Category: Healthcare

Everyone Hates Their Health Insurance Companies

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And all you have to do is read United Healthcare’s latest which is that they will be doing deep dives on all ER visits with an eye to denying payouts.

All insurance companies are bastards, and any policies to fix healthcare in the United State that involved them are doomed:

Doctors and hospitals are condemning plans by UnitedHealthcare—the country’s largest health insurance company—to retroactively deny emergency medical care coverage to members if UHC decides the reason for the emergency medical care wasn’t actually an emergency.

In the future, if one of UHC’s 70 million members submits a claim for an emergency department visit, UHC will carefully review what health problems led to the visit, the “intensity of diagnostic services performed” at the emergency department (ED), and some context for the visit, like the member’s underlying health conditions and outside circumstances. If UHC decides the medical situation didn’t constitute an emergency, it will provide “no coverage or limited coverage,” depending on the member’s specific insurance plan.

Emergency medical doctors and hospitals were quick to rebuke the plan. They say it sets a dangerous precedent of requiring patients to assess their own medical problems before seeking emergency care, which could end up delaying or preventing critical and even lifesaving treatment.

The policy was initially set to take effect July 1. But in an email to Ars Thursday, UHC now says it is delaying the rollout amid the criticism—at least until the end of the pandemic.

They are implying that if you have symptoms that look like a heart attack, and it turns out that it’s heart burn, you will be facing thousands of dollars that they won’t cover, because they are evil bastards.

Doctors are having none of this:

………

The delay is unlikely to ease critics’ concerns. After the policy was first announced last week, doctors were quick to note that assessing the necessity of emergency care before it’s actually given is nearly impossible. Many serious conditions have symptoms that overlap with nonserious conditions. For instance, chest pain may simply be a symptom of acid reflux or a panic attack, but it could also be a sign of a life-threatening heart attack. A bad headache could just be a bad headache, or it could signal a dangerous brain bleed.

In a 2018 analysis published in JAMA Open Network, researchers found that up to 90 percent of the symptoms that prompted an adult to go to the emergency room overlapped with symptoms of nonurgent conditions, which may be denied coverage in the future. But those same symptoms could also be linked to life-threatening conditions.

That analysis was spurred when the second-largest insurance company, Anthem, instituted a similar policy to UHC’s and began denying ED coverage.

In an accompanying editorial, one of the authors of the analysis—Maria Raven, chief of emergency medicine at the University of California, San Francisco—noted how problematic it is to retroactively evaluate emergency medical care. “My colleagues and I examined whether a patient’s symptoms at presentation to the ED could be labeled reliably as a non-emergency based on the discharge diagnosis—the diagnosis that Anthem is currently using to determine medical necessity,” she wrote. “We found it was impossible.”

It’s more than evil, it’s a public health disaster.

A significant proportion of vaccination reticence in the United States is driven by people believing that the medical-insurance complex will f%$# them like a drunk sorority girl whatever promises are made by the US government.

Our system is beyond broken.

Not Enough Bullets.

I Guess Nancy Wants those Donations from the Insurance Industry

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In yet another “Democrats in Disarray” story, the Washington Post notes that there friction between Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, because Pelosi wants to make Biden’s subsidies to Obamacare permanent, and Sanders wants to expand Medicare. 

This is really pretty simple, making the Obamacare subsidies permanent is a subsidy for the insurance companies, and not of people in need, while expanding Medicare helps everyone.

Pelosi wants to keep feeding money to the insurance companies because she wants to keep raising campaign donations from the insurance companies:

The White House is facing diverging pressure from two powerful allies — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — over whether to use an upcoming spending package to strengthen the Affordable Care Act or expand Medicare eligibility.

Pelosi’s office is pushing the White House to make permanent a temporary expansion of Affordable Care Act subsidies that were included in the $1.9 trillion stimulus legislation last month, according to a senior Democratic aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

Sanders said in an interview that he is arguing for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to 55 or 60 and expanding the program for seniors so it covers dental, vision and hearing care.

The contrasting visions for the next phase of President Biden’s legislative agenda reflect divisions within the Democratic Party about how Biden should further overhaul health insurance in the United States. Pelosi is looking to double down on the ACA, which has become more popular in recent years as it offers insurance subsidies to people well above the poverty line. Sanders, meanwhile, is looking for an opportunity to make progress on his longtime efforts to make government health insurance universal.

Lowering the Medicare age is better policy, because it puts more pressure on expanding the program in the future, while Obamacare, while better than what went before us, still sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.

Also, I would note that expanding Medicare is better policy, because older people vote in higher percentages than younger ones.

My prediction:  Biden goes with expanding subsidies to insurance companies, because, he’s always been a creature of the finance and insurance industries.

Interesting Take-Away on “Fixing” Obamacare

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Over at Naked Capitalism, a commenter makes a long and detailed post about Aetna and its pulling out of the exchanges. He ends with this:

Finally, two important take-aways from this. First, there is nothing in ObamaCare for Hillary’s “incrementalism” to address. It is simply too broken for even the industry’s master to deal with. Second, much as they tried, the Republicans did NOT kill ObamaCare. Capitalism did.

I think that this is an accurate description of the problems inherent in the system.

He also states that he was familiar, though not necessarily involved, in discussions on the “Public Option”, and that it was not killed as a sop to the insurers and big pharma, but because it it could not be made to work in the way that the Obama administration wanted it to, which was to screw sick people without making it too obvious:

………The public option (and this comes from as close to an insider as you’ll ever likely have) was put in as a dumping ground for the pre-existing conditions that the insurers didn’t want. It was in effect a high risk pool by another name, because “high risk pool” would make ObamaCare sound too much like car insurance, not a good selling point for sure. The problem was how to get high risk claimants into the public option without using the words pre-existing conditions. Could their actuaries identify these people by other criteria in a close enough fashion to where the math would still work out (i.e., where profit was still there). As time wore on, it became clear that this simply was not going to be possible, at least not to a level that was close enough to make the idea work.

This narrative makes sense to me, since most of Obama’s initiatives in the area of regulation and the roll of government have been directed toward privatizing profits and socializing losses. (He is very much a Chicago school kind of guy)

It’s a cogent critique which boils down to:  If you want healthcare to work in a profit driven marketplace, you can’t.

Of course the Teabaggers out there will have a different take, which is that Obamacare was designed to fail to force us into single payer, which would turn all of us into Kenyan Muslim Communists., but Teabaggers believe that markets can never fail, that they can only be failed.

What a Surprise, Obama Lied

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When Obama said that if the UK approved a Brexit it would move to the back of the queue for negotiation trade deals, he was lying:

The US is hoping that a quick trade and investment deal with the UK after it leaves the EU could kickstart the stalled negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which has met increasing resistance on the continent.

As well as serving the US’s purposes, such an agreement would be welcomed by the UK government as proof that it can recreate the necessary web of trade links post-Brexit.

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has just spent two days in the UK talking with the prime minister’s officials and with the new foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, exploring what form such a UK-US trade deal might take.

As The Guardian explains: “The UK cannot formally sign any trade deals with other countries or trading blocs until it has left the EU, but it appears to be accepted that negotiations on the outline shape of such deals can start before that happens.”

As an aside, it appears that chief among US goals is to make current and future steps toward privatization of the British NHS irreversible:

One of the issues raised by those advocating leaving the EU was that remaining a member state would see the UK obliged to sign up to a TTIP deal that included ISDS. The fear was that ISDS would make re-nationalising privatised NHS services prohibitively expensive if US companies were involved. In theory, the latter might try to use the ISDS provisions in TTIP to claim that their future profits had been “expropriated” by nationalisation, and to demand compensation.

However, the UK could now sign up to a US investment treaty with significantly fewer protections than those offered by TTIP’s ICS system, which is what the EU is still pushing for. Instead of Brexit helping to protect the NHS, it may end up bringing in a system that protects it less than if the UK had stayed in the EU.

This would be a very bad thing.

And the Con Continues to Unravel

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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has been banned from running labs for 2 years:

In a severe turn of events for former blood testing darling Theranos, which has been defending itself against accusations of wrongdoing for months, U.S. regulators slapped strong sanctions against the company and its owner.

Theranos said in a statement issued late Thursday that the certificate for its lab in Newark, Calif., had been revoked, its approval to receive Medicare and Medicaid payments “cancelled,” and that it would have to pay an unspecified fine. In addition, chief executive Elizabeth Holmes, the company’s founder, will be banned from owning, operating or directing a lab for at least two years.

………

Theranos was perhaps the most celebrated of these young companies. Holmes was at one time compared to Apple’s Steve Jobs, and the company’s valuation was estimated to be a staggering $9 billion at its peak.

I still don’t understand how this company was ever seen as a success.

Their technology never worked., but supposedly sophisticated investors showered them with hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is nuts.

End This Guy’s Political Career

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This would create the largest health insurer in the country, but hizzonner thinks it’s fine to put a their own lobbyist in charge of creating a behemouth that would dictate healthcare to 53 million people.

Corruption doesn’t begin to describe this:

The regulatory review of the largest health insurance merger in U.S. history has now become a major political battle, pitting a national Democratic leader against his own party. On Friday, Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy — a top Hillary Clinton surrogate who is the co-chair of the Democratic National Committee’s platform panel — faced pressure from his state’s Democratic House speaker to remove his appointed insurance commissioner from her role regulating Cigna’s controversial mega merger.

Connecticut House Speaker Brendan Sharkey’s call on Friday came after Clinton and former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius raised concerns about the prospect of the merger harming the 53 million Americans who could be affected by the transaction. The deal is currently facing an antitrust review by state and federal regulators.

The political fight in Connecticut — which is leading states’ regulatory review of the merger — follows an International Business Times investigation documenting Connecticut Insurance Commissioner Katharine Wade’s personal and familial ties to Cigna, as well as an increase in campaign contributions to Malloy-linked political groups from donors affiliated with the merging companies. Wade, Cigna’s longtime in-house lobbyist, was appointed to her state government position by Malloy in early 2015 — just as Cigna and Anthem were finalizing their merger proposal.

“At a minimum, the commissioner should recuse herself from further involvement in the Cigna-Anthem merger review,” said Sharkey, according to the Connecticut Post. “Whether a potential conflict crosses a legal ethical line should not be the only factor here. Perception of a conflict is also an important part of the equation, and most onlookers, including consumer and health-care advocates following this issue all have the same perception.”

This is pay to play bullsh%$ at it’s worst.

Why Not Both?

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Angry Bear wonders if, “Economists Idiots or Just Delusional?”

If reducing the value of the policies If held by those who are continuously employed, either by taxing them or forcing those people to move to a less comprehensive plan than their risk-aversion preferences, is going to “reduce costly distortions in U.S. health care,” the only possible conclusion is that total health care spending is going to get costlier on average.

Yes, you might argue this will reduce “distortion.” But you would have to be an idiot—or, apparently, Alan Auerbach (Strongly) or Austan Goolsbee—to believe that is a good thing.

It does explain many of the policy shortcomings of the Obama animation.
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I Need to Stop Calling Him Governor Rat F%$#*

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He just jammed up the useless Baltimore Executive to force him to install air-conditioning before the start of the next school year instead of waiting for at least 3 years, and now he going to sign into a law a bill that provides free birth control to Marylanders:

Advocates say a new Maryland law will place the state at the forefront of efforts to require insurance plans to offer birth control at no out-of-pocket cost, expanding access to women and men who want to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

 The law goes further than President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which already reduced costs for women seeking birth control in many cases.

 Under the Contraceptive Equity Act, Maryland will be the first state to require insurance companies to cover over-the-counter emergency contraceptives, such so called morning-after pills, at no cost. Maryland also will be the first state prohibiting out-of-pocket costs for men who have vasectomies.

 Advocates who pushed the bill through the General Assembly say Maryland is the first state to pass such a comprehensive approach.

 “Maryland is on the forefront across the board with this act,” said Karen Nelson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Maryland.

 Other provisions prohibit co-payments for any type of contraceptive and also ban preauthorization requirements for long-acting contraceptives such as IUDs. The law allows women to receive six months’ worth of birth control pills at one time.

Did I mention that he’s a Republican?

While I am not a fan of of the governor or many of his policies, he is not the kind of batsh%$ insane Australopithecine of many other (Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Paul LePage, Bruce Rauner, Sam Brownback, Matt Bevin, Rick Snyder, Pat McCrory,Greg Abbott, etc.) Republican governors.

Credit where credit is due.  He did the right thing. 

*Full disclosure, when we had problems with health insurance exchange, we called our state senator, and we ended getting a call from Hogan’s office, where a staffer fixed the problem.

Obamacare in a Nutshell

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Marcy Wheeler sees the elephant in the room about Obamacare, and by elephant in the room, I mean Republican thinking:

Partly, though, Obamacare is designed to underinsure people, because there’s a belief that unless people feel the sting of obtaining care, they’ll get too much of it. “Bending the cost curve” under Obamacare is largely driven by increasing the costs of actually using insurance to the end user as opposed to, say, eliminating the many layers of private profit that doesn’t actually improve health care but makes it expensive.

This is the problem at the core of Obamacare, and it is why allowing a Medicare buy in or a public option would have been so helpful.

It would have created an alternative to the contemptible greedheads who Obama shovels money at, and an infrastructure to move onto real publicly funded healthcare.

So Not a Surprise

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And in what might be the last chapter of the lack of investor due diligence that is the blood testing firm Theranos, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced that it will ban the top three executives at the firm from the test business:

Theranos, the high-profile clinical laboratory company, had a day of reckoning yesterday. That’s when The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a story revealing that Theranos was sent a letter by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) providing notice of sanctions.

In a letter to Theranos executives, CMS said it is prepared to:

  • revoke the company’s CLIA certificate;
  • impose a fine of $10,000 per day;
  • suspend and cancel the lab’s approval to receive Medicare payments; and
  • impose a two-year ban on the owner, operator, and laboratory director for owning or operating a clinical laboratory.

Pathologists and medical laboratory professionals will recognize that these are among the most severe sanctions that CMS can impose on a laboratory under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA). Further, clinical pathologists who currently serve as medical directors of CLIA laboratories will find it useful to read the entire letter sent to Theranos on March 18, as it describes how CMS viewed the responses that Theranos provided following a January 25, 2016, letter from CMS describing deficiencies identified during an inspection of the Theranos CLIA lab facility in Newark, California.

………

“After careful review, we have determined that the laboratory’s submission does not constitute a credible allegation of compliance and acceptable evidence of correction for the deficiencies cited during the CLIA recertification and complaint survey completed December 23, 2015, and does not demonstrate that the laboratory has come into Condition-level compliance and abated immediate jeopardy. In general, we find that the statements made in the allegation of compliance and evidence of correction: 1) failed to adequately address the deficient practice cited; 2) are incomplete and failed to meet the criteria of acceptable evidence of correction; 3) do not ensure sustained compliance; and 4) show a lack of understanding of the CLIA requirements.

Less than a year ago, Theranos had a valuation in the billions, because it was promising a new technology that would allow for inexpensive blood tests on just a drop of blood. (A little finger stick)

The technology has never worked, even under the most controlled conditions, like demonstrations to investors, but it was treated like the next big thing for reasons that have never made sense to me.

My guess is that the founder of the company, Elizabeth Holmes, dazzled people with a rather spot on impersonation of Steve Jobs (she only wears black turtle necks), which convinced people who knew better that the nothing-burger business model of dot-coms could be applied to healthcare.

Is there Nothing Which Financial “Innovations” Cannot Crapify?

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It appears that the latest innovation proposed is, “Securitizing Loans for Large Health Care Expenses.”

I did not think that we could make healthcare delivery worse in the United States.

To quote Rick Blaine, “I was misinformed.”

I saw this headline in Kaiser Health News — “Mortgages For Expensive Health Care? Some Experts Think It Can Work” — so I said, “Nah,” and ignored it for a couple days, but then I clicked through to the academic paper Kaiser linked to — if “academic” has any meaning, the times being what they are — and I couldn’t find any tells that it was a parody or some kind of sick joke, so yeah. It’s for real! The paper is called “Buying cures versus renting health: Financing health care with consumer loans,” by Vahid Montazerhodjat, David M. Weinstock, and Andrew W. Lo, and it was published in Science Translational Medicine (STM), February 24, 2016. First, I’ll present the author’s scheme, and after briefly showing how it conforms to the simple rules of neoliberalism, I’ll look at potential scope creep if the proposal is implemented, debt-cropping, and the possibility of predatory servicing. I’ll conclude with a 30,000-foot view of the scheme’s implications. (I’m afraid I’m thinking of this post in terms of somebody who’s take out one of these loans — a consumer patient — rather from the finance perspective that Yves would offer. That said, readers with more nuts-and-bolts knowledge of securization than I have — like most of you — please feel free to chime in; that’s why I’m describing the scheme first.)

The article goes further into the details, and each detail is more and more horrifying.

Really horrifying:  Repossessing your kidney horrifying.

It is a descent into what Matt Stoller calls, “Debtcropping,” which is, as he notes, “An instrument of political and economic control.”

If So, I Approve this Camel’s Nose………

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Matt Bruenig has a very interesting perspective on Bernie Sanders’ single payer program, specifically, he believes that it provide the fiscal basis for a massive expansion of social welfare programs:

Currently, total health expenditures in the US make up around 17% of GDP. The average for the OECD is 9.3%. Around half of our healthcare spending is public while the other half is private. Thus, very roughly speaking, to shift all of the current healthcare expenditures onto the public health insurance, you’d need initially to raise the tax level by 8.5 points of GDP (half of 17%).

 If you believe, as I do, that switching to a single-payer healthcare system would allow us to better curb healthcare inflation and thus to control costs much more effectively than we currently do, then that means that the 17% of GDP we currently pay towards healthcare could be pushed down over time. Let’s assume that, by keeping healthcare inflation in check through single-payer, we could eventually bring health expenditures down to around 10% of GDP (slightly above the OECD average).

 Under this scenario, we would initially raise the tax level by 8.5 points in order to cover the half of health expenditures that are currently paid out privately. Then, over time, we would cut healthcare expenditures by 7 points (from 17% to 10% of GDP). Assuming we didn’t lower the tax level over the expenditure-slimming period, we would be able to use those 7 points of savings towards other welfare programs (child care, child allowance, paid leave, etc.). And there is a lot of stuff you can get with 7 points of GDP.

He’s an optimist.

My guess is that these savings, will go to bombs and bullets, because  ……… America!!!!

We have still not accepted the wisdom of Eisenhower’s Chance for Peace speech, while we bankrupt ourselves through military procurement and military adventurism.

Oh Snap!

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Hillary Clinton has been going after Bernie Sanders’ single payer healthcare proposals, claiming that single payer would take their healthcare away, and she’s rolled out Chelsea on the campaign trail.

It is ludicrous and dishonest, and it has led to a huge spike in contributions to the Sanders campaign:

Hillary Clinton’s new barrage against Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential primary opponent she has all but ignored through most of her campaign, is having an effect — though probably not the one she intended.

Sanders’s underdog campaign said it is seeing a surge of contributions as a direct result of the new attention it is getting from the Democratic front-runner, with money coming in at a clip nearly four times the average daily rate reported in the last quarter of 2015.

………

The former secretary of state and her team have stepped up their criticism of Sanders on a variety of fronts in recent days as polls have begun to show him edging even with her in Iowa — and, for the first time, looking competitive in a national poll. But the Clinton strategy may be backfiring in some ways.

………

“As of now, we are at about $1.4 million raised since yesterday when the panic attacks by the Clinton campaign began,” Briggs said. “We’ve gotten 47,000 contributions. We’re projecting 60,000 donations. Even for our people-powered campaign, this is pretty darn impressive.”

………

Even her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, got into the act, bashing Sanders during her first campaign appearance on behalf of her mother this election season.

“Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare and dismantle private insurance,” Chelsea Clinton said at a stop in New Hampshire. “I worry if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we’ll go back to an era — before we had the Affordable Care Act — that would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”

Ludicrous, and dishonest, and more significantly, desperate.

Hillary’s strength this cycle was her aura of inevitability, and that appears to be vanishing like the mist

As I recall, inevitability was her perceived strength in 2008 as well.

Not a Good Sign

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One of the features of Obamacare is the not for profit co-ops that are supposed to find an alternative to for profit insurers.

Many of them have failed, and now what is arguably the most successful co-op, Maine’s Community Health Options, has shut down individual enrollment:

Community Health Options, a not-for-profit co-op insurance company based in Maine that also sells health plans in New Hampshire, will limit individual enrollments later this month because of “higher-than-expected claims costs.”

It’s an inauspicious sign for the company, which was one of the few successful co-ops created by the Affordable Care Act. Twelve of the ACA’s 23 co-ops have folded or are in the process of closing down, all of which occurred this year.

Community Health Options is one of three insurers selling individual plans in Maine and one of five insurers in New Hampshire. Both states use the federal HealthCare.gov website for enrollment. The co-op will stop directly enrolling people in individual coverage on Dec. 15, and people who are signing up for its plans through HealthCare.gov will only have until Dec. 26, the co-op said on its website Wednesday.

The decision to halt enrollment early will not affect current members, and Community Health Options still plans on pursuing small employers into next year. “We aim to resume individual enrollment as soon as possible, but in the meantime continue to focus on group business,” CEO Kevin Lewis said in an e-mail Wednesday.

Community Health Options, which has 76,000 members, was one of the only ACA co-ops that didn’t lose money out of the gate. Several of the failed co-ops—written into the ACA as an alternative to the so-called public option—lost millions of dollars due to costly claims. Many older and sicker members chose the co-ops during the first two open enrollments due to their low premiums, but they also used a lot of healthcare services, which crushed the co-ops and their limited financial reserves.

The co-ops were supposed to be two things, a weak tea alternative to a public option, and to provide some cost competition with the for profit insurers who dominate their respective markets.

They are failing, and the largest insurer in the US,  UnitedHealth is threatening to leave the exchanges completely.

We are not yet in an adverse selection death spiral, but this is troubling.

That is Going to Leave a Mark………

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Tervor Noah had a very special guest on The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been obstructing a bill to pay for the health coverage for the first responders at the Twin Towers because he wants to hold it hostage to a change in oil export policy.

Jon Stewart came out of retirement, and appeared as a guest.

He also went down to Congress to harangue what were clearly uncomfortable Senators and Representatives.

Watch the whole thing, particularly the round table toward the end.

It sucks to be Mitch McConnell on even the best of days, this makes it suck even more.

Because Comedy Central vids autoplay on some platforms, I have put the video after the break

From the Department of, “It’s About F%$#ing Time”

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The AMA has reversed itself, and called for a ban on prescription drug advertisements:

Drug companies should stop advertising directly to consumers, a major U.S. doctors group said Tuesday, declaring that the ads often push patients to more expensive treatments and inflate demand for therapies.

In a vote Tuesday at the group’s annual meeting in Atlanta, the American Medical Association called for an end to television commercials and magazine spreads that are used to pitch prescription drugs. It’s a change from the AMA’s previous position, which said the ads were fine as long as they were educational and accurate. The U.S. is one of the few countries that allows direct-to-consumer drug ads.

The vote “reflects concerns among physicians about the negative impact of commercially driven promotions, and the role that marketing costs play in fueling escalating drug prices,” AMA Board Chair-elect Patrice A. Harris said in a statement announcing the vote result. “Direct-to-consumer advertising also inflates demand for new and more expensive drugs, even when these drugs may not be appropriate.”

I am not sure why the AMA has reversed itself, but it is long overdue.

However, given the expansive view of business free speech held by the Supreme Court, I am not sure precisely how one would enforce such a ban.

A ‘Huge Milestone’: Until the Zombies Apocalypse, Anyway

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It appears that the folks in biotech are lauding a treatment of cancer using viruses:

A new cancer treatment strategy is on the horizon that experts say could be a game-changer and spare patients the extreme side effects of existing options such as chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy and other current cancer treatments are brutal, scorched-earth affairs that work because cancer cells are slightly – but not much – more susceptible to the havoc they wreak than the rest of the body. Their side effects are legion, and in many cases horrifying – from hair loss and internal bleeding to chronic nausea and even death.

Imlygic, which bursts melanoma cells open and triggers immune response, can shrink localised tumours but is not proven to extend life, says FDA

But last week the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first time approved a single treatment that can intelligently target cancer cells while leaving healthy ones alone, and simultaneously stimulate the immune system to fight the cancer itself.

The treatment, which is called T-VEC (for talimogene laherparepvec) but will be sold under the brand name Imlygic, uses a modified virus to hunt cancer cells in what experts said was an important and significant step in the battle against the deadly disease.

Hmmmm…. A revolutionary virus based cancer treatment..

Recall a zombie flick that started with that.

I really hope that the FDA has done proper due diligence.

It’s Good Policy. It’s Good Politics, and So the Tories and the Lib-Dems Will Not Support It

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But all the leaders of the other major parties are demanding that the National Heal Service be protected against predatory investors:

Leaders of almost every major political party in the United Kingdom have signed an appeal not to allow a transatlantic trade deal known as TTIP become the Trojan horse that allows American business interests to take over the NHS.

The appeal, organised by the trade union Unite, has achieved the rare feat of bringing together all of Northern Ireland’s main political parties. TTIP, or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, would free up trade between the US and the EU, by allowing companies from either side of the Atlantic to operate under the same rules.

One of its most controversial elements would be the creation of a new supranational court, the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) through which foreign investors could sue governments, or the EU, over any action or legislation that hurt their businesses. It is feared that an American private healthcare firm which was prevented from buying up part of the NHS would be able to go to the ISDS and claim millions of pounds in compensation from the British government for lost business.

………

The appeal has also been signed by the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, the Ukip leader Nigel Farage, the Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, and Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood, and by Peter Robinson of the Democratic Unionist Party, and Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness.


The organisers, from Unite, say that they approached the Conservatives asking for support but were refused, and are awaiting a reply from the Liberal Democrats.

The Tories have been wanting to privatize the NHS since it began operations in 1948, and the Liberal Democrats have specialized in being completely useless and ineffectual since before Lloyd George died, so their actions are not surprising.

Unfortunately, in the mad rush for a bad deal, it is very likely that privatized healthcare, with its associated excessive spending and poor health outcomes, will be in the UK’s future.

I’m Begiunning to Think That US and Allied Military Forces Are Targeting MSF Hospitals

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Last week, as a part of the Pentagon’s “investigation” of a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) bombing in Kunduz, sent in investigators ……… in a tank ……………… which ground much of the evidence to dust:

A US tank has forced its way into the shell of the Afghanistan hospital destroyed in an airstrike 11 days ago, prompting warnings that the US military may have destroyed evidence in a potential war crimes investigation.

 As calls grow for independent inquiry into Kunduz airstrikes, the president of Médecins Sans Frontières demands that those responsible are held to account

 The 3 October attack on the Médécins sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz killed 10 patients and 12 staff members of the group.

 In a statement on Thursday, the medical charity, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said they were informed after Thursday’s “intrusion” that the tank was carrying investigators from a US-Nato-Afghan team which is investigating the attack.

 “Their unannounced and forced entry damaged property, destroyed potential evidence and caused stress and fear,” MSF said.

 The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reported intrusion, which came as new evidence emerged that US forces operating in the area at the time of the attack knew that the facility was a hospital.

And now we have another MSF hospital bombed, this one in Yemen.

Considering the US record on such things,* one has to wonder if perhaps our military establishment is sick of

Airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition targeting rebels in Yemen have destroyed a small hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in the northern province of Saada, although there were no deaths and only one injury, the aid group said Tuesday.

The first of several strikes came around 11 p.m. on Monday and hit a building housing the facility’s administration offices, according to Hassan Boucenine, the aid group’s head of mission in Yemen who spoke to The Associated Press by telephone from the southern port city of Aden.

No one was inside at the time, he said, adding that by the time a second strike targeted the main nearby building about 10 minutes later, its occupants — some 12 staff and patients — had been evacuated.

“This attack is another illustration of a complete disregard for civilians in Yemen, where bombings have become a daily routine,” Boucenine said later in a statement by the group, also known by its French acronym MSF.

It urged coalition forces to explain the circumstances around the attack, saying that the hospital’s GPS coordinates were regularly shared with the Saudi-led coalition and its roof was clearly identified with its logo. The bombing of civilians and hospitals is a violation of international humanitarian law, it added.

The group operates in eight Yemeni governorates at a time when many foreign aid groups and even United Nations personnel have been evacuated. In its statement, it said the destroyed hospital had treated roughly 3,400 patients were since MSF began supporting it in May.

The Saudi-led, U.S.-backed coalition has been launching airstrikes against Yemen’s Shiite rebels, also known as Houthis, and their allies since March. Saada, the Houthis stronghold, has faced a particularly intense bombardment.

The United Nations said the facility was the 39th health center hit since the violence escalated in March, adding that critical shortages of fuel, medication, electricity and water could mean many more will close. Amnesty International said the strike may amount to a war crime and called for an independent investigation.

MFS treats anyone regardless of politics, and I’m beginning to think the Pentagon, and the Saudi state security apparatus, don’t like this.

It does seem rather similar to the spate of bombing of well documented Al Jazeera facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

*Donald Rumsfeld justified the bombing of hospitals during the initial invasion of Afghanistan, because they were treating combatants, which was a remarkably blithe admission of war crimes, since treating the enemy does not remove a hospital’s protected status.