| One reason these devices are not used more is that medicare pays for them only for people who have artificial heart valves, Liska says. However, warfarin can be taken for a number of other reasons, such as to control the abnormal heartbeat, called atrialfibrillation.
In addition, doctors worry that patients will not be able to adequately control their blood levels, Liska says. "We feel that, in reality, the opposite is true—that patients have better control than ever before."
Another issue is the fear of malpractice suits should something go wrong when patients are self-monitoring. |
| Warfarin was only half as effective in these medicare beneficiaries as in clinical trials."
Even when warfarin use was clearly indicated—in people who had no reason for not taking the drug and had other risk factors for stroke—it was used in only 65% of the cases, the study found.
One major reason for the underuse of warfarin was the need for constant monitoring through a blood test every few weeks, Gage says. "Monitoring for many patients was infrequent," he says. "Tests were done every three months or sometimes at longer intervals. |
| For example, most people get their blood test results by phone, but medicare doesn't reimburse patients unless the assessment is made in a doctor's office, he says. "It's a hassle for patients, physicians and staff," Gage explains. "This kind of reimbursement is a disincentive for monitoring."
But, "In the long term, what we need are easier drugs to handle. In a few years, we should have alternatives to warfarin," Gage predicts. |
| James Jollis, a cardiologist at Duke University Medical Center, collected data on 127,959 medicare patients who were hospitalized for heart attacks between January 1994 and February 1996.
The researchers found that, while treatment was essentially the same for all of the patients, 21.7% of those admitted to the hospital in December died, compared with 20.1% of those admitted to hospitals in other months. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 After she gets her prescription filled, the pharmacy bills medicare $50. (Remember, this is for the same prescription that only cost $1 to manufacture.)
4. medicare screws around with paperwork for a couple of months, adding another $50 in overhead cost, and then bills the state of California $50 for reimbursement. Total cost is now $100 (including administrative overhead).
5. The state of California gets the request and spends its own administration dollars ($25, perhaps) fumbling around with the paperwork before paying the federal government. |
Peter Rost
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 One of the most amazing examples of this was when congress passed the medicare drug bill, which gave prescription drug coverage to seniors, starting in 2006, but only covered $1,000 of the first $5,000 expense, and also explicitly forbade the government from negotiating drug prices.4 To make matters even worse, the Los Angeles Times revealed that Costco's prices on the top one hundred drugs used by medicare beat prices of all forty-eight plans in California in more than half the cases. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Medicare: The Bush Administration not only agreed to pay monopoly prices for medications, it also made it illegal for the government to negotiate any discounts with pharmaceutical companies!
The result? A multi-trillion dollar taxpayer funded subsidy to the richest corporations in the world: Drug companies. Click here to view the CounterThink cartoon on this topic.) But it's not just the Bush Administration to blame here: no presidential candidate seems to be free from Big Pharma control other than Rep. Ron Paul, who is a strong advocate of genuine health freedom. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Medicare drugs, he's pushed for mandatory "mental health screening" of children that would result in a windfall of profits for psychiatric drugs, he has supported legal immunity for drug companies in cases where patients are killed by drugs like Vioxx, and he has supported the FDA's actions on banning drug imports and protecting monopoly drug pricing in the United States. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This is not appreciated in America because it competes with our own home-grown poisoning method that prefers to poison consumer more slowly, bilking them for hundreds of thousands of dollars in monopoly priced medications and hopefully killing them off right before medicare or social security might kick in.
So the next time some ignorant bureaucrat (or friend, or family member) mentions to you how dangerous China's food products are, just ask them these simple questions:
1) Why does the FDA allow leukemia-causing chemicals to be added to hot dogs that are consumed by children? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Nurses, Doctors Announce 'Scrubs for SiCKO' Campaign in Conjunction With Debut of Michael Moore's Film to Spark Genuine Healthcare Debate
Planning to spark a fundamental change in national healthcare politics, an unprecedented national coalition of nurses and doctors organizations today announced plans to rally around the openings of Michael Moore's "SiCKO" June 29 to press the campaign for single-payer healthcare, guaranteeing comprehensive, quality healthcare with an expanded and improved medicare for all. |
| HR 676 and similar bills in several state legislatures would have one public entity collecting and disbursing all revenues for care delivered by our current, mostly private hospitals, clinics, and doctors, similar to how medicare works. The system is universal, assures comprehensive benefits, guarantees freedom to choose your provider, and controls costs. It also drastically curbs administrative costs -- and the waste caused by insurance company profits and paperwork. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 And yet the entire revenue base of the cancer industry is based on precisely that: Keeping people alive long enough to "treat" them with overpriced toxic chemicals that can be billed to medicare at 50,000% markups over their manufacturing cost.
Cancer is big, big business. And curing cancer is a threat to all the criminals participating in that industry: The non-profit employees, oncologists, doctors, federal regulators, drug company executives, med school propaganda teachers, pharmaceutical reps and many others. These people cannot allow cancer to be prevented or cured. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Was the procedure billed to medicare?
Like a giant 3-D anatomy chart
Overall, the exhibit was certainly eye opening. Speaking of anatomy, it was skull opening and chest cavity opening, too, if you consider what had been done to the bodies on display. If you're the least bit curious about human anatomy, the exhibit is quite educational. Looking at the muscles, tendons, capillaries and nerves of the human body, you can't help but be humbled and awed by the complexity of the design. The blood supply to the liver is simply breathtaking. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 It's like running around a leaky house with a pail trying to catch all of the drops of water while billing medicare for the cost of the pails. It would be better to simply fix the roof. But knowing that the roof is leaking requires some detective work, and conventional medicine has abandoned anything resembling real detective work. Today, it's all about identifying and treating the symptoms, then waiting for the patient to return with more symptoms caused by the treatments used on the first round of symptoms.
Someday, this whole system of modern medicine will be looked upon as quite foolish. |
Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D.
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 By the middle of this century, spending on medicare alone will consume an estimated 40 percent of the U.S. budget. This is unsustainable, and its effects are already showing up in a variety of painful ways.
Even as I write, General Motors—once the biggest, most powerful corporation in the entire world—is announcing draconian plant closings and workforce cuts that will eliminate more than 30,000 jobs in North America over the next few years. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Another is an immediate and permanent two-thirds cut in Social Security and medicare benefits. A third alternative, were it feasible, would be to immediately and permanently cut all federal discretionary spending by 143 percent."
If you read that last paragraph with any presence of mind, you now begin to understand the magnitude of the fiscal problem facing the United States. It could be solved, as explained above, by doubling all personal and corporate income taxes. But then what's the point in working? It could also be solved by slashing promised benefits in Social Security and medicare. |
Andreas Moritz
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 With one stroke of the pen, Walker says, the federal government increased existing medicare obligations nearly 40 percent over the next 75 years. "We'd have to have eight trillion dollars today, invested in treasury rates, to deliver on that promise," Walker explains. Asked how much we actually have, Walker says, "Zip." In addition to the financial fiasco, the plan forces millions of older Americans to accept inferior drug coverage. All the government does is to borrow money to pay for what it cannot afford to pay. |
Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George
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 The simple answer is that landmark legislation—the medicare Bill Part D—was passed by Congress in 2003 to prevent this and to ensure that millions of taxpayer dollars would be spent on drugs. The fact that this bill was passed in the early-morning hours (perhaps so C-SPAN viewers would not be watching), surrounded by hundreds of pharmaceutical lobbyists (who, according to some observers, wrote much of the bill), and that many of the major politicians and staffers who pushed the bill through the legislative process ended up working for the industry is a national disgrace. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The health insurance companies are paid to deny health claims and the government workers at medicare and Medicaid offices are paid to find new ways to deny payments to doctors and hospitals for services rendered. Thus, doctors' offices and hospitals have to employ entire armies of people to sit around and reclassify procedures in ways that can get paid by insurance companies, medicare and Medicaid. It's a massive waste of time, money and effort.
In the U.S. healthcare system, it's a paperwork nightmare. And there is a paperwork war taking place. |
Charles Barber
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 As a category, mental health issues are searched for more often than immunizations, dental health, medicare or Medicaid, sexual health information, or problems with drugs and alcohol.29 In July 2006, of the ten most popular online searches for pharmaceutical and medical products, six concerned psychiatric drugs or psychiatric disease. (They were, in order, Lexapro, Cymbalta, Zoloft, Wellbutrin [an antianxiety agent], Effexor, and the illness of depression itself.)30 Among people who have visited a medication site, depression is by far the most researched medical condition, with 2. |
| The real problem for Big Pharma is not declining profit margins or loss of political clout—although the Democratic victories in late 2006 sent shockwaves through the industry, for fear that the government would negotiate lower prices of drugs for medicare. The real concern is the lack of new and innovative drugs. Only twenty new drugs were approved by the FDA in 2005, as compared to fifty-three in 1996.65 The "pipeline problem," as it is called, speaks to the serious lack of creativity on the part of the industry. |
| Collectively, the entitlement programs of Social Security ($488 billion), Medicaid ($300 billion), and medicare ($176 billion) now make up almost half of the federal budget.
Feeling entided to all this, we think we are also entided to happiness. |
Bill Sardi
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 Journal Clinical Oncology 23: 8894-905, 2005]
This mass-scale fraud has caused medicare to downshift its reimbursement for Lupron and other cancer drugs. Many oncologists will earn 30 to 50% less a year as a consequence of the $1.1 billion Med icare fraud settlement.
The Pap smear
In 2004, investigators estimated 22 million U.S. women 1 8 years and older had undergone hysterectomy, representing 21 % of the female population. |
Jonathan V. Wright, M.D. and Alan R. Gaby, M.D.
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 Costs medicare less rhat way, too!" She glared at me, readjusted her expression, and continued.
"I saw what your clinic did for Bill a few years back. Near at death's door, now he's out working the yard, fixing the roof, and he's 3 years older than I am. When I first got this congestive heart failure 5 or 6 years ago, he told me to come see you, but medicare won't cover your type of treatment and the co-op won't either. Bill says he's tired of me complaining about not sleeping flat and if I'm too cheap he'll pay for it himself. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| Reuters)-The pharmaceutical industry spends tens of millions of dollars each year on lobbying for numerous issues on its behalf, such as keeping importation of cheaper prescription drugs from other countries illegal and getting favorable language written into medicare legislation.
The following is the total amount spent by some of the biggest drug companies on lobbying in the United States for 2002 and for the first six months of 2003, as filed with the Senate Office of Public Records. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 People who think vitamins are too expensive but pharmaceuticals are a bargain because they get a 10 percent discount on some hare-brained medicare plan. People who spend more on their credit cards to get more "miles" or "cash rewards," not realizing that the interest they pay on those cards far outweighs any such benefits. People who refinance their homes to pay their credit card debt, and then rack up new credit card debt, thinking their home is some kind of limitless cash-dispensing ATM machine. |
Melody Petersen
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 Families should request an autopsy if they wonder about the true cause of a loved one's death. medicare pays for an autopsy when someone over the age of sixty-five dies. The cost is built into the overall rates that the government pays the hospital to care for patients. Even though hospitals no longer do autopsies, they still get this money but spend it on something else.
Doctors must be trained to determine the actual cause of a person's death. They should be required to look specifically at whether a drug may have caused the death or had a part in it. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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 We are also paying a lot of money for health care we may never even receive, as a result of the rising costs of individual health insurance, health-care benefits that drive companies into the ground, expensive medicare drug benefits, and uncontrollable Medicaid costs.
Many of the aforementioned expenses are related to expensive drugs that we often don't need, that are no more effective than older alternatives, or that are simply not as valuable as drug companies make them out to be. |
| In fact, statistics show that antipsychotic medications are being prescribed for one quarter of the medicare beneficiaries in nursing homes. In spite of the fact that these drugs should not be used to treat dementia in the absence of a psychotic disorder, only one quarter of elderly patients on antipsychotics actually have a psychotic disorder. In other words, the majority of those antipsychotic prescriptions currently being written are inappropriate for elderly patients without an indication for treatment with an antipsychotic, namely hallucinations or delusion. |
| A study of children in Tennessee's Managed Care program for medicare showed that the number of prescriptions for antipsychotics doubled in a five-year period ending in 2001. During this time, one in every one hundred children became a new user of an antipsychotic. The proportion of atypical (newer and more expensive) antipsychotics went from 7% to 96% of antipsychotic prescriptions. The number of children treated for psychotic disorders or Tourette's did not change; the increase was accounted for by children treated with attention deficit disorder, conduct disorder, and affective disorders. |
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