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>>Puh-leez. People strain at gnats and swallow camels. I don't even know what "verbal class warfare" is. Paying for healthcare and making sure everybody can eat is one of the prices of a stable society IMHO. Sort of like paying for the fire brigade- how often does your house burn down after all? What a huge cost and inconvenience paying for incompetents? Don't think so. The only issue is whether a drunk dropping his cigarette and setting the place on fire is more deserving than the father of three who has a survivable heart attack but has no coverage.
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>This heart attack survivor will be forever grateful to the EMT's, nurses and MD's who got me through that trauma.
>However, grouping all health care workers together and making their care analogous to food or fire protection is a bit of a leap.
>For every MD who saves lives there are dozens of toenail clippers, Botox dispensers, big pharma shills, breast augmenters, ear wax removers, "rehab" centers and phony psychiatrists who milk a broken "health care" system here.
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>Change, it seems, will have to come from outside the system.
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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simplerWTF is this: "Theranos is working to make its testing available to several hospital systems"? "Working to make it available"? Is it currently unavailable? Why, she doesn't have it?
This Aesopian language is the symptom of everything that's wrong with the (lack of) system. The "Working to make it available" probably, just probably, means "trying to sell or at least convince them to try", which shouldn't be a problem, right, it's an open market and hospitals may just take a couple of her contraptions, give them a couple of drops of each blood sample and run them in a parallel test for a few weeks, right? Except it probably isn't an open market, and there's already a ton of arm and ear (and balls) twisting going on...
I've just heard a story, the other day, about a guy in India who made a simple interface with about a dozen sensors which plug into a tablet or smartphone, which takes blood pressure, pulse and several other parameters. It's already saved hundreds of lives by having pregnant women tested (for mere cents of cost) for pre-eclampsy conditions, so they'd come to birth prepared, no surprises. The death rate on that one cause alone has fallen at least fourfold - and it's on one of those relatively simple tests which weren't done simply because of the price. Now his gadget does that very cheaply and just as reliably as the expensive lab. The FDA is considering it, and will decide whether to ban it some time within the next decade.
