What’s in a dollar?  What is it about the idea of saving a “buck,” that makes us as Americans bend over backwards to keep our green stuff. Is it the notion “Every penny earned is a penny saved?” Where does the actual value of your dollar show up?  In the case of fast food restaurants, usually in our waistlines.
In reading the New York Times Article “The High Price of Cheap Eats,” the author, Roni Rabin, makes a valid point when she proposes that “value meals” may not be such a bargain when you look at the potential health costs.
The Cancer Project, a non-profit cancer prevention organization came out with the five unhealthiest fast food items.  These foods are skimpy in change, but hefty in fat and sodium.
For example, the Jack in the Box

one dollar junior bacon cheeseburger tipped the scales with a whopping 23 grams of fat, and 860 grams of sodium.
Where is the value in that?
Then again it is only a dollar…But how much is your health worth?

How important is a letter grade? Just ask a hopeful student; a grade can make or break a chance of getting into one college or another, one program or another or being dropped from the running all together.

Our society prides itself on getting an “A.” The paragon of perfection. Getting a B isn’t bad; it just means you’re not in the top tier of performance. Receiving a “C” on the other hand signifies “average,” or a lack of trying.
But what about a “D”? In our overachieving, exceptionally demanding society, what does a “D” symbolize?  What about a “D-”?
Can we say “Failure?”

Well make no mistake about it, that’s what the American College of Emergency Physicians is calling the nations emergency care.  According to the AP press, the nation’s overall emergency care system received a D-, and not one single state received an “A” ranking. (Doctors Give US Emergency Care a Failing Grade)
The lack of resources and influx of patients is pushing the problem to its limits. The AP described America’s emergency room system as a “ticking time bomb,” citing a dearth of physicians and nurses “fraught with significant challenges and under more stress than ever before.”

A TV story by WKOWTV.com pointed out that over “300,000 Americans go to ERs for care daily and that ninety percent of the states earned poor rankings receiving mediocre rating or earning near failing marks.”
Can this be true? Can the best efforts and resources of the place and people we turn to in an emergency result in a “D-“? The system we trust the most is going to undoubtedly fail us?

What does this mean for the future of our healthcare, especially on the wake of a financial crisis? Where do we place our expectations? What can we expect from an ER room ranking a “D-”anyways? What is being done to change this?

“This is a national disgrace,” said the organization’s president Nicholas Jouriles, an emergency room physician in Ohio. “The nation’s emergency physicians have diagnosed the condition and prescribed the treatment. It’s time to get serious and take the medicine.”
Medicine that might just end up failing.

People seem to talk about healthcare now days like they talk about food. What do you want? How much do you want, and do you want fries with that?

True healthcare is a not a privilege but something every human being should have. However, once you decide everyone deserves healthcare, the real question is how much care do they get?
Dr. Rich offers a summary of this dilemma in “The Covert Rationing Blog,” when he says:

Exactly how much healthcare are you entitled to if you have a right to healthcare?  Do you have a right to certain specified healthcare services, to a certain dollar amount of healthcare per year or per lifetime, to whatever healthcare it takes to achieve perfect health, or to some other limit or non-limit?
The question of limits (whether we should have them or not, and what should they be) has been a central theme of this blog and of Dr Rich’s book.  To reiterate the fundamental problem: 1) In America we believe that it is wrong to limit healthcare in any way, that everyone is entitled to the very best healthcare, that any bit of healthcare that offers even a small potential of benefit should be provided, and that death itself is merely a manifestation of insufficient research (or actionable incompetence, or systematic discrimination against the unwealthy, or corporate greed).  2) But against that closely held belief, we must balance the unremitting law of economics which tells us that there is simply not enough money in the known universe to buy all the healthcare that might potentially offer some small amount of benefit to every person.  Healthcare spending has to be limited, or it will become a fiscal black hole.

Once healthcare becomes a right, those presumably 47 million Americans will suddenly have claim to “equal access” healthcare. What does that mean anyway? How will that financial stress affect Americans wallets? Let me guess, we will inevitably redefine the limits of what we expect from our healthcare system.

What do you think?
Oh and do you want fries with that?

What are the chances that your identity could be stolen? ChoicePoint Data Solutions proved that possibility a few years ago; when tens of thousands of American’s personal information was stolen.
But what are the chances your medical records could be stolen?

Well the University of Utah Hospital proved that possibility a few months ago, when a Perpetual Storage courier picked up tapes containing medical billing files, and instead of transporting them to the storage facility, he drove home and parked his car.  His car was broken into sometime during the night and the tapes were gone. (See University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics Stolen Backup tape contained 2.2 million billing records.)

What are the chances?

Well lucky for the 2.2 million patients who visited the hospital over the past 16 years, the tapes were found, and didn’t appear to be accessed.  (See Great News: University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics Billing Records Recovered)

But what is the message here?  What if you were one of those patients, and your files had been accessed. What if it wasn’t just billing information but was your actual medical records?  Someone could erase your medical history, or delete medicines you’re taking or worse-those you’re allergic to.  What if they went in and played around with vital health information, like: changing surgeries and the dates you had them, or switching your doctors, not to mention putting procedures down that you have never had done?

One more reason to have a personal copy of your medical record.

The implications are huge, and if it can happen to Choicepoint and to the University of Utah Hospital, who’s to say it won’t happen again and that it won’t be your records?

What are the chances? Is playing Russian roulette with your records a chance worth taking?