The KHIT Blog: Mother's Day 2018

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Mother's Day 2018

I've been having a sad Mother's day. Beyond my own grief, there's this in the news.

Her only chance at life is a new liver, but her insurer said no. Then she wrote a powerful plea to the CEO

The latest compensation data I can find for the CEO of United Health Care is in the neighborhood of $20 million per year.

@UHC tweeted today as well.

No comment.
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I'm still kinda speechless. Working on a video for Danielle's Memorial. Haltingly.

UPDATE

A GoFundMe campaign has been launched:

Help Erika Zak Get a New Liver
Erika, our dear friend and sister, urgently needs a liver transplant to save her life. Now we can help Erika and her family, Scott and Loie, get to the Cleveland Clinic and pay for travel and accommodations, related medical expenses and recovery.

In 2014, Erika was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer that had spread to her liver. Her daughter, Loie, was just 3 months old. She underwent more than 70 rounds of chemotherapy and several surgeries. Then came a major blow, followed by a miracle. One of the procedures left her liver severely injured, and it began to fail. But Erika also began taking an immunotherapy drug that her doctors say has killed most, if not all, of her remaining cancer. She was officially listed on the transplant waiting list last week, and will be heading to Cleveland very soon to wait for a liver. For the first time, Erika has a real opportunity to see her sweet daughter grow up. And we can help.

We have seen our friend and sister fighting so hard for this. We have seen such strong support from her family and friends, and what a happy home she has made for Loie. It's been a heartbreaking and awe-inspiring struggle, and they are so grateful for all of your support.

I will certainly contribute.

Also, concerning my late daughter:

In Loving Memory - Announcing the Danielle L. Gladd Scholarship Fund

Stepping Stones Project has created a scholarship fund dedicated to providing Tuition Assistance to honor the memory of our beloved Executive Director, Danielle Gladd. Danielle was part of the Stepping Stones family from 2014 until 2017, when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She passed away on April 27, 2018. Danielle will be remembered as a strong spirit who was deeply committed to creating experiences for youth that would have long term impacts and affect lives in a positive way. She was our community “center pole” and “mama bear”. We miss her strong presence.

The Danielle L. Gladd Scholarship Fund provides donors the opportunity to provide Tuition Assistance for our program. Tuition Assistance allows youth and families to participate who might not otherwise be able. Danielle exemplified a culture of giving, even personally contributing to make tuition affordable for some families. This fund will provide for a more diverse and inclusive community and help SSP to continue to offer quality Coming of Age programs to more youth and families throughout the San Francisco Bay area.

We will certainly contribute to that as well.
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More to come...

1 comment:

UnknownMay 16, 2018 at 9:21 AM
On Mother’s Day a friend texted me a link to an article on CNN about a woman denied a life saving transplant. I was shocked. I am currently fighting a different insurance for the approval for a double lung transplant. Thank you for adding your voice to bring this game played by Healthcare Insurance.
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Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
___

"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
___

"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
___

"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
___

"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
___

"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Sunday, May 13, 2018

Mother's Day 2018

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