President-elect Barack Obama should take note – health reform is about the little things just as much as it is sweeping changes to the system.

Information gathered from a batch of more than 8,500 meetings held around the country in December will be compiled and used to help design the healthcare proposal that has been in the news as of late. Obama’s transition team plans to post some of the material at change.gov.

One particular meeting took place late December 2008, between newly appointed secretary of health and human services, the former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and more than two dozen seniors During this meeting, seniors told Daschle that they placed more importance on certain things such as waiting times to see their doctor, the increasing cost of prescription drugs, and the narrow range of Medicare coverage for certain medical procedures, equipment, and treatments.

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It’s not just the unemployed facing healthcare insurance problems, according to a new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report compiling research carried out by the State Health Access Data Assistance Center at the University of Minnesota. Nearly 20% of American workers have no health insurance, up from around 14% in the mid-1990s.

During the mid-1990s, one in seven American workers had no insurance. Just ten years later, that figure has increased to one in five workers uninsured, or around six-million more people over the mid-1990s total.

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Fibromyalgia is a devastating disease that causes chronic pain and other symptoms for those who are affected – but it’s a disease with no known cause and no standard treatment. Many people haven’t even heard of the condition, but if that’s the case it’s not because the drug industry isn’t trying hard enough.

Drug Companies’ Hundreds of Millions Help Raise Awareness of Fibromyalgia

Last year, drug industry giants Pfizer and Eli Lilly spent hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to “raise awareness” of fibromyalgia. The companies donated more than six million dollars to non-profit organizations for educational campaigns and medical conferences, too.

That’s more than the companies donated for Alzheimer’s, and diabetes. And only donations made for cancer, depression, and AIDS were higher than the donations made to further the cause of fibromyalgia.

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Many of us rarely ponder what our health and life are worth. It’s often assumed that life is priceless, but that doesn’t do justice to the stratospherically rising health care and insurance costs; in fact health bills are now the leading cause of bankruptcy.

One common way to calculate the value of our life is to use the same equation used by many health care providers. That cost was once $50,000 per year of quality life, according to the international standard for government-run health insurance plans across the globe. This number has been disputed by economists at Stanford and they were able to calculate that a year of quality life is actually $129,000! That is a lot of money for a year of life, but of course: life is priceless!

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photo credit: DerrickT

The shocking truth is that nursing homes in America are not safe, and for-profit nursing homes are even less safe.  This comes from the latest report issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General.

In fact, 2007 saw a number of states report unprecedented rates of nursing home violations – Idaho, Alaska, Washington D.C. , and  Wyoming had a %100 violation rate. The most common violations included infected bed sores, inadequate treatment of urinary tract infections, deficient housekeeping, and improper nutrition. One in six nursing homes, posed “actual harm or immediate jeopardy” to residents.
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