Category: Healthcare

Categories
Healthcare ObamaCare

5 Things You Might Not Know About ObamaCare

1… Contrary to what 42 percent of Americans think, Obamacare really is happening. In fact, people can start signing up for state-run health insurance on October 1st. That’s when states and the federal government will open marketplaces, called exchanges, to offer subsidized benefits to the nation’s 50 million uninsured.

2… Another survey found that a majority of Americans think the law cuts Medicare benefits and covers undocumented immigrants. It doesn’t.

Actually, the government expects the average Medicare recipient to save approximately $35,000 over the next ten years.

3… Tax credits. Next year, health insurance for eligible individuals or families will be subsidized.

For example, someone making just under $23,000 a year wouldn’t have to spend more than 6.3 percent of their annual income on health insurance. Based on a $3,030 plan, their contribution would be $1,450. Under Obamacare, they’d receive a tax credit of $1,580 to put towards their coverage.

4… The 80/20 rule. Insurers are now required to spend at least 80 percent of premium dollars on providing healthcare. The other 20 percent can be used on overhead expenses like excessive administrative costs and profits. In 2012, this provision saved Americans over two billion dollars.

If insurers don’t comply, they’re required to provide customers with a rebate. In 2011, over 13 million consumers received $1.1 billion in rebates – that’s around $150 per customer.

5… taxes. No matter what you’ve heard, your health benefits under Obamacare will not be taxed. The law does require that employers report the value of your annual coverage on your W-2, but the government says that’s just for workers’ information.

h/t Yahoo

Categories
Health Healthcare

Symptoms of Migraines

 

Categories
Health Healthcare

Woman Burned by Facial Warns of Spa Dangers

Daphne Carroll went a medspa to buy makeup but said she couldn’t refuse the free consultation for a laser facial. Little did she know that impulsive decision would change her life.

The consultation, which included a free laser treatment for a spider vein in her cheek, convinced Carroll to go for the full facial. But the 42-year-old said she awoke the next morning with second-degree burns to her face.

It was “the most horrible experience of my life,” said Carroll, who five years later still suffers from facial pain and twitching. She said she has seen 13 specialists, including a neurologist, dermatologist and even a plastic surgeon, all of whom agree that the damage is permanent.

 

h/t – abcnews

Categories
Featured Healthcare News

Top Plastic Surgeon Being Sued For Chopping Off Patient’s Entire Nose

Plastic isn’t always fantastic. In just the latest example of surgery gone too far, New Yorker Vishal Thakkar is suing Tulsasurgeon Dr. Angelo Cuzalina for chopping off his nose duringsurgery.

Cuzalina, a member of the Oklahoma Medical Board and president of the American Board of Cosmetic Surgery, completed eight surgeries on Thakkar between 2006 and 2007 before allegedly making the cruelest cut, his lawsuit alleges.

During one surgery, Thakkar claims, Cuzalina took cartilage from his ear to rebuild his nose without his consent.

Thakkar told Fox23 News Tulsa, “I woke up with pain behind my ear and I said to the nurses, what part of ‘Under no circumstances, do not touch my ears do you not understand?”

Thakkar says Cuzalina later emailed him an apology, but then, in another surgery the doctor took cartilage from his rib.

Despite these warning signs — and several infections — Thakkar continued to go under the knife and eventually woke up from one procedure with a gaping hole in the middle of his face, his lawsuit alleges. “[Dr. Cuzalina] told me that there was an infection in there and since I was on the operating table and unconscious he had to make the decision,” Thakkar said.

h/t – radaronline

Categories
Domestic Policies Healthcare News Politics young people

Lose the Young, Lose the Future

It shouldn’t have taken a report like this to uncover what’s wrong with the Republican Party, but now that it’s been released, it would be great if the power brokers on the right will heed its call. The problem is that this is the other major American political party and their dysfunction is having a profound effect on our political life. Their obstruction has robbed us of a robust economic recovery from a downturn that they planted the seeds for, with Democratic help in many cases, and their lack of identifiable, fair, economically feasible ideas caused the sequester and downgrade of United States’ securities.

But there’s more. Here’s a summary of how young people see the Republican Party on some of the issues of the day.

Gay marriage: “On the ‘open-minded’ issue … [w]e will face serious difficulty so long as the issue of gay marriage remains on the table.”

Hispanics: “Latino voters … tend to think the GOP couldn’t care less about them.”

Perception of the party’s economic stance: “We’ve become the party that will pat you on your back when you make it, but won’t offer you a hand to help you get there.”

Big reason for the image problem: The “outrageous statements made by errant Republican voices.”

Words that up-for-grabs voters associate with the GOP: “The responses were brutal: closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.”

How many national elections do you think the right can win with perceptions like these? We can ask President Hillary after 2025.

The truth is that most people in this country are trending leftward. Not in overwhelming numbers and not by leaps and bounds, but it is happening. Marriage equality will be the law in significantly more states over the next ten years and the health care law will result in broader insurance coverage, technological improvements in health delivery, and a system that encourages and rewards innovation and cost-cutting.

If you were a young adult in 1985, you know how much the country has changed since then politically, economically and culturally. Imagine what the United States will be like in 2035 after an era of expanded equality, more access for more people to the nation’s wealth, less expensive higher education opportunities and a fairer tax code.

Yes, we will have our problems and we could become enmeshed in any number of foreign conflicts (we will get involved in Syria somehow. Mark my words.) and will have our share of domestic disturbances. But if the GOP can reform itself and make the party more responsive to what we need to improve the country, then we will all benefit.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and on Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Education Healthcare

UCLA Awarded $10M Grant to Study Autism in African-Americans

NBC Southern California – The National Institutes of Health awarded UCLA a grant to study the genetic causes of autism in African American children.

Areva Martin of the Special Needs Network says “there’s a void” of qualified health care officials to make the diagnosis in communities like South LA.

The study hopes to change that, and aims to recruit at least 600 African-American families who have a child diagnosed with autism

 

 

h/t – thegrio

Categories
Healthcare

A Heart Attack and Cardiac Arrest – What’s The Difference?

Many people use heart attack and cardiac arrest interchangeably, but they are actually two entirely different medical conditions. Here are the differences between the two.

Heart attacks are usually painful attacks that are caused by blockage of the arteries that send blood to the heart. The medical term for heart attack is myocardial infarction. Many people do not recognize the symptoms of heart attacks and may wait hours before going to the emergency room.

Seeking medical attention as soon as possible is critical as this may prevent further damage to the heart and possible death. During a heart attack, the patient is awake and the heart continues to beat

 Cardiac “arrest” means just that. The heart is arrested, or stops beating. This is known as sudden cardiac arrest. Patients are also in cardiac arrest when they collapse and their breathing is abnormal. Without CPR and immediate medical treatment, patients in cardiac arrest can die within just minutes. When a person collapses, is unresponsive, and is not breathing normally, they are most likely experiencing sudden cardiac arrest. Whether or not the victim survives depends largely upon the immediate response by those in close proximity to the victim to keep the heart beating.

h/t –affordablehealthinsurance
Categories
Featured Healthcare

Kermit Gosnell Guilty Of First-Degree Murder (GRAPHIC: Kermit Gosnell’s House of Horrors)

A Philadelphia jury has found Dr. Kermit Gosnell guilty on three of four counts of first-degree murder, the Philadelphia Inquirer and NBC News report.

Gosnell, a longtime abortion provider, was accused of killing four babies and one female patient, among numerous other charges. Gosnell was acquitted in the fourth baby’s death.

The jury reached the verdict Monday after initially splitting on two of the over 200 counts in the case, including racketeering and conspiracy charges, as well as abortion law violations.

More from the Associated Press:

A Philadelphia abortion doctor was found guilty Monday of first-degree murder and could face execution in the deaths of three babies who authorities say were delivered alive and then killed with scissors at his grimy clinic, in a case that became a flashpoint in the nation’s debate over abortion.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, was cleared in the death of a fourth baby, who prosecutors say let out a soft whimper before he snipped its neck.

Gosnell was also found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the drug-overdose death of a patient who had undergone an abortion.

   

h/t – huffingtonpost

Categories
Abortion Featured Healthcare murder New Jersey News

Missed Chances to Shut Philadelphia Abortion Clinic Abounded

Johnnie Mae Smith, 61, mother of Marie Smith who sued Dr. Kermit Gosnell after a botched abortion, looks at a newspaper with Gosnell’s photo on it during an interview with the Associated Press in Philadelphia Thursday, Jan. 20, 2011. Abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, who catered to minorities, immigrants and poor women at the Women’s Medical Society, was charged Wednesday Jan. 19, 2011, with eight counts of murder in the deaths of a patient and seven babies who were born alive and then killed with scissors, prosecutors said Wednesday. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

PHILADELPHIA — A lack of follow-up on reports of venereal disease, political sensitivities and unfulfilled promises made to health inspectors all added up to missed chances to stop a doctor from performing illegal abortions that killed at least two patients and hundreds of newborns, prosecutors said.

The indictment of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69 — a family practice physician not certified to perform abortions — details allegations of a litany of failures in upholding even the most basic public health guidelines. Gosnell was arraigned Thursday on charges of murdering eight babies and one patient.

Authorities allege that Gosnell and a fleet of undertrained — sometimes untrained — workers ran a ghoulish operation in Philadelphia in which labor was induced in very late-term pregnancies with unsanitary equipment, the viable babies born alive and killed with scissors to the spine, and their body parts left in jars — or clogging plumbing into which unattended women had given birth.

read more

h/t – lubbockonline

Categories
Healthcare

Woman Left Unable to Walk, Talk after Surgeons Operate on Wrong Side of Brain

FENTON, Mo. (KSDK) – It was a botched brain surgery with massive consequences. A St. Ann woman went in for surgery on the left side of her brain, but the procedure was mistakenly performed on the right, and now the hospital is facing a lawsuit.

Pictures show proof. Fifty-three-year-old Regina Turner is seen in a photo with an indelible marking on the left side of her head. It was taken just before her April 4 surgery to put an end to a series of mini-strokes she’d been suffering from for several years.

Another photo shows Turner bandaged up on the right side after what’s called a craniotomy bypass.

“I think everybody in the operating room screwed up. I think somehow her head was marked for the correct side,” said Turner’s Clayton-based attorney Alvin Wolff. “The incorrect side was prepped for surgery. A whole surgery was performed, and nobody noticed that the side was wrong.”

Friday he filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against SSM Health Care St. Louis and neurosurgeon Dr. Armond Levy. He said negligence and carelessness led to the wrong-side surgery performed at St. Clare Health Center in Fenton.

According to the Journal of Neurosurgery, Wolff pointed out, there have been 35 documented cases of wrong-side craniotomies ever in the U.S.

“Sometimes the x-rays can be flipped,” he explained. “Sometimes the doctor doesn’t look at the medical records. Sometimes the surgery comes off late and everybody’s in a rush. Sometimes, if a doctor has a whole lot of surgeries, let’s say he’s got eight knees to do that day, and he’s got four right knees and four left knees, and the first knee cancels and they start moving everybody up, the wrong knee goes in the wrong room.”

Turner, who was mobile before, is now wheelchair bound. Her speech is unintelligible.

h/t – Grio

Categories
Healthcare women's health

A Step Closer To A Perfect World

In a perfect world there would be no wars, the people who we love, love us back and fibroids would not exist. Well, one out of three isn’t bad.

Bronx, New York’s Montefiore Medical Center has become the first hospital in the United States to use a medical procedure called Radio Frequency Ablation to shrink uterine fibroids. The procedure was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration late last year.

Fibroids are benign tumors that grow in the uterus. They effect about one-third of all women and develop primarily in the reproductive years. African-American women are two to three times more likely to get fibroids than women of other races. Symptoms of fibroids are painful, heavy bleeding during menses, pressure in the pelvis area, infertility, pain during intercourse, abdominal bloating, frequent urination, backache and hormonal imbalances which can cause mood changes.

The procedure is minimally invasive and consists of the use of a tiny needle inserted through the abdomen which then emits a low-energy electrical current directly to the fibroid, shrinking it, often times completely destroying it The procedure is also used in the treatment of liver cancer, making it doubly valuable.

Fibroids are the leading cause of hysterectomies, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, responsible for more than 200,000 hysterectomies performed in the United States each year for women in search of relief…200,000!

Radio frequency ablation allows the surgeon to treat only the fibroids while leaving the uterus intact and preserving its normal functions.

One would think this type of breakthrough in women’s health would be broadcasted from the highest rooftops and written about in every medical journal in existence, but information is scarce. A sad testament of the medical profession’s lack of concern for women’s quality-of-life health issues.

But you can spread the word.

Please go to Montefiore Medical Center for more information.

Categories
Healthcare ObamaCare Politics Repeal

Talks Of ObamaCare Repeal Hurting Republican Rebranding Efforts

Republicans are in the midst of a vast re-branding effort. They have looked at the results of the 2008 and 2012 elections and have decided that the American people are correct – their policies are as popular as trickle down economics, and Americans are not buying those policies anymore.

The obvious next move for Republicans would be to dump the failed policies of yesterday and adopt policies that a majority of the American people want. What people want is health care; and after President Obama signed the affordable healthcare law in his first term, the American people voted overwhelmingly for him in 2012 guaranteeing him a second term.

But Republicans, in their infinite wisdom, are promising the American people that their cherished healthcare will be repealed. It is that stubbornness and their failure to accept the will of the people that is setting the foundation for more lost elections in the future.

I’m not complaining.

The LA Times reports on how Latinos, one of the fastest growing minority group, is responding to Republicans talk of health care repeal.

As Republican leaders try to woo Latino voters with a new openness to legal status for the nation’s illegal immigrants, the party remains at odds with America’s fastest-growing ethnic community on another key issue: healthcare.

Latinos, who have the lowest rates of health coverage in the country, are among the strongest backers of President Obama’s health care law. In a recent national poll, supporters outnumbered detractors by more than 2 to 1. Surveys show that Latinos overwhelmingly see guaranteeing health care as a core government responsibility.

Yet congressional Republicans continue to make repeal of the 2010 Affordable Care Act a top agenda item and have renewed calls for deep cuts in health programs such as Medicaid which are very popular with Latinos.

“Obamacare is a colossal mistake for our country,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said recently in a speech on the Senate floor. “It needs to be pulled out by its roots.”

Exit mobile version