I think that was irresponsible, especially since Schuchat said most hospitals and clinics don't have the means to test and classify virus samples.
"Fortunately, we have a new test that
can be done in state and public health laboratories that can differentiate this
new virus from other viruses but there's
really not the sufficient number of those tests or the capacity in terms of the
people to do those tests to test every single person who has an influenza-like
illness," she said.
Doctors may
have an extra busy day Monday morning dealing with the added people who come in clamoring for a flu shot that doesn't yet exist.
Oh well. At
least a dozen or more companies (already paid billions by our government) in a half dozen countries are
in a race to develop the first commercial swine flu vaccine. Some say they have created doses that are ready for testing on animals. May the best man win.
And may we not have a repeat of the 1976 debacle when public health officials vaccinated 40 million Americans to ward off a new flu strain, also called "swine flu" with a largely untested vaccine. The anticipated swine flu pandemic never occurred but at least 500 people who got the vaccine developed Guillain-Barre Syndrome, an often deadly neurological disorder for which there is no cure.
]]>AARP has joined other centrist groups* in the Divided We Fail campaign that calls for a bipartisan solution and states that "all Americans should have access to affordable, quality health care, including prescription drugs, and that these costs should not unfairly burden future generations."
Those sound like safe talking points. Just the kind that will ensure a repeat of the "reform" that gave us Medicare D.
As Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) reflected in a 2006 editorial published in the New England Journal of Medicine: "The current problems with Medicare Part D are largely the direct result of the undemocratic way in which the plan was authored and passed. The final legislation, heavily influenced by drug-company and health insurance lobbyists, focused mainly on the needs of those industries instead of those of the seniors it should serve."
The absence of discussion on non-profit, single-payer health care came up recently on AARP's online member forum.
Some AARP members are cynical about AARP's non-advocacy stance during the current health care debate. There's a suggestion that they've been sold out. Wrote one, "AARP's income from royalties (amounts paid by insurers to allow them to use the AARP name in their advertising) is $498 million or twice the amount paid for membership fees. Royalties represent 43% of the $1.168 billion total revenue."
Another
suggested that AARP is attempting to kill President Obama's proposal
for a public insurance option by requesting that Congress include
long-term care in the health care bill, an expensive provision that would make it even less palatable to the hostages on Capitol Hill. "Then to have the gall to ask
for donations when they get a half a billion in royalties from
insurers," he or she added.
AARP's official "demands":
In short, AARP leadership supports adding more band-aids to an already mummified health care system. Not much of a legacy to leave the children.
* I am confused by SEIU's membership in Divided We Fail.
Right. More smokers means more lung cancer, heart disease and other illnesses. According to the CDC, about 443,000 Americans die from smoking-related illnesses each year.
Then why are seven of the largest life and health insurance companies in the United States, Canada and the UK invested to the tune of $4.4 billion in tobacco companies?
Having grown fat off individuals' health care premiums, particularly smokers', giant insurers like Prudential, Mass Mutual and Sun Life are investing some of those billions in tobacco companies.
J. Wesley Boyd, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the Cambridge Health Alliance at Harvard shared a list of the insurers and the size of their investments in tobacco companies as of March of this year. In a correspondence piece to the New England Journal of Medicine published June 4 they wrote:
"Although investing in tobacco while selling life or health insurance may seem self-defeating, insurance firms have figured out ways to profit from both. Insurers exclude smokers from coverage or, more commonly, charge them higher premiums. Insurers profit -- and smokers lose twice over.
"These facts should discomfit Canadian and British readers as their countries consider further privatization of health insurance," wrote Boyd. "For those of us in the United States, these data are a reminder of the true priority of the insurance industry, which is making money, not ensuring health and wellbeing."
A rational person might hope that this knowledge would cause some discomfiture in Washington, DC, where Congress is presumably wrestling over how to best reform the health care system so that it serves people, not profits, and wrests some control over health care delivery away from insurance companies. But so far, those in charge of crafting the plan are listening only to industry.
While partisan mainstream editorial writers openly gloated about the "stunning" and "shocking" poll released in May, few traditional media looked critically and honestly at what the poll actually revealed, and reported the findings with the same slant as the news release. Rather than spending a minute exploring why it was stunning or shocking, the media simply reported it as fact.
First off, polls should be suspect. While they may have been reliable in a more innocent age,
The
Here's what the watchdogs said about the
Newshounds: "The truth is that while the Gallup poll showed that a greater number of those polled identified themselves as "pro-life" (51%) than "pro-choice" (42%), the majority (76%) responded that abortion should be legal in either all or limited circumstances. Only 23% responded that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances."
Media Matters: "...
"That's pretty dishonest --
The Monkey Cage: "Simply put, the Pew and
"Moreover, both Pew and
Finally, here's a comment from a participant in an abortion poll published in a letter-to-the-editor of the Seattle Times: