Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Clinton & Obama have some good ideas but socialized medicine is not one of them.

Just four stone when she diedAdam Derbyshire 30/ 1/2008

AN emaciated woman who suffered from dementia died weighing just over four stone, an inquest heard.

Margaret Wilson, 85, had been a resident at Thorncliffe Grange care home in Denton for three years.
Her son David, of Charnwood Avenue, Denton arranged for her to go into the care home in Windmill Lane after dementia slowly took hold.

He said: "I felt the care at the home was generally okay but I was always told she was eating fine."

Care home manager Sarah Hitchcock claimed Mrs Wilson weighed 31kg the day before her death.

An autopsy carried out four days later found she weighed 26kg, but it is unclear if post-mortem changes affected the reading.

Ms Hitchcock said: "She was frail and underweight and had a high risk of falling. She needed constant monitoring and was a poor eater. As time went on she became less mobile and slept for long periods.
"
Her son rarely came to see her."

Hitting back, Mr Wilson said: "I often popped in to visit her for half an hour and left without seeing any members of staff, so they were not even aware I had been in the building.
"Secondly, I was never informed she wasn’t eating. Whenever I asked I was told she ate two meals a day."

Mrs Wilson was taken to Tameside Hospital on 13 February last year after struggling for breath.
She was given oxygen and discharged but died four days later.

Dr Paul Dickens, pathologist, said: "She was extremely thin and emaciated. She had deep bed sores on her buttocks.

"Her intestinal walls were also very thin, which is one of the last things to happen to people with poor nutrition.

"It is common for people with dementia to have little or no appetite. The brain cells die off and the nerve pathways are damaged, including those which regulate hunger.

"However, the main cause of death was heart disease."

Assistant deputy coroner Chris Welton said: "I am concerned to note how thin she was and the extent of the malnutrition.

"We have been told dementia is often accompanied by a poor appetite, but I am uneasy that she was so emaciated when the autopsy was carried out."

Verdict: natural causes

________________________________


With other countries such as Canada and Great Britain that have adopted socialized medicine the quality of care has diminished greatly. The government makes all decisions as to what the patient gets and doesn't get-including life sustaining treatments; therefore your life is in the government's hands and we've seen how they've ruined a bustling economy so you can imagine what they'll do when lives are in the balance-THE SAME DAMN THING.

Citizens of these United States must realize that you are a number, a vote and that's it-in their eyes and they DO NOT CARE IF YOU LIVE OR DIE-you're just a another poor unfortunate statistic.

The medical landscape at present needs a lot of repair and the hospitals, not the nursing homes, who are often punished in a more severe manner, have to be reckoned with. The people have to write their legislators-Senators and Representatives and insist that all medical errors-whether properly reported to the individual state's Department of Public or not-have to be made public and included in the Freedom of Information Act, so that the public knows if hospitals are doing the job or not and what they have to protect themselves against when entering a hospital for a simple procedure and winding up being improperly medicated, contract MRSA or a pressure or even be operated on the wrong side of the brain by an inept surgical staff.

This is not to say that all hospitals are doing this, but a large percentage are and we as the patients must know what is going to be done to correct it.

Mr. Edward Comfort of the National Decubitus Foundation has written to many, many of the hospitals across this land and all the monitoring groups also but to no avail, everyone wants to keep these errors a dirty little secret from the public and it's about time the 79 million baby boomers in this country, which represents over 25% of the population to stand up, demand results, information and the right to know what they are in for when entering a medical facility.

All patients must realize also, that socialized medicine will put an enormous burden on the hospitals as we will also be entitling illegal aliens to receive free medical care and that will take away from the care that all legal citizens, who were born and raised here.

Let's smarten up now before it's too late.

Mr. Comfort, his board of directors, which includes my wife and I can't fight this battle alone, we need your support to make hospitals safe and laws that will not just fine the hospitals as they act as the buffer for the real culprits-the physicians and nurses who do not provide the care that they should. The burden also lies with the administrators and risk managers of hospitals to impose stronger language and methods to get these safety matters addressed.

No one should die accidentally, be treated as a statistic-rather than a living person that loved and was loved.

We all have a purpose, whether it be a father, mother, daughter, son, friend, neighbor and we all should be protected.

God Bless all of you and the National Decubitus Foundation, it's board of directors and my wife and I hope that all of you will gather the strength to end just another example of the medical lobby dictating what can be released and what can't, so the precious campaign contributions can keep flowing the the pawns in Washington and the various state governments.

We all pay a hefty price for healthcare in this county and we should get the best care-not just what they damn well feel like giving us.

I'm almost positive that most of you would not put the decision as to whether a loved one or yourself should die in the hands of politicians and the government. Help to keep them out of this or just purchase more body bags in bulk.

Sincerely,
George Mandell

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Great News-strides are being made.

Hospitals Post Bed Sore DataBy Martha Bebinger
BOSTON - January 22, 2008

Hospitals across the commonwealth today begin posting another way to measure the quality and safety of care they provide patients. The numbers of patients who suffer from bedsores could indicate whether patients are getting proper attention. Karen Nelson with the Massachusetts Hospital Association says releasing this information will help the public review hospitals and is already pushing hospitals to improve."They said they can tell there's a difference." Nelson says. "They're looking at themselves, they're looking at their neighbors, they're asking themselves, can we do better and some of them have taken tremendous strides in implementing changes to programs to provide better care."The association also posts information about how often patients fall while hospitalized and four other ways to measure the quality of patient care at 81 hospitals in the commonwealth.

Originally printed on the www.wbur.org/ website

It's late at night but this woke me up and put a smile on my face. Can't wait to tell my wife, she'll be ecstatic.

George

Lives and Money could be saved with a few ounces of prevention & attention.

Insurers refusing to pay for hospital errors
BY VANESSA FUHRMANS THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Posted on Sunday, January 20, 2008

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Health insurers are taking a new tack in a bid to improve patient safety and reduce healthcare costs: refusing to pay — or let their patients be billed — for hospital mistakes.

Aetna Inc., WellPoint Inc. and other big insurers are moving to ban payments for care resulting from serious errors, including operating on the wrong limb or giving a patient incompatible blood.

The companies are following the lead of the federal Medicare program, which announced last summer that starting this October, it will no longer pay the extra cost of treating bedsores, falls and six other preventable injuries and infections that occur while a patient is in a hospital. The following year, it will add to the list hospital-acquired blood infections, blood clots in legs and lungs, and pneumonia contracted from a ventilator.

Private insurers are looking first at banning reimbursements for only the gravest mistakes. But health-insurance executives say it is only a matter of time before the industry also stops paying for some of the more common and less clear-cut problems that Medicare is tackling, such as hospital-acquired catheter infections or blood poisoning.

“I’d rather have the cudgel in place first than push the list too far,” Aetna President Mark Bertolini said.

Some hospitals and others are concerned that the new strategy could drive up medical costs in other ways as hospitals absorb or pass on the expense of introducing the safety and screening procedures needed to help avoid mistakes.

Ultimately, insurers say, the efforts will trigger safety improvements and savings for patients.

Aetna, the country’s thirdlargest insurer by number of members, is beginning to stipulate in hospital contracts up for renewal that it will no longer pay nor let patients be billed for 28 different “never events.” Compiled by the National Quality Forum, a coalition of physicians, employers and policymakers, these mistakes include leaving an instrument in a patient after surgery, the death of a mother in a low-risk pregnancy, allowing a patient to develop bedsores or using contaminated devices.

Such errors are so egregious “there can’t be any argument that they should ever happen,” said Troy Brennan, Aetna’s chief medical officer.

WellPoint, the largest insurer, is testing the same approach in Virginia with four errors from the forum’s never-events list, including leaving a sponge or other object in a patient after a procedure and performing the wrong procedure. It plans to extend the policy soon to its plans in New England, New York and Georgia. UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Cigna Corp. say they’re exploring policies similar to Medicare’s.

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, the national federation of independent Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies that includes Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the state’s biggest health insurer, says that its 39 member health plans are looking at approaches similar to Aetna’s or working with hospitals on reducing errors.

The National Quality Forum’s so-called never events are rare enough that private insurers say they don’t expect to see a big financial savings at first. In Minnesota, where hospitals are required by law to report such errors, 154 never events were reported last year out of 9 million hospital admissions. Rather, the idea is to spur more attention to safety and public reporting of mistakes. “It’s not a matter of not paying for them. It’s about getting them not to happen in the first place,” said Thomas Granatir, director of policy and research at Humana Inc., which is working on a policy similar to Medicare’s.

INFECTIONS’ TOLL The more common errors offer the biggest potential for savings — in both lives and money. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that patients develop 1. 7 million infections in hospitals a year, causing or contributing to as many as 99, 000 deaths a year. On average, urinary-tract infections and hospital-acquired pneumonia — which are on the Medicare list but not on the never-events list — can add more than $ 10, 000 to a patient’s hospital bill. A more serious antibiotic-resistant bloodstream infection can result in more than $ 100, 000 in extra costs.

Such common errors total more than $ 4. 5 billion in additional health spending a year, according to the CDC.

Despite growing evidence that hospitals can take steps to reduce infections drastically, until recently, infections typically have been considered an inevitable part of care and billed accordingly.

“It’s something that no one ever questions when you see it on the bill. But now that Medicare will, maybe that’s going to change,” said Nora Johnson, director of compliance and education at Medical Billing Advocates of America, a nationwide patient-advocacy network that deciphers hospital and insurance bills for consumers and advocates on behalf of uninsured patients.

As insurers roll out the policy across the country, they say they are structuring their contracts with hospitals so that the hospitals also won’t be able to charge patients for care made necessary by medical errors. Given the high rate of medical billing errors, however, consumer advocates advise patients to examine their bills carefully, especially if they are aware of errors or problems that occurred during their stay. People with health insurance should check their bills against the explanation of benefits they receive from the health plan, or press their insurers to make sure they haven’t been overcharged.

When it comes to medical errors, some hospitals say they forgive bills or adjust charges on a case-by-case basis. But the complex billing and payment arrangements between hospitals and insurers can make it hard to avoid paying for errors and for patients to know whether they’re being charged.

BLOOD MISMATCHED Last January, when Arlene Whitfield, a Los Angeles elementary-school teacher, underwent a hip replacement at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, Calif., she accidentally received B-positive blood, instead of A-positive. The mistake lengthened her recovery time by two days and she ended up staying in the hospital for a week, for which Centinela billed accordingly. That is because Medicare’s hospital billing guidelines require hospitals to document and itemize all the care they provide to a patient, said Von Crockett, the hospital’s president and chief executive.

“That’s different than what we expect to collect and get paid for it,” Crockett said. “It’s a documentation of what happened to the patient.” He said Whitfield’s portion of the bill was forgiven.

Her health plan, WellPoint’s Blue Cross of California, ended up paying for only two days, not because it refused payment for the added stay because of the error, but because before the operation, WellPoint had only authorized a two-day stay and didn’t receive a request for an extension. (The average length of a stay for Whitfield’s procedure is 4. 6 days. ) The insurer says it noted nothing unusual about the claim filed by the hospital, although the bill did list the diagnosis code for an infusion of “mismatched blood.” Spurred by laws requiring more public reporting of errors, some hospitals have adopted their own policies on billing for medical errors. All hospitals in Minnesota and Massachusetts, for example, have pledged not to charge for all or some of the errors on the never-events list.

But others say broader policies, such as Medicare’s, could punish hospitals unfairly and force them to absorb the costs of screening each patient for bedsores or infections at the time of admission.

Some in the industry worry that hospitals may find ways to turn away or divert patients at greatest risk of developing infections or bedsores. “The concept of not paying for complications that are often a biological inevitability, regardless of safe practice, is discriminatory and could be punitive to those patients at greatest risk,” Michael Maves, executive vice president of the American Medical Association, wrote in a June letter to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

HOSPITALS TAKE STEPS Hospitals have an incentive to invest in reducing infection rates, health-safety advocates argue. Since health plans pick up only so much of the extra cost caused by infections, “hospitals are losing their shirts, too,” said former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, who formed the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, a national, nonprofit campaign to push hospitals to lower infection rates. To lower its rate of infection, one hospital, Pitt County Memorial Hospital in Greenville, N. C., in February expanded its screening for methicillin-resistant staph infections to all patients entering the hospital. By identifying and isolating those with the strain early, it lowered the number of MRSA pneumonia cases related to ventilator use by 67 percent and MRSA urinary-tract infections by 60 percent within eight months. In all, the expanded screening has cost nearly $ 1 million, $ 800, 000 picked up by private and public insurers. Steve Lawler, the hospital’s president, says it has more than recouped its $ 200, 000 investment. Moreover, spending the money to make the hospital safer is a “better return on investment... than some billboard campaign,” he said.

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Reprinted from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Just another example of patient care in some hospitals & nursing homes.

Report: Man With Maggots in Eye, Bed Sores Dies

Last Edited: Tuesday, 22 Jan 2008, 2:43 PM EST
Created: Tuesday, 22 Jan 2008, 12:43 PM EST
01/22/2008 --
An 82-year-old Florida nursing home resident who had maggots in one of his eyes has died, Local6.com reported.
In addition to the maggots, Anthony Digiannurio, of Deltona, Fla., was found with an infected breathing tube, a partially inserted catheter and bed sores when he was taken to Florida Hospital DeLand from the University Center West nursing home in November, according to the report.
Click here to view the full report from Local6.com.
It was not immediately clear if the death was associated to his care.
See also:FOXNEWS.COM HOME >Health >Report: Man With Maggots in Eye, Bed Sores Dies

Welcome all past customers and new customers.

Thank you for stopping by our mall, feel free to browse.

We are here to provide you with any assistance required and answer your questions.
Please see email below:

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We treat all with respect and courtesy and all we ask is the same from all visitors.
Offensive behavior is frowned upon, but only applies to just a few.

Have a great day.

George

Monday, January 21, 2008

We're Looking for the Shopper of the year 2008

Any and all shoppers that make a minimum purchase of $50.00 from any store in our mall will be entered into a competitition for the "Shopper of the Year", which will require you to include a photo illustrating the following:

A candid but totally tasteful photo of what you prefer to wear when you are shopping online from your home. It can be funny, sexy, ridiculous or downright bizarre, but we must repeat, no nudity or anything too revealing. Photos that are indecent cannot and will not be included in the judging.

You will also have to submit a valid copy of the merchant invoice indicating the exact purchase you made on our site with proper coding It MUST have the proper coding, then you are ready to be judged for originality.

This competition starts NOW and will end on "Sadie Hawkins Day", which is February 29, 2008, which only rolls around every 4 years, in other words, it's leap day in a leap year.

Get your imagination going and come up with something that will totally amaze, amuse or shock us. All valid receipts of purchase and photo may be emailed to us at:

4everprancer@sbcglobal.net


Have a great time shopping at the mall.

Top prize for the winner will be a $250.00 check for you to use whatever way you wish.
Good Luck.



Sincerely,
Ronni D. Mandell

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Sales are steady.

Our Dream of Helping the National Decubitus Foundation seems to be coming true as orders are coming in and we hope they continue as the 10% committment to the foundation is very personal and important to us. They work for patient safety and we urge all of you to visit their site just to see what pressure wounds are and how they can kill a special friend, relative, neighbor, co-worker or even YOU.

If you wish to click on their site please follow this link: http://www.decubitus.org/

We wish to thank the other voter that pulled the lever for Huckabee.

So far, it's Huckabee has (1) vote and Hillary Clinton has (2).