Tag Archives: patients

Kaiser Dumpanente, caught ‘cutting health care costs’

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It was just a week or so ago that I was out walking my dog, and ran into a gentleman who thought he had seen me at his heart clinic. We got to talking, and he informed me of his heart condition and how fragile his health was. I showed him my sympathy for his condition, and he responded by telling me not to worry, that he had the best care possible and a fabulous doctor. I then asked where, and he told me Kaiser Permanente! My heart sunk for him. He was as good as dead in my experience.

Goodbye, Pal, I wanted to say. You see, I have both had KP care and have worked for them, too. Squeezing necessary medical care from them is harder than squeezing water out of a rock. So the story making the rounds of the news outlets today (see Gazette page A4), hardly surprises me at all. Los Angeles is bringing charges against Kaiser Permanente for not caring, in essence. KP ‘dumps’ patients every day, and not just indigents into the streets. So if you have their coverage, Be Aware. You will be having your own health care dumped all the time, in one form or the other.

Extreme TB on its way

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The news has hardly been noticed the mainstream public, but only about 2 months ago, the panic began to hit the world medical community. About 2% of the world’s 9,000,000 TB patients are now thought to have a new strain of it, totally resistant to all antibiotic treatment. The name for this condition is Extreme TB, as opposed to the more prevalent form of multi-drug resistant TB. Tuberculosis has been evolving into a form resistant to all present treatments, and as such, it joins with treatment resistant forms of strep and staph that themselves are newly plaguing patients worldwide. Plus, of course, there is the constant danger of a new rampaging flu epidemic to come sometime soon in the future.

While flu is a virus that mutates (evolves) over time,the microbial evolution of bacteria into forms resistant to antibiotics was not foreseen until just fairly recently. Now, the medical world is in total panic because there have been no technological magic bullets to come along that would help in stopping the spread of infectious disease across the planet once again. What we have now, is a microbial breakdown in the world’s ecologic balance. And like with the other ecological breakdowns, capitalism has been fueling the crisis by enmeshing much of the world in unsanitary poverty.

How serious is this situation? Well ask Bill Gates and George Soros. Both have been pumping millions of their own dollars into African TB prevention programs trying to put their little fingers into the holes in the dikes of our failing world capitalist medical system. Unlike some of the more dull witted super rich, these 2 men realize that drug resistant TB could ultimately kill off even rich folk like themslves, and not just poor Black HIV patients in South Africa. For a recent commentary about the evolution of this new and spreading pandemic, see this Guardian article