Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Stimulate This!

“Now, a few more items for your last day of nursing orientation. Your safety is our first priority. Therefore, we do not use trauma patients’ names, ya hear? It’s “Trauma Purple” or “Trauma Red” from now on. We don’t need some friend of the family packing a piece to know where to find their cousin. Oh, and one more thing…. before I let you go I need you to find a hiding place – any place. Except the linen cart – that’s where I’ll be.”
It’s not Kansas anymore, Toto. It’s just another orientation day at your local county trauma center in southern Florida, where approximately 50 percent of patients are uninsured or illegal non-US citizens.

But it is here that we’ll see what the health care of the future looks like: where private health insurance will cease to exist. That’s because it’s assumed patients in this locale don’t have insurance in the first place, and if they do, the coverage is so minimal relative to the health care needs of the afflicted, that the cost of care will quickly exceed their coverage limits. Here, the delivery of health care has become too expensive, even for insurers. And so the government and taxpayer are left to pay the tab. And like never before, local governments are feeling the pinch of health care costs with billions and billions of dollars of budgetary shortfalls, much created by health care costs for the uninsured or non-US citizens.

But please, don’t talk about this – our economy depends on this model of employer-offered health insurance! How else will we retain our workforce? Please Mr. Stimulus Package, can you spare a dime?

Never mind that it’s a finger in the dyke.

-Wes

10 comments:

Gerard S. Denys said...

We could start by deporting the illegals?

Hello, my name is Rudy said...

Flashback now to 1990!

4. Drexel Burnham Lambert was a major Wall Street investment banking firm which was forced into bankruptcy in February 1990 due to its involvement in illegal activities in the junk bond market, driven by Drexel employee Michael Milken. At its height, it was the fifth-largest investment bank in the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexel_Burnham_Lambert

5.***FIVE INDICTED IN LATEST INSIDER CASE
By ROBERT J. COLE
Published: May 29, 1986

A Federal grand jury in New York indicted four Wall Street professionals and a customer yesterday on charges of trading in securities on the basis of inside information.
Two of them - Michael N. David, a 27-year-old former law associate with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and Andrew D. Solomon, a former analyst at Marcus Schloss & Company, also 27 - were first charged in a criminal complaint in March.
The others indicted were Robert Salsbury, 27, an analyst at ***Drexel Burnham Lambert & Company***; Morton Shapiro, 24, a stockbroker at Moseley, Hallgarten, Estabrook & Weeden, now the Moseley Securities Corporation, and Daniel J. Silverman, 23, an investor, who held a trading account at Moseley.

One Wall Street figure, asking not to be identified, said that under long-standing practice, an individual who received inside information and made money with it - called a tippee - could be accused of using inside information. Now, he said, the Government appeared to be attempting to broaden this doctrine so that a tippee would be breaking the law, even if he personally did not profit, if he passed along information to someone else who then acted on the information.

That is what appeared to be the case with Mr. Salsbury and Mr. Solomon. The grand jury charged that Mr. David, then at Paul, Weiss, told Mr. Salsbury, the Drexel analyst, about Avondale, who told Drexel, which bought stock in the company.

"***James Balog***, vice chairman of ***Drexel***, said that Drexel had not been indicted and ''doesn't rely on inside information to buy stock in arbitrage situations." (What did he just say to the reporter? No indictment?)

Life Before Rudy G.

6.***Talking Business with Balog of Drexel Burnham Lambert; In the Market And Surviving
By Kenneth B. Noble
Published: September 22, 1981 (Interesting Market Perspective, Recommends oil, must time tech, no to cyclical, thinks market may wash out. Dow is below 800.)

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/22/business/talking-business-with-balog-drexel-burnham-lambert-market-surviving.html

A funny thing happened on the way to the...
...everyone was getting indicted.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow said...

"It’s not Kansas anymore, Toto."

"I heard original recordings (the reel to reel masters) of Judy singing when she was with CBS. I interviewed the CBS recordist who retained the original recordings. (somehow?)
What a voice and the presence was astounding. You and I may still dwell in an analogue world.

You are right about the strange dynasty of political officers at 'ABIM Road Studios'. They were all morally compromised early by corrupt mentors and by the ABIM culture of good easy money/ with not much interest in caring for people; it is/was not just the diplomates who have been harmed.
ABIM and Big Tobacco, A "Love" Story. The officers were 'morally popped' and too embarrassed to ever recover or even talk much at all about it when they could.

Sounds like you were good with spit wads too.

We both must have gone to same school in "Peacetown", USA.

Taylor Swift, Healing Nation said...

The Beast in the Labyrinth: Medical Info mania and the Hidden Medicine Propaganda Wars
It's subtle; the media IS the message and the message IS the media, a subliminal dance. Lethe's psychological sleep.

Taylor Swift "Blank Space" lyrics

Nice to meet you. Where you been?
I could show you incredible things
Magic, madness, heaven, sin
Saw you there and I thought, oh my god
Look at that face, you look like my next mistake
Love's a game, wanna play
New money, suit and tie
I can read you like a magazine
Ain't it funny rumors fly
And I know you heard about me
So hey, let's be friends
I'm dying to see how this one ends
Grab your passport and my hand
I could make the bad guys good for a weekend

[Pre-Chorus]
So it's gonna be forever
Or it's gonna go down in flames
You can tell me when it's over
If the high was worth the pain
Got a long list of ex-lovers
They'll tell you I'm insane
Cause you know I love the players
And you love the game

[Chorus]
Cause we're young and we're reckless
We'll take this way too far
It'll leave you breathless
Or with a nasty scar
Got a long list of ex-lovers
They'll tell you I'm insane
But I got a blank space baby
And I'll write your name

[Verse 2]
Cherry lips. Crystal skies
I could show you incredible things
Stolen kisses, pretty lies
You're the king baby I'm your queen
Find out what you want
Be that girl for a month
But the worst is yet to come
Oh no! Screaming, crying, perfect storms
I could make all the tables turn
Rose garden filled with thorns
Keep you second guessing like, oh my god
Who is she? I get drunk on jealousy
But you'll come back each time you leave
Cause darling I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream

[Pre-Chorus]
So it's gonna be forever
Or it's gonna go down in flames
You can tell me when it's over
If the high was worth the pain
Got a long list of ex-lovers
They'll tell you I'm insane
Cause you know I love the players
And you love the game

[Chorus]
Cause we're young and we're reckless
We'll take this way too far and leave you breathless
Or with a nasty scar
Got a long list of ex-lovers
They'll tell you I'm insane
But I got a blank space baby
And I'll write your name

[Bridge]
Boys only want love if it's torture
Don't say I didn't say I didn't warn you
Boys only want love if it's torture
Don't say I didn't say I didn't warn you

[Pre-Chorus]
So it's gonna be forever
Or it's gonna go down in flames
You can tell me when it's over
If the high was worth the pain
Got a long list of ex-lovers
They'll tell you I'm insane
Cause you know I love the players
And you love the game

[Chorus]
Cause we're young and we're reckless
We'll take this way too far and leave you breathless
Or with a nasty scar
Got a long list of ex-lovers
They'll tell you I'm insane
But I got a blank space baby
And I'll write your name

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ORhEE9VVg

Music in the Cath Lab
http://www.acp-online.org/taylor-swift-in-the-cath-lab-music-in-the-cath-lab-debate/

Are You Choosing Wisely with Cardiac Imaging?
http://www.acp-online.org/are-you-choosing-wisely-with-cardiac-imaging/

Taylor Swift and the Medical Home Campaign. Where does it lead. "Medicine takes you to extraordinary places" like the PCMH, AHRQ, NAC, NQF ABIMF & related36 orgs, ABIM, ABMS, RWJF, back to the CMS, NQF, back to the...on and on and on...
http://www.nj.com/indulge/index.ssf/2015/04/nj_doctors_encourage_medical_screenings_after_taylor_swifts_mother_diagnosed_with_cancer.html
https://www.kennedyhealthalliance.org/about
https://www.kennedyhealthalliance.org/sites/default/files/KEN_KHA_Brochure_15.pdf
https://www.pcmh.ahrq.gov/page/pcmh-foundations-finance
http://www.ahrq.gov/news/events/nac/2012-11-nac/nacmtg1112-minutes.html

Thomas H. Brem Impressions and CV said...

Brem IFCC Testimony and CV.

The CV suggests "placement" in several key national and state government "membership" and "advisory" positions.

CBI was influential in his later professional life and direction.
Socialized medicine was unpopular in the forties and fifties, and Brem's interest may not have been from a deep conviction, as much as duty. To be deemed a "traitor" by your peers, can only be tolerated or managed inwardly when it is part of serving a "higher cause".

In Brem's case he followed orders since the war years in the China/Burma/India theatre, along with comrades from his LA hospital, and he tried his best to be liked in other professional ways to earn respect.
Private activities of "large prey" sport fishing tells us perhaps he was a "fisher of men" as well as just hunting for a pleasurable "open experience" out on these ocean excursions with colleagues.
Psychologically Brem handled the multiple positions with military/medical discipline and was poised under fire.

Living in the "seed ground" where, in part, socialized medicine would be spawned by government-sponsored hydro-electric projects, this led to the creation of some and the early medical insurers in California. Kaiser's roots are there. Now a behemoth.
Elsewhere we find hydro projects such as Washington State exhibits today along the Columbia River. Boeing and the Manhattan project solidified some positions in medical "cooperatives" such as Group Health and Virginia Mason.
[My impressions of Thomas Brem]

https://cfrankdavis.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/thomas-brem-statement.pdf


Rapaport Interview (Thomas Brem) said...

Rapaport's interview with thoughts and memories of Thomas Brem

Q: How did Dr. Brem influence your medical career?

Rapaport: I also became a close personal friend of Dr. Thomas H. Brem. I considered him my "professional father" during the years I worked with him in the Department of Medicine at USC.

Dr. Brem had spent almost four years during World War II with the Los Angeles County Hospital Unit at the India/Burma theater of operation. Upon returning to Los Angles, he began a private practice but soon decided that it wasn't for him and he joined the medical staff at the Birmingham VA Hospital. As I have already mentioned, by 1950 he had become Chief of the Medical Service of the Long Beach Veterans Administration Hospital.

Tom Brem was an outstanding clinician and an outstanding human being. In 1954, while I was abroad in Norway on leave from the VA Hospital as a Fulbright Research Scholar in Medicine (see later), he wrote to let me know that he was moving to USC as the designated Chair of Medicine when the current Chair retired. And that when that happened he would want me to join the department as its full time hematologist.

Tom Brem was fair in everything he did and had not an ounce of pretence, prejudice or pomposity within him. Happiness for him was making it possible for people in his Department to achieve their professional goals. He taught all who interacted with him how high one must aim to become and remain a good physician.

***He was one of the early persons pushing for the passage of Medicare against the resistance of many doctors in Southern California who considered that "socialized medicine." They considered him a "traitor" for supporting it. That did not bother him; I remember him saying "Why should I care if people I dislike dislike me?" He treated every patient he encountered on medical rounds on the wards of the USC Service at the LA County General Hospital, even the most down and out street person recovering from an alcohol binge, with courtesy and concern.***

He was the icon of a generation of internists in Southern California who trained as residents in medicine at the Los Angeles County General Hospital. In later years he served as a President of the American Board of Internal Medicine and also of the American Board of Medical Specialties.

He died, coincidently as had Dr. Carpenter, at age 79. I felt privileged to be asked to speak at his memorial service. As I spoke a thought soothed my sadness. My wonderful friend Tom had helped me not just to become a high quality physician. He had also tried to help me in another way. He loved to fish and he would hire a boat each year for members of his department to spend a summer's day fishing together on the blue Pacific. And by example, he had tried to teach me how to catch a 35 pound albacore using 25 pound test line.

http://www.hematology.org/About/History/Legends/1582.aspx

Attendings Poetry Journal said...


The Stolen Child W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

Here dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.


Born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to continue his education and study painting, but quickly discovered he preferred poetry. Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland’s native heritage. Though Yeats never learned Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore. Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeats (and Yeats himself was eventually married to another woman, Georgie Hyde Lees), she remained a powerful figure in his poetry.

Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite Irish independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest of Europe, paralleling the increasing conservativism of his American counterparts in London, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His work after 1910 was strongly influenced by Pound, becoming more modern in its concision and imagery, but Yeats never abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms. He had a life-long interest in mysticism and the occult, which was off-putting to some readers, but he remained uninhibited in advancing his idiosyncratic philosophy, and his poetry continued to grow stronger as he grew older. Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922, he is remembered as an important cultural leader, as a major playwright (he was one of the founders of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin), and as one of the very greatest poets—in any language—of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of seventy-three.
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DirectCurrent said...

Spahr and Sporting will be used by BO$$ and SISTERS as a tool to dissuade dissent, outside probes, or any copyright discussion. No need otherwise. NJ corrupt as...

Where Did All the Money Go Long Time Passing Ditto Long Time Ago said...

Question? Did Hank Strozeski set up a limited partnership within the ABIM? How, why, for whom? His name only on 1989 document.
Hidden from the world? Yes, absolutely under the radar of IRS.
Only a few were in on it?
The New York firm indictments and the 1838 failure probably woke up more than a few nerves in the body when the huge losses occurred.
But when you are on the roll you keep going.

I've been to Vegas, Atlantic City, Monaco, reservations studying the psychology of gambling. I don't see much difference in ABIM gambling, betting the chips of physicians easy come money.

As long as docs are under the illusion that the certificate has meaning and MOC can be finessed through just like convincing a nation we need to go to war. It is such a bold lie to the American public. ABIM safety net. Military police actions. Really? If the ABIM is so important to the safety of Americans, why did Chris Cassel never show up for work. The ABIM is a foreign intervention in the US.
Study all the thousands of NGO's we have all over the world. They are not for democratic reform at all. They have the same features as the ABIM. Propaganda and control. That is the shocker. Our minds and being cannot buy such a big ticket item. Our buffers to reality are too great. Our conditioning is hard to overcome.

We go to school and learn that we are free, but we are not. But we must strive to be.

People in Joe Hayden's criminal cases are indicted for this kind of fraud that Cassel did. The 19 million doctor's case involving CMS, etc, comes to mind. Cassel jeopardized lives by relinquishing control of the ABIM to less seasoned and professional executives to do the work. How can she get away with that deception and all the rest? The political woman comes in to sue physicians, and to steer the partisan platform. I shutter at how this mechanism of deceit becomes so powerful with a psychological/financial hold.

The ABIM gambling scenario seems quite familiar to what the fast money traders were doing at Drexel, Burnham, Lambert at the time. It is no different. Negligence and reckless. Total disregard for ethics.
I investigated a "music academy" that had cash flow from a gambling institution. It payed for big overhead, building and execs, too many execs. The gaming came under pressure from native casinos and th sham was exposed. They had to fold. The execs moved on to similar "easy gigs". The CEO and CFO took the loot with them in the form of parachutes and retirement funds. What a pyramid scam. First the CFO jumped ship. That's the first sign, no matter what the company says.

"Well, he retired."
Or.
"She finally found that dream job. We wish her well in her new position!"

Often the money was gone and that's the simple truth. Or the heat for transparency was on.

S. faced heat and but completing his risky task and mission...in 2004 he moved on.
How much did he get for the risks he took?

It fascinates me how non-profits can be so damn profitable for a few people!

DC said...

And the "Blue Ribbon" quote for the night is from a fellow who worked with the guy who laughingly said, "B was clueless about medicine."