or, What a Scorpion Sting Teaches Us about Hospitals and Insurance

By, G. Keith Smith, M.D., http://www.surgerycenterok.com
A woman recently received treatment for a scorpion sting in the Chandler Regional Medical Center emergency room in Phoenix and was billed $83,000, $80,000 of which was for the new anti-venom serum, Anascorp.

According to an article in the Arizona Republic, the patient’s insurer paid more than $57,000, and the hospital is asking her for the balance of about $25,000. This is said to be the “out of network” cost.

This is scandalous, but not because her “insurance” company didn’t pay enough on this claim. Actually, part of the scandal is that the insurance paid as much as it did! Continue reading →

By author/contributor, Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D.

Yes, there IS a war on women and women’s health—but it’s not being waged by Republicans or covered by the media. The accusations being hurled at Republicans are distracting attention from the real issues.

Women not only make up half the population. They also make 90 percent of the decisions about medical care for their children, husbands, and aging parents. They understand the importance of having the freedom to choose their doctors and their treatment. Continue reading →

Article by Jane M. Orient, MD published in the Washington Times on Sept. 3, 2012

“Insurance” and “coverage” are warm, benign-sounding words. The more the better. With “universal” and “comprehensive” coverage, everyone would be safe and secure, right? There would be no more worries about health care bankruptcy, for example.

People have gotten their photos in the newspaper for not having enough coverage. They’ve had cancer, and the only treatment that might help them has been ruled “experimental” and, therefore, not covered. Chances are, they got it anyway — with help from family, friends, total strangers and likely a loan from the bank. But there are other possible meanings for coverage. It can be stifling, restrictive and limiting. It can refer to six feet of earth. With a health plan, bankruptcy protection is for the plan, not the subscribers who may be forking over $600 a month in lost earnings. Continue reading →

By G. Keith Smith, M.D.,

As ObamaCare becomes ever more unpopular, the single payer idea keeps coming up. So let’s consider what a single-payer system would look like. There are so many places to look it’s a little confusing. Here’s a partial list.

Canada tends to come up first, and I think about it a lot. That’s because lots of Canadians come to our facility in Oklahoma for their care. Do I really need to say anything else? Continue reading →

By Grace Marie Turner,

President Obama said during his weekly radio address today that he wanted to share “some actual facts” about “a lot of accusations and misinformation flying around” about Medicare.

Let’s look at the “facts” that he highlights in his address:

We’ve extended the life of Medicare by almost a decade.

He “extends the life of Medicare” by paying Medicare providers less and less every year to the point that 15 percent, and eventually 40 percent, of Medicare providers will either go bankrupt or stop seeing Medicare patients altogether, according to Medicare actuaries.

CLICK HERE TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

By Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D.

The Supreme Court has ruled that Obamacare is constitutional and has upheld the law – a victory for those who want the Federal government to micromanage your life and medical care. This is a tragic defeat, however, for those who support our Founder’s vision of liberty and privacy and the right to control our private property, such as our medical records, and our medical decisions in the privacy of personal consultations without government intrusion.

So what happens now? What does it really mean for patients and their doctors and their privacy and their freedom to choose their medical care?

With Obamacare upheld, dangerous threats lie ahead for patients and their healthcare professionals, both from ObamaCare and from the “stimulus” bill passed in 2009.

This President’s campaign promises—no new taxes, lower insurance premiums, the ability to keep your doctor and your insurance if you liked it—were shredded in the secret back room deals of the single-party bill, which Congress did not read before its frantic midnight passage.

Now that people have read the law over the past two years, we see that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is neither protective of patients, nor affordable.

The Congressional Budget Office recently revised its earlier cost estimate, saying that Obamacare will cost over 2 Trillion dollars, double their original estimates, adding massively to the staggering US debt.

PPACA is not protective of patients either. Doctors are leaving Medicare, making it harder for seniors to access medical care. Cancer drugs are increasingly scarce. Insurance companies are getting out of the health insurance business, so that patients now have less choice of plans. As estimated 30-40% of employers can no longer afford to offer health insurance plans, instead pushing people onto Medicaid programs with long waits for care.

In an unprecedented show of solidarity, 26 states came together to sue the federal government to overturn ObamaCare and its takeover of one-sixth of our entire economy—the most massive power grab I have seen in my lifetime.

Along with the power grab, ObamaCare has been an assault on religious liberty and medical privacy, while tracking gun ownership in medical databases. PPACA also violates the 5th Amendment of our Constitution by allowing the federal government to take control of your private property—your medical records and your money—to serve its healthcare agenda.

What the Democrats have done to our medical freedom and privacy is nothing short of a crime in my book. Punishment won’t fall on Congress and the President, however, but on the American people, especially the elderly.

Many groups of Americans face punishment under the PPACA healthcare “reform” unless we completely repeal and replace the entire Obamacare law with market-based and patient-centered real reforms:

• Punishment for the sick. Medical expenses will no longer be tax-deductible until they reach 10% of adjusted gross income (AGI), instead of the current 7.5% AGI.

• Punishment for the elderly. Medicare cuts of $500–573 billion penalize the elderly by delaying, rationing, and denying treatment.

• Punishment for low income seniors, Hispanics, and blacks who will lose their Medicare Advantage program. Cutbacks have begun now, but the most severe cuts occur after the November 2012 election.

• Punishment for those who value their medical privacy. Under the Stimulus Bill or TARP, patients’ medical records will be sent directly to the federal health czar without permission from patients.

• Punishment for those with Health Savings Accounts who want to control how they spend money on healthcare—HSAs are further restricted, shifting power away from patients, where it belongs, into the controlling hand of big government elites.

• Punishment for those who want rapid access to specialists or primary care physicians. Various surveys report that more than 45% of doctors may leave medicine rather than practice under government control.

• Punishment for specialists serving mainly elderly patients, such as cardiologists and oncologists, who will see payments for their services slashed, and for their patients, whose access to care will be reduced.

• Punishment for all doctors, who will have to purchase expensive new computer systems or face further payment cuts…or go out of business.

• Punishment for medical device makers in the form of new taxes—which will be passed on to consumers.

• Punishment for consumers who buy “generous” health insurance policies, as the tax on insurance companies is passed on to purchasers.

• Punishment for States that elect to participate in Obamacare. The Medicaid expansion will catastrophically burden State budgets that are already stretched.

• Punishment for insurance companies and limited choices of insurance policies for patients. New compliance regulations eat into profits and raise premium costs, while “generous health insurance plans” will be hit with higher taxes.

• Punishments for all—except for exempted elite Federal politicians and their cronies, such as labor unions, who receive waivers. The exempted elite keep their private care, yet are the very ones forcing more taxes, penalties, higher costs, and less freedom as punishment on the rest of us.

We must repeal the entire Obamacare law and restore market-based, patient-centered health reform that maintains privacy and freedom for patients and their physicians.

(DISCLAIMER: Dr. Vliet speaks as an independent physician, not as an official spokesperson for any political party or organization. Dr. Vliet has no financial ties to any health care system or health insurance plan. Her allegiance and advocacy is to and for patients.)

Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D. is a preventive and climacteric medicine specialist with medical practices in Tucson AZ and Dallas TX that take an integrated approach to evaluation and treatment of women and men with complex medical and hormonal problems. Dr. Vliet is also President of International Health Strategies, Ltd., whose mission is twofold: liberty and privacy in treatment options and preservation of the Oath of Hippocrates focus on the individual patient.

Dr. Vliet has appeared on FOX NEWS, Cavuto, Stuart Varney Show, Fox and Friends and syndicated radio shows across the country addressing the economic and medical impact of the new healthcare bill.

By Elizabeth Lee Vliet, MD

The mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers that Americans remember each May are strikingly different from “Julia,” the star of Obama’s political campaign.

We cannot see helpless Julia as Molly Pitcher, stepping up to fire a cannon in the Revolutionary War in place of her fallen husband. We can’t picture Julia taking risks to free slaves in the War Between the States, or doing demanding work nursing dying soldiers in battles, or being willing to endure walking alongside a wagon train to settle the West.

Julia does not work from dawn to dusk to build shelter, plant crops, harvest food to eat, sew clothes, haul water, or clean up waste as our ancestors did. Julia does not stand side by side with her parents, brothers, sisters, and husband to build a community and fight to defend it.

Julia does not seem to have any of those natural relationships most women have—she only has the parasitic “relationship” with the “government” with her from cradle to grave.

Julia doesn’t need the skills our foremothers had…or even the skills of women today who work in fields previously only available to men. Everything is done for Julia through government benefits! But remember, those benefits come from taxing someone else’s work.

Poor hapless Julia can’t even “focus” on her web design work without free contraceptives provided by the government to “ease her worries” about getting pregnant. When Julia does “decide” to have a child, she then sends the child off on a bus to be raised at a government school.

Our foremothers showed strength, independence, and courage. They had no guarantee of the basics of life, even water, food, or shelter, and endured unbelievable hardship. They persevered through hard times, held their families together, and passed along their culture, their traditions, their standards, and dreams of liberty to the next generation.

American women have helped build the strongest and most prosperous nation in the history of the world. Through their own hard work, women reached the pinnacle of success in many fields: business, medicine, law, the military, engineering, space exploration, mining, construction, science, and government. They achieve through their effort and initiative and development of skills, a process we call earned success.

Julia, on the other hand, exemplifies learned helplessness and dependency. Her life shows the stark contrast between the vision of our Founders and the vision of modern “progressives.” Instead of having the freedom to choose her own path and to succeed based on one’s work, one’s intellect, one’s right to keep property, and one’s personal values, Julia’s life is subservient to Big Daddy government for protection to help her day to day. Although Julia doesn’t realize it, she could lose her favored “protection” at any time her protectors lose an election.

Government will take care of Julia—after it decides she is one of the chosen. Julia will be allowed to live as long as she is perceived to be an asset to the state. Once she becomes too old, or too sick, she will be “comforted” and “assisted” in dying when the government decides it is her time to go so that “society’s” resources can be spent on someone younger or more politically valuable.

It is a cruel irony that the very progressives who are reducing our women to this pathetic state are accusing others of making “war on women.” This government nanny kills the soul and the creative spirit of strong women, and creates passive, helpless shells of women living a shadow life.

The spirit of America is not embodied in the faceless, passive cartoon character of Julia, holding out her hand for government benefits.

The true spirit of America is embodied in The Lady Liberty, a strong woman who values the law, stands proudly holding her torch high as a beacon to victims of tyranny and oppression throughout the world.

The spirit of women we celebrate each Mother’s Day is embodied in the millions of women who dared to dream, who dared to take risks, who dared to explore the unknown and work alongside men to build a great nation.

I have spent a career in Medicine focused on empowering women, not creating dependency. Let it not be said that freedom to choose one’s path in life died on our watch while we made passive, parasitic “Julias” out of our young women.

By Elizabeth Lee Vliet, MD,

Proponents of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have a very costly, tax-payer funded national advertising campaign—posing as “protectors” of Medicare—even as the massively unpopular law cut $500-$800 billion from Medicare to fund expansion of Medicaid, shifting more medical care services to younger voters.

One Arizona Democrat said this is just “excess” money in the Medicare budget. Whom is he hoodwinking? Cutting $500-800 billion over 10 years is like cutting all Medicare to all recipients for 18 months. Smart seniors know that you cannot have the same level of medical services with such draconian budget cuts.

In the dark of night, in back room deals, with coercion and single party control, Democrat leaders Pelosi and Reid rammed through Congress the ironically named “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” or PPACA, in 2010. PPACA is neither protective of patients, nor affordable.

The 2010 healthcare law created the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) of 15 unelected board members, appointed by the President to determine therapies, procedures, tests, and medications covered by Medicare, and therefore allowed for Medicare patients and people covered under non-Medicare insurance offered through the government–run exchanges.

The decisions of the IPAB are not subject to Congressional oversight or judicial review. IPAB’s job is to cut costs by cutting medical services. Privately run insurance companies have appeal processes in place to protect patients. Doctors successfully use those appeals all the time to have medical care approved for payment. ObamaCare has no appeal process to protect you. Does this sound like patient protection?

The bureaucrats appointed under this Administration have already cut back on preventive medical screenings, such as PSA for prostate cancer and tests for breast cancer, and have recommended reducing CTs and MRIs, reducing back surgeries, reducing hip and knee replacements, and reducing approvals for hospital re-admissions for the same illness within 30 days of discharge. Does this sound like patient protection?

The same unelected bureaucrats in control of your medical care have further reduced access by drastically reducing Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals. Even Medicare’s chief actuary, Richard Foster, said these cuts mean 30-40% of hospitals would have to close by 2030. Does this sound like patient protection?

Still lower payments to doctors, already well below the costs of delivering care and propped up by privately insured patients, mean thousands more doctors will stop taking new Medicare patients. Want to pay for your own care? Sorry. Even private contracting is jeopardized under the new intrusive compliance regulations. Does this sound like patient protection?

The “Affordable Care” Act has imposed new taxes on recipients, such as the tax on investment income, new taxes on medical devices, and new taxes on medications. Higher costs are passed on to seniors. This is not affordable for people on fixed incomes.

The new healthcare law also slashes Medicare Advantage, the privately run plans most often chosen by low-income seniors. Cutting Medicare Advantage pushes low-income seniors into more expensive government-run plans. How is this affordable? Does this sound like patient protection?

“Patient Protection” Act proponents claim they “closed the doughnut hole.” They lure seniors into a false sense of security. Most haven’t noticed the shortages of critical medicines. You may not have to pay for it, but if you can’t get what you need when you need it, how does that help protect patients? In reality, it may jeopardize your life.

ObamaCare supporters claim that it will cut the national deficit—based on double counting fictional savings. In reality, the actual federal deficit would increase by up to $340 billion over the next 10 years, according to a meticulous study of PPACA’s spending and revenue projections by Charles Blahous of the Mercatus Center. (See http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/publication/The-Fiscal-Consequences-of-the-Affordable-Care-Act_1.pdf)

The upcoming elections provide a stark contrast in choices: Democrats who support the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act claim to be protecting Medicare. Maybe they mean protecting Medicare bureaucrats. They are most certainly not protecting Medicare patients.

This election season, your vote may determine the fate of your life. Don’t fall for platitudes or believe the ads. Use your common sense.

Look at what this intrusive, draconian new healthcare law has already done to seniors: budget cuts, increased taxes on drugs and medical devices, increased taxes on your investment income, and rules that cause physicians to stop taking Medicare patients.

Those who voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act need to be voted out of office in 2012 before they kill us with their “protections.”

Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D. is a preventive and climacteric medicine specialist with medical practices in Tucson AZ and Dallas TX that take an integrated approach to evaluation and treatment of women and men with complex medical and hormonal problems. Dr. Vliet is also President of International Health Strategies, Ltd., whose mission is twofold: liberty and privacy in treatment options and preservation of the Oath of Hippocrates focus on the individual patient.

Dr. Vliet has appeared on FOX NEWS, Cavuto, Stuart Varney Show, Fox and Friends and syndicated radio shows across the country addressing the economic and medical impact of the new healthcare bill. Dr. Vliet’s medical and educational website is http://www.herplace.com/.

By Elizabeth Lee Vliet, MD,

October 2011 brought an overlooked but devastating ruling by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), an unelected bureaucrat, to further damage your Constitutional rights. Kathleen Sebelius decreed that all private health insurance companies must turn over to the federal government their medical records on all patients insured by them to be included in the federal health information database without patients’ consent.

The traditional American view is that you, the patient, are the owner of the information in your medical records that reside with your personal physician. You control to whom your information is released. Under the new Sebelius ruling, the government will control your medical information on federal computers in a federal database. Thus, your personal medical information is open to anyone with access to the system.

Traditionally, doctors released information only with the patient’s specific consent, which was often given as a condition for getting an insurer to pay. Americans have always had the right to pay for medical care themselves and not allow the doctor to release their medical records and personal information to an insurance company.

The October ruling has not gotten the press attention that it deserves. Besides violating other fundamental liberty rights, it violates the 5th Amendment to the Constitution, which states that “No person…shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process…nor shall private property, be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

With the HHS new rules for medical records, your personal property of your medical information is simply being taken by the government to be used for “the collective, or public, good” without compensation to you for the use of your data.

Worse, your own data may be used to keep you from getting treatments you and your doctor think you need! The federally run Comparative Effectiveness Research bureaucracy and Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) will use this data to decide how to allocate finite medical resources. The Progressive view is that medical decisions should be made by elite, unelected, politically-appointed “experts” whose focus is on “population health,” not your health or your life.

These bureaucrats’ job is to ration medical care, not based on individual needs, but on government criteria, such as: cost of treatment effectiveness as determined by government experts, not necessarily medical specialists, and your “quality life years” remaining, based on your age or your “value” to society.

Beyond privacy issues, there is major concern about the safety of your medical information. An expanded federal medical database makes millions more people vulnerable to loss of health information and medical identity. Hackers stole millions of medical records from the Veterans Administration and patients were at risk for identity theft. David Blumenthal, M.D., the former “health information czar,” admitted “No infrastructure exists in most areas of the country for secure exchange of health information exchange among providers and between providers and consumers.”

The federal government has now expanded beyond the capability of its employees to manage their responsibilities properly. Our Founders knew that if we allowed such vast expansion of federal authority, it would make eunuchs of state and local governments… which actually better met the needs of local communities. People would wait for Washington to satisfy our every need. We are already learning the wisdom of their concerns, for example, in the failure of the federal government

• to properly regulate our financial institutions,
• to efficiently run the Postal Service without hemorrhaging red ink,
• to effectively administer programs such as veteran’s health care, Medicare, and Medicaid to keep costs under control,
• to improve quality and improve access to medical care, and
• to control Medicare and Medicaid fraud.

It is particularly dangerous to have government bureaucrats control our health information and treatment options. Do we really need to suffer more lives lost just to gain more proof that big government control and central planning does not work?

We have no voice in the regulation of our medical care by unelected bureaucrats. Instead of taxation without representation, wenow have medication without representation.

Confiscation of your medical records property is another example that when something is “free,” the real cost to you is staggering.

Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D. is a preventive and climacteric medicine specialist with medical practices in Tucson AZ and Dallas TX that take an integrated approach to evaluation and treatment of women and men with complex medical and hormonal problems. Dr. Vliet is also President of International Health Strategies, Ltd., whose mission is twofold: liberty and privacy in treatment options and preservation of the Oath of Hippocrates focus on the individual patient. Dr. Vliet is the 2007 recipient of the Voice of Women award from the Arizona Foundation for Women for her pioneering advocacy for the overlooked hormone connections in women’s health. Dr. Vliet received her M.D. degree and internship in Internal Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School, then completed specialty training at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Vliet is a Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Vliet has appeared on FOX NEWS, Cavuto, Stuart Varney Show, Fox and Friends and syndicated radio shows across the country addressing the economic and medical impact of the new healthcare bill. Dr. Vliet’s books include: It’s My Ovaries, Stupid!; Screaming To Be Heard: Hormonal Connections Women Suspect– And Doctors STILL Ignore; Women, Weight and Hormones; The Savvy Woman’s Guide to PCOS, The Savvy Woman’s Guide to Testosterone. Dr. Vliet’s medical and educational website is http://www.HerPlace.com.