U.S. Treasury Bonds. And those bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.7 The reason Social Security holds only treasury bonds is the same reason many Americans do: The federal government has never missed a single interest payment on its debts. President Bush wanted to put Social Security funds in the stock market–which would have been disastrous–but luckily, he failed. So the trillions of dollars in the Social Security Trust Fund, which are separate from the regular budget, are as safe as can be.

Myth: Social Security adds to the deficit

Reality: It’s not just wrong — it’s impossible! By law, Social Security funds are separate from the budget, and it must pay its own way. That means that Social Security can’t add one penny to the deficit.1

Sources:

1.”To Deficit Hawks: We the People Know Best on Social Security” New Deal 2.0, June 14, 2010

2. “The Straight Facts on Social Security” Economic Opportunity Institute, September 2009

3. “Social Security and the Age of Retirement”Center for Economic and Policy Research, June 2010

4. “More on raising the retirement age” Ezra Klein, Washington Post, July 8, 2010

5. “Social Security is sustainable” Economic and Policy Institute, May 27, 2010

6. “Maximum wage contribution and the amount for a credit in 2010.” Social Security Administration, April 23, 2010

7. “Trust Fund FAQs” Social Security Administration, February 18, 2010

8. “To Deficit Hawks: We the People Know Best on Social Security” New Deal 2.0, June 14, 2010

Of course we rely more on the private for profit industry to finance and provide care with a profit margin of over 30%, but another overlooked reason is that we consume so much unnecessary care:

A Rand Corporation study estimated that one-third or more of the care that patients in this country receive could be of little value. If that is so, hundreds of billions of dollars each year are being wasted on superfluous treatments.

At a time when Americans are being forced to pay a growing share of their medical bills and when access to medical care has become (difficult), health care experts say it will be far harder to hold down premiums and expand insurance coverage unless money is spent more wisely.

More expensive is not always better, as our life expectancy is only 39th in the world behind a miniscule country like Slovenia. Nevertheless:

Some medical experts say the American devotion to the newest, most expensive technology is an important reason that the United States spends much more on health care than other industrialized nations — more than $2.2 trillion in 2007, an estimated $7,500 a person, about twice the average in other countries — without providing better care.

Here is a case in point:

A group of cardiologists recently had a proposition for Dr. Andrew Rosenblatt, who runs a busy heart clinic in San Francisco: Would he join them in buying a CT scanner, a $1 million machine that produces detailed images of the heart?

The Evidence Gap
An Imperfect Picture
Articles in this series will explore medical treatments used despite scant proof they work and will consider steps toward medicine based on evidence.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The scanner would give Dr. Rosenblatt a new way to look inside patients’ arteries, enable his clinic to market itself as having the latest medical technology and provide extra revenue.

Although tempted, Dr. Rosenblatt was reluctant. CT scans, which are typically billed at $500 to $1,500, have never been proved in large medical studies to be better than older or cheaper tests. And they expose patients to large doses of radiation, equivalent to at least several hundred X-rays, creating a small but real cancer risk.

Not only are medical decisions driven by the prospect of higher revenues, patient safety is compromised with the additional and unnecessary procedures!

“many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government… AT&T revealed that it spends $2.4 billion a year on coverage for its almost 300,000 active employees, a number that would fall to $600 million if AT&T stopped providing health care coverage and paid the penalty option.”

Is the Affordable Care Act unaffordable? Isn’t it at least a step in the right direction?

Those questions can only be answered by considering whether the ACA ends up strengthening or weakening the health insurance corporations.

Progressives for their part criticize the current weak healthcare reform because:

the new legislation hands over $350 billion in government subsidies to the private insurers while mandating consumers to buy the industry’s shoddy products. That, combined with a lack of price controls means the ACA could prove to be a bonanza for the corporate stakeholders in the medical-industrial complex.

Either way,………..single-payer will prove to be the simplest, and most cost effective alternative for businesses and individuals alike!

(Republican Attorney General candidate Holly) Benson told the 50 or so people in attendance that the bill was clearly unconstitutional, violating the Commerce Clause and specifically the 10th Amendment. The moderator at the debate asked if any of the other candidates cared to respond.

Gelber stood quickly, grabbed his microphone and said he would. “You’re wrong!” he bellowed, staring down at Benson and getting a cheer from the decidedly liberal audience. But he was just getting started.

“There are 4 million Floridians without health care, 800,000 children so sick that they have to be taken to the emergency room for pediatric care, and that’s a shame, that’s a moral stain, and it’s wrong,” he said fiercely, eager for the chance to challenge Republican assertions that arose after the bill passed and McCollum sued earlier this year.

He then asked how many in the room have had their FICA taxes taken out of their paychecks. “Every single person in this room,” he answered. “You know what that’s for? For your Medicare when you grow older. It’s not a violation of the Commerce Clause, it’s a frivolous lawsuit politicized by the attorney general’s office, and the moment I’m attorney general, I will recede from it. We need to provide health care to the people of the state of Florida, and that’s that!”

The outburst led to a sustained cheer, and demonstrated why for the past decade the Democratic state Senator from North Miami Beach has been perhaps the most effective and articulate communicator for a party that has been locked down in minority status.
As a former assistant U.S. attorney (he was one of the youngest federal prosecutors in the country when he joined the South Florida office at the age of 25), the 49-year-old Gelber certainly has the experience to run for attorney general. But in early 2009, he announced he was intending to run for the Democratic nomination for U.S.Senate. Then, after Charlie Crist announced he would run in the Republican primary, Gelber shifted to the AG race.

Alan Grayson of Orlando however came up with a novel approach to “off-shore” drilling, by drawing on Alaska’s experience:

“Offshore drilling in Florida poses a tremendous risk to the environment and to the largest component of our economy, which is tourism. Before we even entertain the possibility of drilling offshore, I want to see tangible benefits for the people of Florida,” said Rep. Alan Grayson, an Orlando Democrat whose district includes much of eastern Marion, said in a statement.

Grayson, however, was willing to offer a condition.

“In advance of any drilling, there should be an agreement as good as the one that the people of Alaska enjoy. Each year, every man, woman and child in Alaska receives a check for more than $1,000, in exchange for Big Oil drilling there. If and when the oil companies offer that much or more to Florida, we can consider whether to take the risk,” Grayson said.

He was referring to the annual royalty that oil companies have remitted to Alaskans, which has averaged $1,436 over the past decade.

A more typical environmentalist response came from Congresswoman Corrine Brown:

Rep. Corrine Brown, a Jacksonville Democrat, represents a district that includes part of Marion and Alachua counties. She indicated the wells were unwelcome no matter how far out they were sunk.

As shown by the Deepwater Horizon disaster, “The risks of drilling for oil off of Florida’s shores brings about extraordinary risk to our state,” she said in a recent statement.

“In an already depressed economy, and with unemployment in the state of Florida nearing 13 percent, the last thing we need to do is endanger nearly one million jobs and the $65 billion tourism industry in Florida,” she added. “Along with my colleagues in the Florida delegation, I will do everything within my power to make sure that drilling does not take place anytime in the near or distant future in the state of Florida.”

Brown also signed a letter to Obama urging him to reverse his stance on opening more areas to offshore oil exploration and stick to the provisions of a 2006 congressional compromise that allowed drilling in 8.3 million acres that was previously closed in exchange for keeping oil rigs at least 235 miles off Florida’s coast.

Surely we already have enough Oil rigs in the Gulf! There are currently roughly 3,800 Gulf oil rigs.

If only we would have invested the clean-up monies into renewable energy production………but that just makes too much sense.

The idea is to give more very severely wounded veterans an option other than institutional care.

A welcome relief for tens of thousands of Military Families impacted by the devastation of the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Almost 14% of Floridians are veterans, but it was Senator Akaka from Hawaii (where 16% of the population is a veteran) who drafted this life-saving legislation.

The impact on caregivers cannot be overstated………:

Joseph Briseno Jr., Eva’s 27-year-old son, is one of the most severely wounded soldiers ever to survive. A bullet to the back of his head in a Baghdad marketplace in 2003 left him paralyzed, brain-damaged and blind, but awake and aware of his condition.

Hi mother Eva takes care of “Jay” in her suburban Virginia home where the family room has been transformed into an intensive care unit, with the breathing machine and tubes he needs to stay alive.

Jay Briseno’s spinal cord was shattered, and cardiac arrests led to brain damage that left him unable to see or to speak more than an occasional word.

His family became a mass casualty of the wound.

His parents quit their jobs and drained their savings to take care of him after he came home from hospitals and rehabilitation centers. His younger sisters, Malerie and Sherilyn, help when they can, and Joseph does a big share. But much of the care falls to Eva, a small, doe-eyed woman who weighs 100 pounds to Jay’s 147.

How far would you go for your son?

A lesser man would leave, Eva says of her spouse, whom she has known since grade school in their homeland, the Philippines. A lesser woman would cringe at the wound care and bodily indignities that Eva has learned to manage for her son, Joseph says.

“I can’t walk away from this. She can’t. I’m very proud of my wife,” he said.

What keeps Eva going is hope that stem cells or some future treatment advance will help her son.

“I do believe in miracles,” she says.

Yet desperation clouds her prayers. “Most of the time I ask God if I can take Jay’s place,” she confesses, unable to suppress a sob.

Hearing his mother, Jay cries too, the tears silently slipping from his blind eyes.

It about time we have the support caregivers need for our wounded warriors.