Arkansas Blog

Only $725.?
Consider yourself lucky.
Affordable health care can turn this country around for the better. We have allowed greed to dominate and force people into bankruptcy for too damn long.

Bill: About $725. Wonder what stitches would have cost.)
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Most Americans, with or with out health insurance, are one or two serious illness away from bankruptcy.

The new dirty word in the anti-health care debate this week is "trigger."

Insurance/Pharma Trying to Pull Trigger on Public Health Option (clicky or below)
http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/5574/

Blanche, as a member of the finance committee, will play a key role in whether or not this assault reason stands.

Also an article on American not health care in this months New Yorker worth reading.

Cost Conundrum
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande

Have you noticed that Sparks Hospital in Fort Baptist DIDN'T sell after all? It appears Sparks is the GM of not for profit hospitals. Sounds like they had debt they weren't showing.

My wife had an operation there a year or so ago and it was like buying a used car in a bad part of town. This costs this much if you pay now, costs different if you pay in 90 days, on every part of the operation and hospitalization...actually...it was out-patient stuff, but the rent on the operating room was figured in and discounted for cash....it beat all I've ever seen. If my Black & Decker drill had been working I might have tried to take out her gall bladder myself.

I won't hurt none if GM & Chrysler fall into the ocean, but each day I worry that one of us will get sick or injured and we'll have to choose between toughing it out, never ending debt, or bankruptcy....and thanks to Blanche Linclown & Mark W. Pryor.....bankruptcy will be as rough as being deathly sick. Hell of a pickle to be in 24-7. Hope your arm gets better quick, Max.

I had an accident at my bro's house in Otter Creek about 24 yrs ago...cut my hand pretty deeply
and went to St. Vincent. I had six sutures. Tab was slightly over $600 of which I had to pay my
20% co-pay. While sitting in the waiting room with blood gushing from my hand and holding a towel over the gash to compress it a fellow came in who had been shot in the stomach. The receptionist told him to have a seat in the waiting area. One came over with a clipboard + questionaire. He was bleeding badly. When they discovered he had no insurance an ambulance was called to take him else where.

I drew an intern who had graduated 3 months earlier. He cleaned on the deep gash which was caused by a broken light bulb and on my way out remarked that he may not have gotten it cleaned out completely and if that was the case it could really swell up in a couple of days. We returned to Fayetteville the next day. Then it really swelled up, I went to the ER in Fayetteville, they opened it and took out the remaining slivers of glass. The tab was $350.

Hopefully I will never need to visit St. Vincents again.
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24 years ago is a long time, eLwood. Hospital quality can change, and does when one decides to. Unfortunately poor one-shot experiences tend to give hospitals their strongest reputations, it seems. I wonder whatever happened to that newly minted doc you saw? Could be practicing up in your neck of the woods now!

Not that I would ever wish you to have to visit any ER at any hospital; here's to your continued health :)

Well done Mr. Keck. I guess some would prefer that Arkansas follow the other great economies where unions run wild, like.....um, um.............

Been in much the same situation, Max. Aside from the bill -- gasp -- there was the horrendously long waiting room stint, then an even longer wait in a room during which police officers subdued -- with a Taser, I think -- some woman on the other side of the curtain.
Yep, huge bill. Yep, an experience I hope never to repeat.
A word to the wise: unless it's spurting blood, or gushing uncontrollably, a pretty big gash usually responds favorably to a 5 to 10 minute betadine/water soak, a tube of Neosporin and some butterfly band-aids. Probably $20 tops from Walgreen's or the like. You might throw in some New Skin for later although it doesn't work as well as I'd hoped to minimize scarring. Of course, if you want to go this way, you have to keep your tetanus shots up to date. I do since I seem to be accident prone.
And that's my practicing without a license offering, for now at least.

Joke of the Day...

A doctor complains to his colleagues about the sanitary problems at a latex glove factory in Mexico.

"Workers stick their hands in melted latex and then dip their hands in a vat of cooling water to solidify the latex. The glove is then thrown in a finished products box."

His colleagues are disgusted by the lack of care taken in keeping the gloves sanitary.

"That's not all," says the doctor. "You don't even want to know how they make their condoms!"

AR Student,

Don't bet on it. Hospitals, administratively, are large conservative, reactionary organizations very resistance to behavioral changes, like the US Army, Navy and Air Force.

They get new weapons and techniques, train to use them effectively, but the organization management and institutional policies stay the same. For instance when General Petraeus graduated USMA in 1974. He was thoroughly indoctrinated with the modern Army big picture of fighting insurgents in Vietnam with counterinsurgency tactics. From 1960 to 1974 new weapons, troop organizations, tactics, strategies, objectives and operations had been developed from our Vietnam experience, i.e. Green Berets, Seals, Riverines, etc.

However thirty-one years later Lt. General Petraeus and Mattis recieved kudos for writing a "new field manual Counterinsurgency" to address the military's inability to deal with Iraqi insurgents and the Taliban in Afghanistan. A failure of the military institutions' ability to learn from their past errors and experiences due to the reactionary and conservative nature of the organization management which had minuscule change. If they didn't W.E.B. Griffith's novels would not be a popular as they were.

Should Big "L" rip his hand on a nail from his Bro's deck in Otter Creek, he will probably get a clone of the previous intern, because while there are twenty-four years of new drugs and techniques, there is twenty-four years of additional entrenchment by the hospital administration in their time-tested management techniques.

My brother just recently had to stay the night at a hospital in Brooklyn last weekend. (He was on an ArkTimes cover years ago for his blog.) He's better now. It may be a long entry but I think you'll laugh out loud at parts and definitely cringe: http://www.pointedstick.net/colter/2009/06/02/1131/#more-1131

Thanks, imjustsaying. Worth the read, and reinforces the inertia of a conservative reactionary organization.

Your brother was right about the nurses and staff also, but there are still Nurse Hatchets out their. Ken Kesey is good, but I suspect he drew her from life. There must be pocket sadists that enjoy tormenting ill patients for their own amusement under the guise of good administrative procedures, otherwise there would not be that many hospital horror stories, including Paddy Chayefsky's.

No offense Max, but a cut that didn't cause you to bleed to death overnight is not an emergency. If you successfully made it through the night, an acute care clinic or your doctor's office was a more appropriate place for you. At least you didn't call for an ambulance...

If there is one healthcare problem that needs to be solved by both providers and patients... It's the misuse of Emergency Rooms. Misuse increases the wait time and costs incurred for everyone.

ARK. BLOG: I tend to agree. But it was Memorial Day. No walk-in clinic was open that I could find and I searched on-line and in the phone book. It was a gaping, oozing wound, about four inches long and pretty deep. (It still hasn't knitted together.) I knew I'd pay for the emergency room, but I couldn't think of an option short of waiting another day and I had some concern about infection. I regretted it after.

Why didnt we have pictures of the gaping oozing wound, Max?? But please, NO pictures of Keck's hairdo. Someone might be dining