December 23rd, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Book Reviews, Health Policy
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My friend and former Chair of the CFAH Board of Trustees, Doug Kamerow, has written a book that I think you will like.
Besides being a mensch and witty as heck, Doug is a family doctor and a preventive medicine specialist. In his new book, Dissecting American Health Care: Commentaries on Health Policy and Politics, these four characteristics constitute the lens through which he comments on scores of events, controversies and changes in public health and health policy that have taken place over the past four years. For example, Doug writes about last year’s debate over the H1N1 vaccine, the papal position on condoms and HIV, how prevention fared in the health care reform act (ACA) and his attempt to Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
December 15th, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Opinion, True Stories
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That old Tom Petty song, “The Waiting is the Hardest Part,” keeps running through my mind. Four of my friends are waiting to hear the results of medical tests taken last week.
- Lucas has exhausted all of the standard cancer therapies for rectal cancer and is waiting to hear if he is a candidate for any experimental treatments.
- Sam, who has lived through aggressive treatment for multiple cancers, is waiting to hear results from a test that will tell him if the fact that he is so very, very sick is due to one of them recurring.
- Lucy just had major abdominal surgery and is waiting to hear the results of the pathology report that will determine whether or not her cancer can be treated at all.
- Phil, who has been in remission from two different leukemias, had Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
December 11th, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Health Policy, Health Tips, Opinion
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Did you know that every nursing home resident in the U.S. must be asked every quarter whether she wants to go home, regardless of her health or mental status? And if she says yes, there is a local agency that must spring into action to make that happen.
This is the result of a 2010 Center for Medicaid/Medicare Services regulation aimed at helping keep older people in their (less expensive) homes rather than institutional settings. A New York Times article notes that the nursing home exodus, while modest to date, is building. This means the number of people with serious chronic conditions like congestive heart failure, diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who draw heavily on community-based primary care services will grow.
These returnees are joining their peers and the blossoming crowd of us Baby Boomers who intend to resist living in nursing homes with as much spirit as our parents did, while the consequences of our plump and sedentary lifestyles arrange themselves into a constellation of diabetes, congestive heart failure and COPD similar to the one that plagues our elders.
Much has been written about Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
December 2nd, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Health Policy, Opinion
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Here’s the bad news: We will not benefit from the health care services, drugs, tests and procedures available to us unless we pay attention, learn about our choices, interact with our clinicians and follow through on the plans we make together. And that “following through”part? We have to work at doing that every day, whether we feel sick or well, energetic or tired out. And if we can’t do it, we’d best find a spouse or parent or friend or social service agency who can step in to do the things we can’t manage.
OK. For some people, this is not bad news. This is how we think it should be: “Nothing about me without me.” For others, our personal encounters with tests and treatments and illness have taught us that this is just the way it is.
But for many of us, this news – should we have reason to attend to it – is inconsistent with our idealized vision of health care that, tattered as its image might be, will step in, take over and fix what ails us. Most of us, after all, are mostly well most of the time and our exposure to health care is minimal.
Efforts to improve the effectiveness of health care and contain its cost have produced Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
November 26th, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Health Policy, Opinion
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A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to speak as a patient about “consumers and cost information” while being videotaped for use in the annual meeting of the Aligning Forces for Quality initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
RWJF Video - This Costs How Much?
I admire the aims of this initiative – “to lift the overall quality of health care in targeted communities, reduce racial and ethnic disparities and provide models for national reform” – and I think it has taught us some valuable lessons about what it takes to make even slight course corrections in the trajectory of the huge aircraft carrier that is health care.
Plus, I have listened to hundreds of people talk about their experiences with the rising price of health care: who thinks about it when and why, what individuals do to cut back on the expense, where they have been successful and where not. I’ve heard lots of stories, most of them involving Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
