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  • johnpi 10:08 pm on December 25, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , , mississippi, US health care   

    State of Mississippi partners with Republic of Iran for healthcare program.

    The healthcare situation in the US state of Mississippi has become so desperate that it rivals third world conditions, and so state planners are looking to a model developed in Iran to save lives where community ‘health houses’ are established.

    [Dr Aaron] Shirley and [James] Miller visited Iran in May and were astonished to be welcomed with open arms. When they went to remote villages to see the health houses, the Iranians were equally amazed.

    “They told us this is a miracle,” said Miller. “Not only were Americans coming here, but also they were learning from us rather than telling us what to do.”

    One villager exclaimed: “We always knew rain fell down but never knew it could fall up.”

    They signed an agreement with Shiraz University to form the Mississippi/Islamic Republic of Iran rural health project and applied to the US Treasury for a special licence for “Iranian transactions”.
    ….

    “The Iranians are a proud people with 5,000 years of history and huge contributions to science and medicine,” said a State Department official.

    “A project like the Mississippi one is incredibly powerful as it appeals to that Iranian concept of history. It’s a great way to keep the door open between the two countries.”

    (via)

     

  • johnpi 11:26 pm on December 14, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , HPV, , , , sexually transmitted disease, US health care, ,   

    The HPV vaccine mandate for immigrant women has been eliminated.

    This week the reproductive justice movement is celebrating a significant victory. Effective December 14, immigrant women and girls will no longer be forced to get Gardasil, a vaccine developed by Merck and Company to prevent transmission of the strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) linked to cervical cancer. This marks the reversal of a harmful and discriminatory rule originally put in place in July 2008 by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that took away the ability of immigrant women and girls to make informed choices of whether or not to get the Gardasil injection.

    The regimen of shots for HPV, which is sexually transmitted, costs $360, creating additional financial and legal barriers for green card applicants. Also,

    …progressive groups acknowledged that the mandatory use of a medical procedure on a targeted population when it is not required of the general population is discriminatory. Like their U.S. citizen counterparts, all prospective immigrant women should have the opportunity to make an informed decision about their use of the HPV vaccine, weighing both the potential costs and health benefits of using the vaccine.

    The vaccine is recommended but not required for the general population.

     

    • Bryan Jenkins 7:32 pm on April 28, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I have a friend who got cervical cancer because of HPV. right now she is under going chemotherapy and some anti-cancer drugs. . ‘

  • johnpi 8:25 pm on December 14, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , US health care   

    No public option, no Medicare buy-in…progressives are nearly completely defeated on health care reform in the United States.

    ‘This deal’s getting worse all the time…‘

     

    • shams 1:55 am on December 15, 2009 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      The fat lady hasn’t sung yet.
      And….this is a process. Once the camels nose is in the tent health care reform can proceed….it needn’t be done all at once.
      Obama is a gamer…..public option was always a sacrifice play I think.

  • johnpi 3:24 pm on October 4, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , , , US health care   

    A McClatchy feature article on the eight US states that allow insurance companies to designate domestic violence as a “pre-existing condition” for grounds to deny health care coverage.

    “This is insane,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who’s been trying to convince Congress to address the issue for roughly a decade.

    Murray said she couldn’t remember exactly when she first learned of it, but sometime in the 1990s she recalls a private conversation she had with a woman who broke down as she explained that she couldn’t flee an abusive relationship because her children were covered under her husband’s health care plan and she couldn’t get her own. Another woman told Murray that she didn’t report that she’d been battered because she feared losing her coverage.

     

  • johnpi 6:38 am on October 2, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , , , , , US health care   

    Republican senator tells former Canadian public health minister that her country has a ‘parasitic relationship’ with the US.

    Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, insulted a former Canadian Public Health Minister by telling her that her country, which has universal health care, has a “parasitic relationship” with the United States because of its supposedly inferior health care technology:

    During a hearing of the Special Committee on Aging, the Tennessee Republican told Canada’s former Public Health Minister, Dr. Carolyn Bennett, that her country is “living off of us” because they set lower prices for health care and “all the innovation, all the technology breakthroughs just about take place in our country and we have to pay for it.”

    “It is not really our country so much is the problem, it’s sort of the parasitic relationship that Canada, and France, and other countries have towards us,” Corker said. “…You benefit from us, and we pay for that. And I resent that, and I want to figure out a way to solve that.”

    Think Progress blogger Zaid Jilani notes:

    Although attacking the Canadian and European health care systems is a common tactic for conservatives, the fact remains that these countries have been leading health care innovators time and time again.

    Canada brought the world insulin, developed bone marrow transplantation, and conducts more lung transplant surgeries than the United States. Meanwhile, of the twenty most profitable pharmaceutical manufacturers, only nine are from the United States — the rest are from western Europe, Japan, and Israel, all of which have universal health care systems that Corker so is opposed to.

     

  • johnpi 5:26 am on October 1, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , , US health care   

    Are you ‘mainstream,’ ‘clean-cut’? Probably not by the exacting standards of Rick Scott, the messianic enthusiast of privatized healthcare who is leading a group called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights against Obama’s healthcare reform right now.

    After the attacks on Sept. 11, Yarian says that Scott phoned him and stated that he should be careful not to hire anyone of Middle Eastern descent because they might scare off customers. At the time, Yarian was willing to excuse the directive as part of the collective shock the country was going through.

    In November, though, Yarian interviewed a Hispanic man for a supervisory nurse position. “He was great. He had all the qualities and experience I was after,” Yarian says. “But he had a slight accent. When Rick found out, he said, ‘Nope. All our employees have to be mainstream.’”
    ….

    (The EEOC’s Lisser zeroed in on that word when I mentioned it. “We at the EEOC would want to carefully check out a company that expressly stated a hiring guideline specifying ‘mainstream’ people,” she says. “We’ve seen ‘mainstream’ and ‘clean-cut’ used as code words to discriminate based on race and national origin before.”)

     

  • johnpi 5:22 am on August 26, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , US health care   

    Fasting in the news, used and abused…

    On Wednesday Rep. Michele Bachmann was part of a star-studded “teletownhall” meeting to discuss health-care reform. Bachmann is hyping the abortion issue, though there is nothing in Obama’s health care plan that concerns abortion.

    Arrogance:

    [Bachmann] suggested that it might be some kind of religious destiny that hardy souls such as herself are in Congress at this time.

    Prayer and fasting:

    But it was Bachmann’s fervent call to utilize prayer and fasting to beat back health-care reform efforts that was the true highlight of the call.

    “That’s really where this battle will be won — on our knees in prayer and fasting,” she told the listeners. “Remember: faith without works is dead. So we’re asking you to do all of it: pray, fast, believe, trust the Lord, but also act.”

     

  • johnpi 4:46 am on August 26, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , US health care   

    Behind the Obama-Hitler slur: The Republican Party has “co-opted a fringe movement’s propaganda for its talking points in the health-care debate.” Namely, Lyndon LaRouche.

    (More …)

     

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