About 20% of American adults reported having had a mental illness during the preceding year, a government survey found.

The figure rose to almost 30% of those in the 18 to 25 age group, compared with 14.3% of patients 50 and older, according to researchers from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

And of the nearly 46 million U.S. adults who reported having had a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder when surveyed in 2010, some 60% didn’t receive any treatment for the condition.

The most common reason for not getting mental healthcare was not being able to afford it.

The researchers noted that although the 20% figure is “relatively high,” just 5% reported having serious issues that interfered with their normal activities.

Although more of those with serious mental illness reported receiving treatment, a large proportion — 39% — didn’t receive any mental health services.

The unemployed, Medicaid beneficiaries, and those living below the poverty level were more likely to have mental illness in the preceding year, as were younger patients. Women appeared to be at greater risk than men (23% versus 16.8%)…

[continues at MedPage Today]

Gawker writes that the question wasn’t so hypothetical. Kent Snyder is credited with convincing Paul to run for president, and served brilliantly as his campaign manager, raising an astonishing $19.5 million. In 2008, just two weeks after the campaign ended, Snyder died at age 49 from pneumonia. He did not receive insurance through Paul, and was unable to afford it on his own due to a preexisting medical condition. His death left his mother with $400,000 in medical bills. (She is now in debt.) Say what you will, but he exemplified the free-market libertarian principles that he worked for while healthy:

After Snyder’s death, Paul posted a message to the website for his Campaign for Liberty — a pre-Tea Party organization which served Paul as both presidential marketing tool and platform to promote his non-interventionist, free market ideals. He wrote:

“Like so many in our movement, Kent sacrificed much for the cause of liberty. Kent poured every ounce of his being into our fight for freedom. He will always hold a place in my heart and in the hearts of my family.”

And that, friends, is what freedom is really all about.

The Carer Watch forum, which is an online meeting place for hundreds of disabled people and carers has been taken offline by the hosting company after legal threats made by Atos Origin regarding unspecified comments made on the forum. Atos Origin’s involvement in the condemn Government’s notorious health and disability testing has made them a target of fury amongst many disabled people, which has led to a fierce campaigning against them both on and offline. Atos are fighting back with the CarerWatch forum being only the latest website hit by Atos legal threats. Latest news: That Censored Carer Watch Post Revealed. Libelous? Or just a bullying attempt by Atos to censor free speech on the internet.

In May this year the Afteratos website was threatened with legal action over the use of their corporate logo in the spoof design above (use of corporate logos for parody is a grey area in UK law). Atos also threatened the site over their use of the phrase ‘Atos Kills’. Then last week Atos turned their attention to the aptly named ‘Atos Register of Shame’ claiming that:

“In particular we draw your attention to Atos Register of Shame which is purporting to be a register of health-care professional employees who have allegedly performed substandard medical assessments. This is a direct attack on Atos and the name of the website in and of itself is implying that Atos carries on its business in a manner which is shameful.”

Which is perfectly apt since the way Atos carries out it’s business is indeed shameful. Atos have come under heavy criticism from disability campaigners, charities and increasingly the medical profession for their administration of the government’s Work Capability Assessment and decisions made based on Atos’ computer system has tragically already led to sick and disabled people committing suicide. The Guardian reveals that 12 doctors are currently being investigated by the British Medical Association over their treatment of vulnerable people and may face being struck off.

Enough is enough — it’s time to call on the trusty internet to resist this intimidation and harassment of disabled people and supporters wanting to speak out against this company. Please tweet, blog, share — use the images here, or the phrase ‘atos kills’, let’s get spartacus style on the bastards. Please also consider republishing the offending post. If tweeting use the hashtags #atoskills #atos #atosorigin to let them know we’re talking about them.

For the latest websites which have defied these legal threats visit: johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/the-great-atos-rebrand-update.

Photo: Reckon (CC)

Via Modern Mythology:

(Update: Since writing this entry, I recently discovered a Mother Jones article informing me that the Republican/Tea Party Governor of Florida, Rick Scott, founded a company called SOLANTIC that specializes in drug testing, among other “public services” … Could it be that this legislation stands to benefit the people who are passing it financially? Hrmm … Jigsaw falling into place.)

Recently, as many of you may have heard, Florida senators successfully passed a bill requiring welfare recipients to receive mandatory drug screenings. It is doubtful the legislation will stop there. In what seems to me to be an instance of VERY OBVIOUSLY blatant racial discrimination and discrimination of the haves towards the have-nots, they are now finding another way to invade all of our lives and rob us of more of our privacy. One gradual erosion of civil liberties at a time. The cruel and hilarious irony of the situation is that although at the moment these measures are now only being taken against those who have already slipped through the cracks, it is only a matter of time before all of our privacy and civil liberties will be up for grabs.

Think of it like this: What if your healthcare provider (if you even have one, and you probably don’t) suddenly decided to take it upon themselves to barge into your house and force you to piss in a cup, clip your hair, ransack your apartment or home and search for anything mildly incriminating. Any evidence that you had engaged in anything mildly incriminating (and most of you have, or know someone who has) would then be immediate grounds for them to discontinue your healthcare. Alternately, say you yourself or someone you knew suffered from some sort of drug related addiction or health problems. Ironically, many of the same persons I have heard complaining about people on welfare using drugs have had similar issues themselves. Imagine, then, you yourself or someone you love ODs and they are dying. They are now in a position of life or death.

Now imagine the doctor in charge tells you, “Sorry, new ER policy: We are no longer allowed to treat this person because they have a history of drug use and their healthcare won’t allow it.” What if a doctor in an ER refused someone a life saving preventative measure to keep them from dying because of drug use? What if your healthcare provider suddenly decided that it didn’t have to insure you if you had a history of drug use?

Sound extreme? It is.

More on Modern Mythology

An appeals court ruled Friday that President Barack Obama’s healthcare law requiring Americans to buy healthcare insurance or face a penalty was unconstitutional, a blow to the White House.

The Appeals Court for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, found that Congress exceeded its authority by requiring Americans to buy coverage, but also ruled that the rest of the wide-ranging law could remain in effect.

The legality of the so-called individual mandate, a cornerstone of the 2010 healthcare law, is widely expected to be decided by the Supreme Court. The Obama administration has defended the provision as constitutional.

The case stems from a challenge by 26 U.S. states which had argued the individual mandate, set to go into effect in 2014, was unconstitutional because Congress could not force Americans to buy health insurance or face the prospect of a penalty.

“This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives,” a divided three-judge panel said.

Obama and his administration had pressed for the law to help halt the steep increases in healthcare costs and expand insurance coverage to the more than 30 million Americans who are without it.

Read more here.

]]> http://www.disinfo.com/2011/08/appeals-court-deems-healthcare-mandate-unconstitutional/feed/ 43 http://www.disinfo.com/2011/08/u-s-approves-free-birth-control-for-women/ http://www.disinfo.com/2011/08/u-s-approves-free-birth-control-for-women/#comments Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:26:42 +0000 Pelliciari http://www.disinfo.com/?p=57928

Photo: Ceridwen (CC)

It’s a good time to be a woman. Via Reuters:

U.S. health insurance companies must offer women free birth control and other preventive health care services under Obama administration rules released on Monday, a historic decision supported by family planning groups and opposed by conservative groups.

The rules from the Health and Human Services Department are part of the nation’s healthcare overhaul and largely follow recommendations from an advisory group released last month.

The U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, commissioned by the Obama administration, recommended that all U.S.-approved birth control methods — including the “morning-after pill,” taken shortly after intercourse to stop a pregnancy — be added to the list of preventive health services.

[Continues at Reuters]

Photo: Ceridwen (CC)

It’s a good time to be a woman. Via Reuters:

U.S. health insurance companies must offer women free birth control and other preventive health care services under Obama administration rules released on Monday, a historic decision supported by family planning groups and opposed by conservative groups.

The rules from the Health and Human Services Department are part of the nation’s healthcare overhaul and largely follow recommendations from an advisory group released last month.

The U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, commissioned by the Obama administration, recommended that all U.S.-approved birth control methods — including the “morning-after pill,” taken shortly after intercourse to stop a pregnancy — be added to the list of preventive health services.

[Continues at Reuters]

]]>

In a decision announced Friday the federal government ruled that [marijuana] has no accepted medical use and should remain classified as a dangerous drug like heroin.

The decision comes almost nine years after medical marijuana supporters asked the government to reclassify cannabis to take into account a growing body of worldwide research that shows its effectiveness in treating certain diseases, such as glaucoma and multiple sclerosis.

DEA Administrator Michele M. Leonhart sent a letter dated June 21 to the organizations that filed a petition for the change. Leonhart said she rejected the request because marijuana “has a high potential for abuse,” “has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States” and “lacks accepted safety for use under medical supervision.”

This is the third time that petitions to reclassify marijuana have been spurned. The first was filed in 1972 and denied 17 years later. The second was filed in 1995 and denied in 2001. Both decisions were appealed, but the courts sided with the federal government.

A 59-year-old man has been jailed in Gastonia, N.C., on charges of larceny after allegedly robbing an RBC Bank for $1 so he could get health care in prison. Richard James Verone handed a female teller a note demanding the money and claiming that he had a gun, according to the police report.

He then sat down and waited for police to arrive. “… I say, ‘I’ll be sitting right over here, on the chair, waiting for the police,’” Verone told reporters, recalling the June 9 robbery in an interview from Gaston County Jail.

Verone said he asked for $1 to show that his motives were medical, not monetary, according to news reports. With a growth in his chest, two ruptured disks and no job, Verone hoped a three-year stint in prison would afford him the health care he needed.

WASHINGTON — Four former employees of Blackwater, the scandal-plagued security firm now called Xe, have filed a $60 million class action lawsuit claiming the firm failed to pay health and pension benefits to its employees.

Their lawyer, Scott Bloch, said Wednesday that Xe improperly classified thousands of its employees as independent contractors, allowing the company to avoid “millions of dollars in taxes, withholding and payments of benefits.”

“Blackwater made hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers and hired thousands of former veterans of military service and police officers,” said Bloch in a statement.

“It is a grave injustice to them who were mistreated and left without any health insurance or other benefits for their families, and left to fend for themselves in paying into Social Security and Medicare,” he said.

The lawsuit was filed Monday in federal court in Washington, and hopes to recover Social Security, unemployment insurance, health and other benefits for the four plaintiffs, all of whom were injured while working for Blackwater.

For more information, see original article.

Everyone’s cracked wise about cheerful voices in commercials telling us that an erectile dysfunction drug might make you blind, but have you ever read the full list of side effects? Prescription medication labels average an insane 70 possible side effects, according to a new study.

The study examined 5,600 medications, and found the worst offenders to be antidepressants, antiviral medications, and restless leg syndrome medications treatments. One especially ridiculous drug listed 525. The exhaustive lists fly in the face of FDA guidelines asking drug companies to keep the lists manageable. Obviously, 525 is a preposterous number of side effects to list on a label, but isn’t it just as concerning that we’re prescribing drugs that could go wrong in 500 different ways?

More on Gizmodo

Says Dorothy:

The hell of war comes home. In July 2009 Colorado Springs Gazettea published a two-part series entitled “Casualties of War”. The articles focused on a single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, who since returning from duty in Iraq had been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, drunk driving, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides. Returning soldiers were committing murder at a rate 20 times greater than other young American males. A separate investigation into the high suicide rate among veterans published in the New York Times in October 2010 revealed that three times as many California veterans and active service members were dying soon after returning home than those being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. We hear little about the personal hell soldiers live through after returning home.

See more at Sad And Useless

You might expect your granny to knit you a woolly jumper, but one pensioner has been defying expectations by using her needles to craft amazing knitted breasts.

Coral Charles-Dunne, 91, from Birmingham, has knitted dozens of the unusual educational tools as part of a project to inform expectant and new mums about breastfeeding.

She says spends about two hours creating each of the woolly boobs and makes them in a range of sizes, knitting for up to six hours per day.

The knitted breasts are then used by expectant moms to learn techniques for breast feeding … their partners probably use them to create an unusual game of football.

Read More on Newslite

The Canadian-born Bieber never plans on becoming an American citizen. “You guys are evil,” he jokes. “Canada’s the best country in the world.” He adds, “We go to the doctor and we don’t need to worry about paying him, but here, your whole life, you’re broke because of medical bills. My bodyguard’s baby was premature, and now he has to pay for it. In Canada, if your baby’s premature, he stays in the hospital as long as he needs to, and then you go home.

For the rare disinfo reader who is a Bieber fan, here’s some video from the RS shoot:

Article continues at Rolling Stone.

In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed – “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.

Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution.

And when the Bill came to the desk of President John Adams for signature, I think it’s safe to assume that the man in that chair had a pretty good grasp on what the framers had in mind.

Realizing that a healthy maritime workforce was essential to the ability of our private merchant ships to engage in foreign trade, Congress and the President resolved to do something about it. The law did a number of fascinating things.

First, it created the Marine Hospital Service, a series of hospitals built and operated by the federal government to treat injured and ailing privately employed sailors. This government provided healthcare service was to be paid for by a mandatory tax on the maritime sailors (a little more than 1% of a sailor’s wages), the same to be withheld from a sailor’s pay and turned over to the government by the ship’s owner. The payment of this tax for health care was not optional. If a sailor wanted to work, he had to pay up.

This is pretty much how it works today in the European nations that conduct socialized medical programs for its citizens – although 1% of wages doesn’t quite cut it any longer.

President Rousseff Photo: Roberto Stuckert Filho/Presidência da República

BBC News reports:

Brazil is to provide free medicines for everyone suffering from high blood pressure or diabetes.

The drugs will be distributed through a nationwide network of budget pharmacies, where many medicines are already heavily subsidised.

President Dilma Rousseff said the measure was part of her campaign to end extreme poverty in Brazil.

About 33 million Brazilians have high blood pressure, and more than seven million have diabetes.

The free medicines will be available to all Brazilians who have a doctor’s prescription, but the authorities say they expect the offer to be taken up mainly by poorer people who use the public health system.

They will be distributed through 15,000 chemist shops that belong to the “Popular Pharmacies” network, where many drugs are already sold at a 90% discount.

[Continues at BBC News]

Life expectancies in the U.S. are now lower than for many other industrialized countries, and the nation’s past love affair with tobacco is largely to blame, government officials say.

In a report released Tuesday, a panel commissioned by the National Research Council sought to explain why the U.S. spends more on health care than any other nation, yet Americans are dying younger than some of their counterparts in other high-income countries.

Over the past two and a half decades, life expectancies continued to rise in the U.S., but at a slower pace than those seen in Australia, Canada, Japan, Great Britain, and other high-income European countries.

The average live expectancy for men in the U.S. was 75.6 years in 2007, compared to around 79 years among men in living in Australia, Japan, and Sweden and between 77 and 78 years among men living in the Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and France.

The life expectancy for women in the U.S. is 80.8 years, which is lower than for any other high-income country included in the analysis except Denmark (80.5 years).

Americans now smoke less than the populations of many other industrialized, high-income countries, but this was not the case in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, panel co-chair Samuel H. Preston, PhD, tells WebMD…

[continues at WebMD]

Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media

The Republicans who now control the U.S. House of Representatives made demolishing the Obama healthcare bill their top priority during their campaign and will fight their hardest to make that demolition a reality now that they hold office. We all know the reasons: tea partiers want the government out of their Medicaid; seasoned republicans know they just need to trumpet their hatred of “big government” to stay seated; and most in both camps believe that the “market” is gospel and should dictate who should get health coverage.

The Department of Health and Human Services released a study showing that between 50 and 129 million Americans have some kind of pre-existing health condition. As plenty of Americans know, a preexisting condition can allow insurance companies to deny some or even all coverage. Should an insurance company decide to change their criteria defining “pre-existing condition,” it’s possible for a patient to lose coverage as well. But, under the Affordable Care Act, soon enough Americans will not be subject to coverage denial or extraordinarily high premiums because of preexisting conditions.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

Gage Martindale, who is 8 years old, has been taking a blood-pressure drug since he was a toddler. “I want to be healthy, and I don’t want things in my heart to go wrong,” he says.

And, of course, his mom is always there to check Gage’s blood pressure regularly with a home monitor, and to make sure the second-grader doesn’t skip a dose of his once-a-day enalapril.

These days, the medicine cabinet is truly a family affair. More than a quarter of U.S. kids and teens are taking a medication on a chronic basis, according to Medco Health Solutions Inc., the biggest U.S. pharmacy-benefit manager with around 65 million members. Nearly 7% are on two or more such drugs, based on the company’s database figures for 2009.

Doctors and parents warn that prescribing medications to children can be problematic. There is limited research available about many drugs’ effects in kids. And health-care providers and families need to be vigilant to assess the medicines’ impact, both intended and not. Although the effects of some medications, like cholesterol-lowering statins, have been extensively researched in adults, the consequences of using such drugs for the bulk of a patient’s lifespan are little understood.

Many medications kids take on a regular basis are well known, including treatments for asthma and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

But children and teens are also taking a wide variety of other medications once considered only to be for adults, from statins to diabetes pills and sleep drugs, according to figures provided to The Wall Street Journal by IMS Health, a research firm. Prescriptions for antihypertensives in people age 19 and younger could hit 5.5 million this year if the trend though September continues, according to IMS. That would be up 17% from 2007, the earliest year available.

Researchers attribute the wide usage in part to doctors and parents becoming more aware of drugs as an option for kids. Unhealthy diets and lack of exercise among children, which lead to too much weight gain and obesity, also fuel the use of some treatments, such as those for hypertension. And some conditions are likely caught and treated earlier as screening and diagnosis efforts improve.

Gage, who isn’t overweight, has been on hypertension drugs since he had surgery to fix a heart defect as a toddler, says his mother, Stefanie Martindale, a Conway, Ark., marketing-company manager.

Most medications that could be prescribed to children on a chronic basis haven’t been tested specifically in kids, says Danny Benjamin, a Duke University pediatrics professor. And older drugs rarely get examined, since pharmaceutical firms have little incentive to test medicines once they are no longer under patent protection.

Still, a growing number of studies have been done under a Food and Drug Administration program that rewards drug companies for testing medications in children. In more than a third of these studies, there have been surprising side effects, or results that suggested a smaller or larger dose was needed than had been expected, Dr. Benjamin says. Those findings underscore that children’s reactions to medicines can be very different than those of adults. Long-term effects of drugs in kids are almost never known, since pediatric studies, like those in adults, tend to be relatively short.

“We know we’re making errors in dosing and safety,” says Dr. Benjamin, who is leading a new National Institutes of Health initiative to study drugs in children. He suggests that parents should do as much research as they can to understand the evidence for the medicine, confirm the diagnosis, and identify side effects.

As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective.

The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less — right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical — the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population.

The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.

Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called “A Superpower in Decline,” which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at “balance” found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties…

Read More in Alternet

The very misnomered “U.S.” Chamber of Commerce is best known for throwing gobs of money into the last election at the idiotic Supreme Court’s urging, attempting to get a flood of corporate hacks masquerading as populists elected to Congress, and also for it’s fearless “leader”, Tom Donohue, who famously claimed he’d make any candidate who even dared MENTION helping the poor, bleed and cry.

Yeah. A real prince among men. And that is the real spirit of that organization. A giant eff you to anyone who isn’t a billionaire, that claims to work for small businesses, but doesn’t. Nathan Diebenow writes in RAW Story:

The US Chamber of Commerce lobbied to kill a bill that would have helped cover medical expenses and compensation for first responders and survivors of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to documents available online.

The Chamber’s aim was to keep open a tax loophole benefiting foreign corporations that the $7.4 billion bill would have closed to provide funding for the American emergency workers.

In a letter opposing the 9/11 bill, R. Bruce Josten, the Chamber’s executive vice president for Government Affairs, cautioned that closing the tax loophole would harm US trade relationships and financial markets.

Read More in RAW Story

Some Republican lawmakers — still reveling in Tuesday’s statewide election sweep — are proposing an unprecedented solution to the state’s estimated $25 billion budget shortfall: dropping out of the federal Medicaid program.

Far-right conservatives are offering that possibility in post-victory news conferences. Moderate Republicans are studying it behind closed doors. And the party’s advisers on health care policy say it’s being discussed more seriously than ever, though they admit it may be as much a huge in-your-face to Washington as anything else.

“With Obamacare mandates coming down, we have a situation where we cannot reduce benefits or change eligibility” to cut costs, said State Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, the veteran conservative lawmaker who recently entered the race for speaker of the Texas House. “This system is bankrupting our state,” he said. “We need to get out of it. And with the budget shortfall we’re anticipating, we may have to act this year.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, estimates Texas could save $60 billion between 2013 and 2019 by opting out of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, dropping coverage for acute care but continuing to fund long-term care services. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission, which has 3.6 million children, people with disabilities and impoverished Texans enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP, will release its own study on the effect of ending the state’s participation in the federal match program at some point between now and January.

State Rep. John Zerwas, R-Simonton, an anesthesiologist who authored the bill commissioning the Medicaid study, said early indications are that dropping out of the program would have a tremendous ripple effect monetarily. He is not ready to discount the idea, he said, but he worries about who would carry the burden of care without Medicaid’s “financial mechanism.”

“Because of the substantial amount of matching money that comes from the federal government, there’s an economic impact that comes from that,” Zerwas said. “If we start to look at what that impact is, we have to consider whether it’s feasible to not participate.”

The talking baby ad was paid for by the “Coalition to Protect Seniors,” which has a Web site but no information about its backers.

Are CGI babies shilling for big insurance corporations?  Mike McIntire of the New York Times did a little research and here’s what he had to say.  It’s good stuff, so please do read it through to the end!

It was the wisecracking baby who caught my attention.

Sitting on a living room carpet and addressing the camera in a dubbed voice that growls like a Vegas bookie, he tells viewers, “Gramps is sad — Obama cut $455 billion from his Medicare.” He warns of dire consequences from the health insurance overhaul if voters do not take action in November.

“I don’t know what smells worse,” the little guy huffs, “my diaper or this new bill.”

A sign-off informs the television audience that this high-minded piece of issue advocacy was paid for by the “Coalition to Protect Seniors.”

Hmmm.

Who are the members of the coalition? Where do they get their money? And why are they spending hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking candidates for Congress around the country?

More at the New York Times.

Paging Dr. 3PO. One day soon robots could performing routine procedures in the OR.

Bioengineers at Duke University announced yesterday that they’ve created a robot that can “locate a man-made, or phantom, lesion in simulated human organs, guide a device to the lesion and take multiple samples during a single session,” all without a doctor’s supervision. Researchers hope these developments could one day lead to robots working autonomously on basic surgical operations.

Nicknamed the Biopsy Bot, the robot relies on 3-D and ultrasound technology for its movement. The ultrasound scans serve as the robot’s “eyes,” enabling the doc bot to locate its target. With advanced artificial technology, the robot processes the 3-D data and sends out specific commands to its mechanical “arm” and “hand,” devices that examine lesions and are able to take samples.

So far, the next-gen surgical robot has been 93% effective in its most recent tests, and researchers at Duke are confident about the robot’s viability…

[continues at Fast Company]

Before, doctors worried about patients who self-diagnosed after doing Internet research on questionable medical websites. But the social Web has given birth to a new beast: users who document their DIY medical procedures on camera and share the videos on YouTube.

Doug Southern would have preferred to see a doctor, but bad timing meant he was without health insurance. He was laid off from his job a short while before a three-year-old baseball-sized cyst on his back became infected.

When his brother-in-law, a family practitioner, and his sister came to visit him in Tuscaloosa, Ala., he decided to put down a towel and pillow on his kitchen floor and turn it into a makeshift operating room so his cyst could be taken out “Alabama style.”

The graphic, seven-minute YouTube video is punctuated with squeals of delight and revulsion from Mr. Southern’s sister (the camerawoman) and commentary from the doctor (“Now you see how that’s a little bit cheesy there? That’s some of the cyst stuff comin’ out.”).

His video was posted mostly for entertainment (“You don’t want to see it, but once you see it happening, you can’t take your eyes off it,” he says) but it was uploaded to the “Education” category of YouTube.

Five health care facilities have signed an agreement with the New York Attorney General’s Office to settle charges that they polluted the state’s watersheds by dumping pharmaceutical products down sinks and toilets.

In 2008, an Associated Press investigation revealed that the drinking water consumed by more than one-sixth of the U.S. population is contaminated with trace (but potentially biologically active) amounts of over-the-counter and prescription drugs. While some of these chemicals enter sewage systems after being excreted by people taking the drugs, many of them were traced back to a common practice in hospitals and other health-care facilities: disposing of unused pharmaceuticals by flushing them down sinks or toilets.

After state tests of New York watersheds revealed widespread pharmaceutical contamination, the Attorney General’s Office launched an investigation. Eventually, five facilities — Putnam Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Holmes in Putnam County, and O’Connor Hospital, Countryside Care Center, Margaretville Memorial Hospital and Mountainside Residential Care Center in Delaware County — were charged with numerous federal and state violations, including failure to properly track, label, store and dispose of drugs. The hospitals and nursing homes were found to have improperly dumped antibiotics, antidepressants, hormones, painkillers and other pharmaceutical products directly into the state water supply.

Read More: Natural News

Pressured by an aging population and the need to rein in budget deficits, Canada’s provinces are taking tough measures to curb healthcare costs, a trend that could erode the principles of the popular state-funded system.

Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, kicked off a fierce battle with drug companies and pharmacies when it said earlier this year it would halve generic drug prices and eliminate “incentive fees” to generic drug manufacturers.

British Columbia is replacing block grants to hospitals with fee-for-procedure payments and Quebec has a new flat health tax and a proposal for payments on each medical visit — an idea that critics say is an illegal user fee.

And a few provinces are also experimenting with private funding for procedures such as hip, knee and cataract surgery. It’s likely just a start as the provinces, responsible for delivering healthcare, cope with the demands of a retiring baby-boom generation.

Read More: Reuters via Yahoo News

I caught Lawrence O’Donnell interviewing Michael Moore [on Countdown With Keith Olbermann] about health care.

Because I’m unemployed and so have time on my hands, and because there were so many bizarre claims about the contents of the HCR bill being tossed around during the debate, I’d already spent time spelunking through the depths of the bill … and so my ears perked up when I heard him saying this:

MOORE: If the insurance company is caught denying somebody because of a preexisting condition … their fine, according to this new law, is $100 a day. One hundred dollars. Now, do you think they’re going to take the fine, or do you think they’re going to pay thousands of dollars to help you if you have cancer? I think they’re probably going to take the fine … You can’t find that in the bill, it’s so hidden … My team of researchers spent a couple weeks on it and they found where this is going to be just $100 a day … If anybody’s watching this, get the bill online, see if you can find where that is, if you can actually find it and break the code, send me a thing on twitter and I’ll come over and wash your car.

I thought he was kidding about the car wash, but come Saturday morning Michael was tweeting about the fact that nobody had yet cracked the code, and I thought, “What the heck?” I had a copy of the HCR bill on my hard drive (doesn’t everyone?) so I thought I’d have a go at solving the mystery.

Read More on MichaelMoore.com

And that’s not just a cliche. I hate being right about this shit. Believe me, nothing would make me happier than feeling like I could cheerlead for the Democrats or some broad-based left formation. It would certainly make my life a lot easier and I might be able to declare a “victory” from time to time. The sad fact is that the Democrats and the left groups who apologize for them are not merely misguided souls on the same team as me. Nor are they merely deceivers who mislead the working class. Rather, they are active participants in attacking the working class, their living standards and working conditions.

Case in point: Not only will the health care bill leave four million people uninsured — to say nothing of the people paying too much for sub-standard coverage — it will fine them for the privilege. So not only are Americans now a captive audience of insurance conglomerates that would sell their organs if a profit could be turned on them, those who can’t afford to provide further profits for insurance companies will be fined.

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