On the public dime ...

Professur

Professur

Well-Known Member
A new thread for the posting of news articles showing the good, thebad, and the ugly sides of public health care. Please keep the rhetoric to a minimum and let your articles speak for themselves.


HEALTH bosses are trying to find the safest way of moving a 70 stone British man to a clinic for life-saving treatment.

A team of medics including the military are drawing up plans to move him from his home in Ipswich, Suffolk, some 152 miles to a specialist centre in Chichester, Suffolk.

Do you know this man? If so call the newsdesk on 0207 7824104
Email
[email protected]

One option is to fly him out in an RAF Chinook helicopter if an ambulance is not available.

The costs of the combined effort, which will run into tens of thousands of pounds, will be met by the NHS.

The man, now almost immobile, is said to have tried desperately to lose the weight.


A spokeswoman for NHS Suffolk said officials are looking at alternative forms of transport.

She also confirmed the move is likely to be completed in a few weeks' time.
Click to expand...
source
 
Well, it's certainly an under-utilization of the Chinook's lifting capabilities. That is one amazing bird. It has a load capacity of 28,000 pounds, enough to lift the man in question and 27 of his fattest friends. With a maximum speed of 170 knots, he won't have long to wait either.

My dad works in the Chinook program, retrofitting them to the new CH-47F specification (better faster stronger more reliable).

However, why don't they just use a forklift or a pickup truck or something? Surely a Chinook is total overkill for this (although it would perform magnificently). A U-haul van with a ramp? Get a 1-ton engine hoist and lift him into the back of a tractor?
 
Probably have to take down a wall to get him out. The chinook thing seems more like a stunt to try and embarass the man in question..as if reaching 70stone (980lbs) wasn't bad enough.

Quick question...who kept enabling this man?
 
Re: On the privately wasted dime....

Professur said:
A new thread for the posting of news articles showing the good, thebad, and the ugly sides of public health care. Please keep the rhetoric to a minimum and let your articles speak for themselves.
Click to expand...

Seems like the ups and downs of private coverage are quite relevant too!

The "death panels" are already here

Sorry, Sarah Palin -- rationing of care? Private companies are already doing it, with sometimes fatal results

By Mike Madden

Aug. 11, 2009 | The future of healthcare in America, according to Sarah Palin, might look something like this: A sick 17-year-old girl needs a liver transplant. Doctors find an available organ, and they're ready to operate, but the bureaucracy -- or as Palin would put it, the "death panel" -- steps in and says it won't pay for the surgery. Despite protests from the girl's family and her doctors, the heartless hacks hold their ground for a critical 10 days. Eventually, under massive public pressure, they relent -- but the patient dies before the operation can proceed.

It certainly sounds scary enough to make you want to go show up at a town hall meeting and yell about how misguided President Obama's healthcare reform plans are. Except that's not the future of healthcare -- it's the present. Long before anyone started talking about government "death panels" or warning that Obama would have the government ration care, 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan, a leukemia patient from Glendale, Calif., died in December 2007, after her parents battled their insurance company, Cigna, over the surgery. Cigna initially refused to pay for it because the company's analysis showed Sarkisyan was already too sick from her leukemia; the liver transplant wouldn't have saved her life.

That kind of utilitarian rationing, of course, is exactly what Palin and other opponents of the healthcare reform proposals pending before Congress say they want to protect the country from. "Such a system is downright evil," Palin wrote, in the same message posted on Facebook where she raised the "death panel" specter. "Health care by definition involves life and death decisions."

Coverage of Palin's remarks, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's defense of them, over the weekend did point out that the idea that the reform plans would encourage government-sponsored euthanasia is one of a handful of deliberate falsehoods being peddled by opponents of the legislation. But the idea that only if reform passes would the government start setting up rationing and interfering with care goes beyond just the bogus euthanasia claim.

Opponents of reform often seem to skip right past any problems with the current system-- but it's rife with them. A study by the American Medical Association found the biggest insurance companies in the country denied between 2 and 5 percent of claims put in by doctors last year (though the AMA noted that not all the denials were improper). There is no national database of insurance claim denials, though, because private insurance companies aren't required to disclose such stats. Meanwhile, a House Energy and Commerce Committee report in June found that just three insurance companies kicked at least 20,000 people off their rolls between 2003 and 2007 for such reasons as typos on their application paperwork, a preexisting condition or a family member's medical history. People who buy insurance under individual policies, about 6 percent of adults, may be especially vulnerable, but the 63 percent of adults covered by employer-provided insurance aren't immune to difficulty.

"You're asking us to decide that the government is to be trusted," Gingrich -- who may, like Palin, be running for the GOP's presidential nomination in 2012 -- told ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday. But as even a quick glance through news coverage of the last few years shows, private insurers are already doing what reform opponents say they want to save us from. (The insurance industry, pushing back against charges that they're part of the problem, said last month that "healthcare reform is far too important to be dragged down by divisive political rhetoric." The industry has long maintained that its decisions on what to cover are the result of careful investigations of each claim.) Here is a look at a handful of healthcare horror stories, brought to you by the current system. It took Salon staff less than an hour to round these up -- which might indicate how many other such stories are out there.

-- In June 2008, Robin Beaton, a retired nurse from Waxahachie, Texas, found out she had breast cancer and needed a double mastectomy. Two days before her surgery, her insurance company, Blue Cross, flagged her chart and told the hospital they wouldn't allow the procedure to go forward until they finished an examination of five years of her medical history -- which could take three months. It turned out that a month before the cancer diagnosis, Beaton had gone to a dermatologist for acne treatment, and Blue Cross incorrectly interpreted a word on her chart to mean that the acne was precancerous.

Not long into the investigation, the insurer canceled her policy. Beaton, they said, had listed her weight incorrectly when she bought it, and had also failed to disclose that she'd once taken medicine for a heart condition -- which she hadn't been taking at the time she filled out the application. By October, thanks to an intervention from her member of Congress, Blue Cross reinstated Beaton's insurance coverage. But the tumor she had removed had grown 2 centimeters in the meantime, and she had to have her lymph nodes removed as well as her breasts amputated because of the delay.

-- In October 2008, Michael Napientak, a doorman from Clarendon Hills, Ill., went to the hospital for surgery to relieve agonizing back pain. His wife's employer's insurance provider, a subsidiary of UnitedHealthCare, had issued a pre-authorization for the operation. The operation went well. But in April, the insurer started sending notices that it wouldn't pay for the surgery, after all; the family, not the insurance provider, would be on the hook for the $148,000 the hospital charged for the procedure. Pre-authorization, the insurance company explained, didn't necessarily guarantee payment on a claim would be forthcoming. The company offered shifting explanations for why it wouldn't pay -- first, demanding proof that Napientak had tried less expensive measures to relieve his pain, and then, when he provided it, insisting that it lacked documentation for why the surgery was medically necessary. Napientak's wife, Sandie, asked her boss to help out, but with no luck. Fortunately for the Napientaks, they were able to attract the attention of a Chicago Tribune columnist before they had to figure out how to pay the six-figure bill -- once the newspaper started asking questions, the insurer suddenly decided, "based on additional information submitted," to cover the tab, after all.

-- David Denney was less than a year old when he was diagnosed in 1995 with glutaric acidemia Type 1, a rare blood disorder that left him severely brain damaged and unable to eat, walk or speak without assistance. For more than a decade, Blue Cross of California -- his parents' insurance company -- paid the $1,200 weekly cost to have a nurse care for him, giving him exercise and administering anti-seizure medication.

But in March 2006, Blue Cross told the Denney family their claims had exceeded the annual cost limit for his care. When they wrote back, objecting and pointing out that their annual limit was higher, the company changed its mind -- about the reason for the denial. The nurse's services weren't medically necessary, the insurers said. His family sued, and the case went to arbitration, as their policy allowed. California taxpayers, meanwhile, got stuck with the bill -- after years of paying their own premiums, the Denney family went on Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid system.

-- Patricia Reilling opened an art gallery in Louisville, Ky., in 1987, and three years later took out an insurance policy for herself and her employees. Her insurance provider, Anthem Health Plans of Kentucky, wrote to her this June, telling her it was canceling her coverage -- a few days after it sent her a different letter detailing the rates to renew for another year and billing her for July.

Reilling thinks she knows the reason for the cutoff, though -- she was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2008. That kicked off a year-long battle with Anthem. First the company refused to pay for an MRI to locate the tumors, saying her family medical history didn't indicate she was likely to have cancer. Eventually, it approved the MRI, but only after she'd undergone an additional, painful biopsy. Her doctor removed both of her breasts in April 2008. In December, she went in for reconstructive plastic surgery -- and contracted a case of MRSA, an invasive infection. In January of this year, Reilling underwent two more surgeries to deal with the MRSA infection, and she's likely to require another operation to help fix all the damage. The monthly bill for her prescription medicines -- which she says are mostly generics -- is $2,000; the doctors treating her for the MRSA infection want $280 for each appointment, now that she's lost her insurance coverage. When she appealed the decision to cancel her policy, asking if she could keep paying the premium and continue coverage until her current course of treatment ends, the insurers wrote back with yet another denial. But they did say they hoped her health improved.
Click to expand...

Source

:banghead:
 
MrBishop said:
Probably have to take down a wall to get him out. The chinook thing seems more like a stunt to try and embarass the man in question..as if reaching 70stone (980lbs) wasn't bad enough.

Quick question...who kept enabling this man?
Click to expand...

The delivery man?
 
More on the subject

THE world's heaviest man is a Brit who has ballooned to 70 STONE, it was revealed yesterday.

Paul Mason, 48, needs a £20,000 life-saving op after a compulsive eating disorder left him "super-obese".

Paul . . . op to control eating

He eats 20,000 calories of food a day - EIGHT TIMES the official adult male average of 2,500.

Paul scoffs three family-sized takeaways a night and wolfs down Sunday roasts like snacks.

He has spent much of the past eight years in bed at his home in Ipswich, Suffolk.

His care costs taxpayers an estimated £100,000 a year.

And now he needs drastic stomach surgery to stop him eating and keep him alive - at a cost of £20,000 to the NHS.

But first health chiefs have to tackle the problem of transporting Paul to a specialist hospital 152 miles from his home.

They even considered using an RAF Chinook HELICOPTER to airlift him to the unit in Chichester, West Sussex.

They have ruled out that option and Paul will now travel in a five-ton ambulance specially built for obese people at a cost of £90,000. An NHS Suffolk spokesman said: "This man is very ill and this is life-saving surgery.

"The nature of his illness is psychological and the NHS has a duty to help him.

"He is in a very fragile state and needs help. We are exploring all options for transporting him from his home to hospital but we have now ruled out an airlift.

"The most important aspect of transporting him is preserving his dignity and looking after his safety.

"We have not had anything like this before."

Susie Squire, of the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: "While it is important to get this man the medical attention he needs, cost-effective methods must be used."

Paul has battled a compulsive eating disorder most of his adult life. His widowed mother Janet looked after him but she died six weeks ago at 76. He now has two carers treating him.

In 2002 a forklift truck had to be used to transport Paul from his bed and into hospital.

At that time he weighed 56st and paramedics called the fire service after finding it impossible to lift him.

Six firemen were also unable to get him on to a stretcher.

Eventually they took out a window and brickwork and knocked down a neighbour's garden wall to get him out.

Paul managed to shed 20 stone in 2006.

At the time he admitted: "You've got to change your mindset when you've got a food addiction. You can't have treats."

But he soon put the weight back on. And in 2007 he complained to his local council that he could not fit his special 3ft-wide wheelchair through the gates of an Ipswich park.

56 stone Paul Mason had to be rescued by the Fire service because he could not get out of his house


Surgery will take place within three weeks at St Richard's Hospital in Chichester, where the NHS specialist bariatric service provides surgical weight-loss treatment.

Paul became the world's heaviest man after 90st Mexican Manuel Uribe, 43, halved his weight to wed last year.

In 2004 the record holder was 77st American Patrick Deuel. Britain's previous heaviest man was 65st cab driver Barry Austin, of Birmingham.
Click to expand...

source
 
Here's an idea. Why don't his two caretakers (presumably paid for by the government) not feed him 20,000 calories of food? If it's a compulsive eating order, he can't stop himself from eating. Does that mean that no one else can stop him from eating either? Hell no. Do his caretakers have compulsive feeding disorder? If they know he will eat as much food as they give him, then stop giving him so damn much food. It's not a difficult concept.

And if it is a psychological disorder, how the fuck do they expect a surgery to help at all?
 
Dood imagine trying to consume 20K calories a day!
It would be quite a feat to do it for several days,
much less to keep it up on an ongoing basis.

I’ve got only 6% bodyfat weigh only 129 lbs
lemme tell ya, not eating is far easier.
 
Altron said:
And if it is a psychological disorder, how the fuck do they expect a surgery to help at all?
Click to expand...

Good question. I'm guessing maybe gastric bypass but I've heard you can do serious harm if you continue to eat like a fool after that.
 
Winky said:
Dood imagine trying to consume 20K calories a day!
It would be quite a feat to do it for several days,
much less to keep it up on an ongoing basis.
Click to expand...

If he could get it down to a Michael Phelps-like 12k and then swim like an olympic athlete he could be in good shape.
 
spike said:
If he could get it down to a Michael Phelps-like 12k and then swim like an olympic athlete he could be in good shape.
Click to expand...

234x.jpg


You better watch out - if he goes swimming in a pool, people might try to harpoon him so that they can use his blubber as fuel oil. Biodiesel anyone?
 
70-stone Brit’s tragic ambition

attachment.php


MASSIVE Paul Mason WANTED to become the world's heaviest man, it was revealed last night.

His bizarre ambition came to light three years ago after he lost 20 stone in hospital.

Paul, now 48, told stunned staff his weight loss was not what he really yearned for.

A health care insider said: "When he left he moaned he was missing the chance of becoming the world's heaviest man.

"And when he got home he ordered takeaway pizzas, curries and Chinese meals.

FAT MAN 5'6


"He was often seen going through the McDonald's drive-thru section for cars in his special wheelchair. No one could stop him eating. It was so tragic."

In his bid to become a record-breaker, 70-stone Paul scoffed whole boxes of Sugar Puffs in one go.

And on Fridays he made for a chip shop with his carers at lunchtime - AND in the evening.

Bob Singh Phagura, manager of the Nacton Road Fish Bar in Ipswich, Suffolk, said: "He would wait outside as we couldn't fit him or his wheelchair into the shop.

"His carers would take away the food. It was ten times more than a normal person would eat.

"He would order four large cod, two pies, four battered sausages and six large portions of chips, along with mushy peas and curry sauce. He'd wash it down with a couple of bottles of Coke."



It also emerged last night the cost of Paul's care over the last few years has topped £1MILLION.

And he ATE his mother out of house and home as the cost of his scoffing meant she could not keep up with mortgage repayments, leading to repossession.

Paul, who stands 5ft 6in, is now virtually immobile. And there are no more trips to the chippie.

He lies nearly all day and night on a reinforced bed on the ground floor of a specially-built housing association bungalow.

It has 5ft wide doors so he does not get stuck in the frames.

The former mechanic and postman receives £67.50 per week in incapacity benefit and a housing payout to cover his rent.


He relies on a team of seven NHS carers, working three eight-hour shifts, to cook his food and clean up after him.

The carers, costing an estimated £100,000 a year, give him breakfast in bed before making sure he is washed and wearing clean clothes. If Paul gets too hot he asks them to turn on a fan placed beside him.

A hoist lifts him up so he can watch TV, use his games console or surf the internet using a keyboard that rests on his stomach.

The bathroom has a reinforced toilet seat and bath.

The only things Paul can do for himself are eat his 20,000-calorie per day meals - eight times the recommended intake for a man - and clean his teeth.

A physiotherapist visits to stretch his legs and perform chest massages to prevent deep vein thrombosis and pneumonia.


Repossessed house ... Janet

The carers also turn him regularly to combat bed sores.

Neighbours said they had seen him only once in the past six months, when he enjoyed a summer barbecue on his drive while lying on his bed. Plasterer Nathan Smith, 28, said: "His carer was cooking for him." Another neighbour, Sue Horne, 55, was sympathetic. She said: "Paul's a really nice bloke and seems happy despite everything. I feel sorry for him."

Paul's mum Janet died six weeks ago aged 75.

Last night his tearful sister Louise, 43, said his compulsive eating had torn the family apart - and left her and fellow sibling Judith with nothing. Paul - a stick-thin soccer-playing lad in his youth - moved back in with arthritis sufferer Janet in 1990 after two relationships fell apart. He cared for Janet for a while but ended up barely able to walk as he ballooned.


Louise said he had a huge fry-up for breakfast, a king-size kebab for lunch, fish and chips for tea and another fry-up for supper.

She told how their father Roy, who like Janet weighed 20st-plus, paid off the mortgage on the family's £100,000 terraced home before he died in 1986. But Janet was forced to re-mortgage due to Paul's food bills - then had the house repossessed when she failed to meet repayments.

As a result there was nothing in her will for Louise and Judith. Louise said: "I still love Paul, but what he does just breaks my heart."

The Sun told yesterday how Paul is set for drastic stomach surgery to stop him eating and keep him alive.

It will cost the NHS £20,000. Obesity expert David Haslam said a "phenomenal amount" had been spent on Paul over the past seven years.

He added: "If you add up all the GP visits, hospital visits, visits from carers and nurses, transport costs, disability living allowance, home adaptation and home help from social services it comes to £1million."

Paul featured in a TV documentary about obesity in 2006. In the show, made by Raw Television and aired on More 4, he argued it was his "human right" to be housed and given handouts.

He said: "I never made myself like this. I don't want to be like this."

Interviewer Giles Coren, the food critic, left and said outside: "I had to get out of there. The victim mentality is a little bit hard to bear."
Click to expand...

source

Do you think a private insurance would have cut him off by now? Will your public option be legally able to?
 
There has to be a point, under private, or public health care where you have to meet certain standards.

Like the don't give liver transplants to people who continue to drink heavily. Call it a death panel if you want, maybe they are needed. The person has to be willing to help themselves.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top