1st of my “That sucks” factoid entries…
The typical supermarket apple has been off the tree for 14 months.
Grant Harrison: The Healthcare timebomb
The average Californian family of 4 costs $18,000 per year for health insurance. This cost is increasing 9 percent per year. By 2020, it will be $40,000 per year! Who will be able to afford this? Not Californian companies and certainly not individuals.
Why is it so expensive? Because everyone in…
“A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease.”
Wendell Berry (via medicalstate)
Healthy lifestyle and healthy behaviors are more powerful than scalpels, scopes, and pharmaceuticals.
Must watch this
Scorpion Stings Twice!
Desert dwellers- be careful to shake out those boots next summer! Because if you are bitten by scorpions, and are taken to the hospital for anti-venom treatment, it could cost you as much as $65 thousand (no typo), and insurance may not even cover them unless the victims are children or “elderly”.
According to this Pharmalot blog posting http://www.pharmalot.com/2011/11/stung-by-the-high-price-of-an-antivenom-drug/, a newly approved anti-venom called Anascorp (approved under FDA Orphan Drug provisions), is being sold WHOLESALE in the US for an astonishing $3500 a vial. Hospitals then charge patients between double and triple that much, for treatment may require 3-5 vials. The same venom is sold to patients in Mexico for $100 a vial or less.
Orphan drugs are approved under special provisions for drugs of extremely limited usage, and pricing is, of course, effectively unregulated. Maybe these drugs were named for the orphans created by bankrupt Scorpion bite victims. Got to love our American healthcare system!
We need some element of open markets in healtchare
“The government cannot force you to buy things. It can only tax you, draft you, seize and sell your property, arrest you, incarcerate you, and execute you. It cannot tell you to buy insurance, only a gecko can do that.”
Stephen Colbert (via soupsoup)
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Jay Parkinson + MD + MPH = a doctor in NYC: Thank you
Four years ago today, I started my practice in Williamsburg that really changed my life in an unfathomable way. And four years later, today, I’m at Google Zeitgeist speaking about my story. This morning’s speaking schedule went like this:
- Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google
- Robert Reich, Secretary…
Way to go, Jay! Glad I cranked the hamster wheel of patients and jetted up to Wburg from Philly to meet you opening day of your practice.
