May 2021

Covid Killed His Father Then Came $1 Million in Medical Bills

NY Times Article by Sarah Kliff One coronavirus survivor manages her medical bills in color-coded folders: green, red and tan for different types of documents. A man whose father died of the virus last fall uses an Excel spreadsheet to organize the outstanding debts. It has 457 rows, one for each of his father’s bills,

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This is why blaming doctors is pointless: America has no healthcare system

MAY 23, 2021  3 AM PT Published by the Los Angeles Times   To the editor: Dr. Robert Pearl asserts that “doctor culture,” taught and learned in medical schools, is destroying the U.S. healthcare system.   I disagree. America has no healthcare system. We have a healthcare industry that supports profit-making healthcare enterprises, regardless of whether

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What’s missing in Newsom’s budget that has public health officials worried.

By MELODY GUTIERREZSTAFF WRITER  MAY 20, 2021 5 AM PT SACRAMENTO — Healthcare advocates in California are pushing back against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget plan released last week, saying it follows a dangerous pattern of underfunding local public health agencies despite glaring funding inadequacies exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Health leaders asked that $200 million in ongoing funding

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Medicine and Social Justice

Scamming Medicare: It’s the providers and insurers, not the patients!
I have often written about universal health care and favored a single-payer system, or, in its current incarnation, Medicare for All. I still do and will have some more to say about it in a bit, but wanted to begin by providing some recent examples of the outrageous abuses of our non-system of health care. More important, abuses of the people who are supposed to be receiving health care. Actually, it is not so much that these are examples of new practices, but rather that there have been important recent articles exposing them.

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