President Barack Obama addressed physicians this week at the 158th annual meeting of the American Medical Association (AMA) in Chicago. His goal was to gain the support of the nation’s doctors for his healthcare plan which he said for the first time will cost an estimated $1 trillion dollars, perhaps even more. To help fund the costs obama wants to cut federal payments to hospitals by about $200 billion and cut $313 billion from Medicare and Medicaid over 10 years, in addition to a new $635 billion in tax increases and spending cuts in the health care system. The goal is to formulate a streamlined health care system that costs less, yet delivers more. Whatever the cost – or the plan – reforming our broken health care system will not be cheap. With more than 50 million uninsured Americans something needs to be done.
Listen to the full speech and share your opinion.
Tags: AMA, American Medical Association, Chicago, health, Health Care, obama
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Dr. Steven Chang, the author of DailyDose, is a staff physician with Kosmix RightHealth. Dr. Chang practices Family Medicine at the University of California Davis Medical Center, where his medical interests include both pediatric and geriatric care, public health, gay and lesbian health, and sleep medicine. Dr. Chang trained at the Stanford University affiliated O'Connor Hospital, and was a research fellow at the National Institute of Health. He holds an M.D. from McGill University and a BA in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:48 am
i make less than $700.00 a mo im disabled cant work barely exist if u cut my medicare & medicaide what am i going to do to take care of my health needs it already dont cover some things i need HAVE YOU TRIED LIVING ON WHAT I MAKE GAIL DEES
June 16th, 2009 at 11:54 am
I NEED LAZER SURGERY ON MY BACK NOW CAUSE IM HIGH RISK TO BE PUT TO SLEEP CHECKED ON IT U HAVE TO PAY $20.000 UP FRONT FOR WHAT MEDICAIDE & MEDICARE WONT PAY I DONT MAKE THAT IN 20 YEARS IF I DIDNT HAVE TO HAVE A PLACE TO LAY DOWN , EAT, BATH LIGHTS TO SEE BY IT STILL WOULD TAKE OVER 20 YRS TO COME UP WITH THAT KIND OF MONEY IM 62 YRS OLD GET REAL NOW GET ON OUR LEVEL OF INCOME
June 16th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
I don’t see where this would benefit anyone but the people who have not worked. It sounds to me like Obama doesn’t care about the elderly. It sounds like socialism to me. There should be cuts made in something besides health care benefits – like welfare benefits for the people who use it for a living and teach it to their children to use for a living.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
I completely disagree….making our health care a goverment agency….will allow the goverment to control the Doctors wage…
This will result the kind of Doctors in other countries….that is why they come to america
Our doctors will be forced to see unlimited patients and earn a flat amount…this will discourage doctors…making them care less for the patients resulting in poor health care.
I am also am agianst Obama because he will not help with the doctors must face and the insurance cost they have….Listen we are in a day and age where people place lawsuits every place u can think of …and even if the doctor wins the lawsuite he still has to pay for legal fees….or if the patient looses maybe it should be maditory they pay the legal fees they thurst upon a doctor in a moment of greed.
June 16th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Please, make sure that mental diseases and the cost for society are considered, when the reform of the healthcare system is discussed!
Everybody is concerned about the health care reform for which this country has such great need.
No other country uses 16% of gross national product for its health care. And still 45 million people are lacking health insurance. Half of all bankruptcies are due to medical bills.
When President Bill Clinton gave Hillary Clinton the enormous task to reform health care, the country was not prepared. I was invited as a guest to her forum in Detroit, where I was an outreach worker and health educator for women in Detroit for HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. In this forum I told stories about women and children who lacked health care. Stories about individual women and children speak more than statistics. I spoke about a vaccination rate of children in Detroit comparable with developing countries. The child mortality rate here was higher than in most developed countries.
The large profitable insurance companies were lobbying against the reform on Capitol Hill. As a Swedish physician, I found such lobbying appalling and could not call it other than legalized bribing. People with health care insurance coverage were afraid that they would get less coverage and were against any reform.
The bureaucracy that requires insurance companies to receive reports about every single blood sample or physician visit cost a lot. The paper work is enormous. The insurance companies also have the right to deny a patient a certain procedure or treatment. Those decisions are thus not made finally by the patients’ physicians but by medically less knowledgeable administrators.
What people did not understand was that the healthcare cost for all increased. The uninsured patients are paid through Medicare and Medicaid or by the individual hospital. By denying people easy access to prophylactic medication, child prevention pills, vaccinations, screenings of blood pressure and for diabetes, and mammograms, unwanted children are born, teenage pregnancy numbers are high, and patients arrive at the emergency rooms with more grave diseases and more severe complications. Many young Afro-American men arrive at the hospital today with a high blood pressure undetected for years and go right to hemodialysis because of ruined kidneys.
A grain of prophylaxis is worth more than treatment in the later stage of diseases.
Now people, health care workers, insurance companies and politicians agree that a radical reform of the health care system is a necessity.
There is one group of patients whom I do not hear about when healthcare reform is discussed. Who talks about mental diseases? The mentally ill usually have enough to struggle with than being politically vocal. Their families are stressed. And of course, we have the stigma that is attached to mental diseases. I have earlier not been so vocal about my own depressions. I could not talk about my first husband’s schizophrenia, when he was alive, since I was afraid that he would have his medical license taken away from him.
I want to urge patients, families, healthcare workers, and politicians to speak up also about the need for affordable and accessible treatment alternatives for patients with mental diseases. When the new medications for schizophrenia and other psychoses became available, the large mental hospitals were closed and people who had not lived in society for many years were thrown out into a reality that they could not handle. What about living quarters, job, medication, and just handle the daily life?
Many mentally ill patients now end up in the criminal system. Chief Wayne Probate Judge Milton Mack found that 15% of prisoners have had previous contact with mental health agencies. He argues that judges should be allowed to order involuntary treatment when patients are unable to understand their condition or make meaningful decisions regarding their health.
Drug users do not belong in the prisons! They belong in treatment programs. Drug dealers and rich money launderers belong in the prisons. What a waste for a country to have about 25 % of young African-American men locked up, due to unfair sentences and prejudices, and lack of good education and social welfare. A prisoner costs the society per year as much as a year of college tuition. The state spends well over two billion dollars a year on our prisons, more that on higher education.
Many homeless people suffer from untreated mental diseases, lack of follow-up, and lack of access to mental services and medication.
So let us speak up! The mental health system in the U.S. is already lacking necessary resources. With proper medication a patient with mental disease can usually support him/herself and live by him/herself. The father can support the family and the mother can take care of her children. We would see fewer children in the foster care system. Please, make sure that mental diseases and the cost for society is counted with whenever or wherever the reform of the health care system is discussed!
Lisbeth Nordstrom-Lerner, M.D.
Southfield, MI
June 17th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
OKAY –NOT A GOOD IDEA TO KEEP STEPPING ON THE WORKING-CLASS WHO UM, VOTED YOU IN, WELL I GUESS EACH POLITICIAN EVENTUALLY SHOWS WHY THEY CALL IT POLITICS TO BEGIN WITH