Health

One of the greatest privileges working in health care is to be able to make the passage into death a little bit easier for people and their families. Nurses and doctors and other providers do their best to ease pain and provide comfort despite the fact that we know almost nothing about the process of dying.

Death is something that has mostly been dealt with in religious and philosophical realms. The fact that we can’t experience death and then come back to talk about it makes it difficult to know anything about the passage.

Of course, there is something of an exception to this when people have what are called near-death experiences surviving after cardiac arrest or remembering being brought to the brink under general anesthesia. The common thread is seeing a bright light and a long tunnel and having a feeling of complete calm. Beyond that we don’t know much, but a study done in 2014 at the University of Michigan with four patients opens a new window into the act of dying.

Regular physical activity has always been an important part of my life. Baseball was my go-to sport growing up and it was a rare day (weather permitting) that I was not riding my bike. If there is a day without movement I feel as though I should be guilty of some sort of crime.

As the years have passed it has become necessary to make accommodations for the constant decay of the body. But despite that decay I have always found a way to figure out how to get some sort of exercise on a regular basis.

After spending a working lifetime in healthcare and reading all kinds of medical reports it is clear to me that if you want to prevent a lot of health-related problems one of the best things you can do is to exercise on a regular basis.

On the surface it looks like an amazing step forward. Eli Lilly, one of the major producers of insulin, (among the three companies that control 90% of the insulin market)1 announced that it is lowering the cost of some of its older insulin products by 70%. It was a shrewd and coldly calculated move to make the company look good in the public eye and fend off the inevitable mandates that the U.S. government is working to implement.

Recently, legislation was passed to cap the price of insulin at $35 a month for people enrolled in the Medicare D program. Democrats tried to get the bill to apply to all Americans but their efforts were stymied by the pharmaceutical lobby that owns more politicians than most other businesses.

Eli Lilly knows that it is just a matter of time before new laws are enacted to lower insulin prices across the board so they made a pre-emptive strike in the insulin wars. According to the New York Times, “Lilly trumpeted its decision as a victory for patients. In reality, though, Lilly’s moves are more limited than they initially appear. Lilly’s existing $35 cap on out-of-pocket payments will be easier for privately insured patients to take advantage of.

In Dec. 2022, Congress voted to eliminate the extra federal funding and requirement that states keep people on Medicaid. Vermont will be starting Medicaid redeterminations on April 1. According to the Urban Institute’s projections, up to 29,000 Vermont Medicaid recipients could be affected.

The Vermont Workers’ Center is hosting an informational session in the Meeting Room at the Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro on Feb. 22 between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. All are welcome to stop in to find out whether they will be affected, what their rights are in this process, and how to be sure that they aren’t cut off for bureaucratic reasons. People who are not on Medicaid and have questions about health care access are also welcome, as there will be other health care resources available. For more information, email windham@workerscenter.org.

It shouldn’t be a revelation to anyone who has used the U.S. health care non-system that we have the worst health outcomes of any high-income nation. The health care statistics about the U.S. delivery of health care are alarming, but that has been the case for many decades and the situation shows no sign of changing anytime soon.

If we cut to the chase, the reason that we spend more per person on health care, that we have the lowest life expectancy at birth, that we have the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions and that we have the highest maternal and infant mortality rate among high-incomes countries is because of the profit motive.

In Dec. 2022, Congress voted to eliminate the extra federal funding and requirement that states keep people on Medicaid. Vermont will be starting Medicaid redeterminations on April 1. According to the Urban Institute’s projections, up to 29,000 Vermont Medicaid recipients could be affected.

The Vermont Workers’ Center is hosting an informational session in the Meeting Room at the Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro on Feb. 8 between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.

There has been a movement over the past few years to energize the concept of providing some degree of hospital level care at home. Medicare has been modifying its rules to pay for projects that move in this direction and some policymakers are touting this concept as a welcome addition to the health care system.

The Hospital at Home program is quite simply a bad idea. Why would we want to beef up the hospital system of care when it is clear that we should be putting the majority of our health care dollars into prevention, not into patching things up after they go bad?

Hospital care should be the care of last resort. When things break and diseases take hold hospitals do a good job of fixing things. But hospital type care should not be a model for how a health care system moves forward into the future.

Here’s the December 2022 dashboard summary. We continue semi-regular COVID-19 dashboard numbers from the Vermont Department of Health, and MA and NH counties that surround Brattleboro, as long as they continue providing them.  Scroll down the new comments for the latest.

Vermont and MA have very limited looks at what are going on these days, with weekly snapshots. NH attempt daily updates but doesn’t always give new totals. We continue to try…. : )