Solutions For 2018
The focus of Money Connection for the new year is moving our readers here in the United States to a vision of financial success that encompasses a global economy. We cannot survive as a separate entity by only focusing on the economy around our neighborhood, state on national communities. Our economy has moved to a global realm and we as visionaries have did you our readers and students a disservice with advice that only encompasses our borders.
Be aware that most of our information will be slanted to financial areas outside the US that affect us here in this country. We must come forth with new and innovative ideas that make us competitive in the marketplace because you cannot in today’s economy rely on security in finance or making money with blinders to what’s happening globally. So as we focus on this trend our thinking should also account for our political representatives who are not focused on global competitiveness. And, this article being presented on healthcare services in our country should open their eyes to a stanch fact that we must improve our system of caring for our sick or those same representatives and their lobbyist, who work for the health industry, will see their profits also being taken outside their boundaries of control. Remember we are now in a global sphere where healthcare can be somewhat administered by doctors, healthcare advocates, pharmacies and other entities involved in health outside our borders. Some very smart healthcare providers in India, for instance, could start providing healthcare related procedures from their country virtually to the US. And, for some of you doubters who are reading this article, all things are possible, just look around. The evidence is very clear.
Presidents all the way back to Kennedy had been trying to enact Universal Health Care. Health care when I was a little guy was a benevolent issue and proceeded along well until the greed of Wall Street saw hugh profits in wellness. Those robber barons have so ingrained themselves into healthcare they have control over who gets treatment and who doesn’t. So what are our solutions??? A hospital in Dallas, Texas has come forth with a program called “Frequently Flier”:
The ‘Frequent Flier’ Program That Grounded a Hospital’s Soaring Costs:
At Parkland Memorial Hospital, social worker Sheryl Abraham and senior vice president Marilyn Callies reviewed a sheath of graphs, each representing a special kind of visitor to the hospital—the “frequent fliers,” as the nurses call them, or more politely, “high utilizers.” Sitting in Callies’ office they worked through a list of 96 people who had visited the hospital at least 10 times over the previous month. Some had run up annual tabs of over $100,000 in unpaid bills. Nearly all of them were homeless at least part of the year. Here was a man in his late 40s, admitted to the emergency room 12 times over the past month, here a mentally ill woman who had visited 16 times. “Here’s one who comes in for her medication refills,” said Callies, leafing through the stack. “Maybe we could get a courier and get the medications to her?”
High utilizers was not a new problem at 872-bed Parkland Memorial, one of the 10 biggest hospitals in the United States. Parkland is best known as the place where President John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead 54 years ago after being shot while his motorcade passed through downtown. These days, it’s emergency room overflows with injuries and illnesses large and small: people with bullet wounds and heart attacks, strokes and pneumonia, and also chronically ill patients with nowhere else to go, for whom Parkland’s emergency room is a refuge from their disordered lives. And then there were patients whose medical emergencies could easily have been prevented with regular medical care, or housing or decent food.
As we see that our representatives are obsessed with Tax Cuts for the rich they are missing the real problem with giving themselves more profits or tax cuts, improve social safety net and your profits will go up. Instead of cutting health care for all, provide that service and bottom line results will improve. A healthy workplace means healthy employees, healthy job markets means healthy profits and buyers of your goods and services. An unhealthy environment encompassing the above events means unhealthy profits for the robbers.
E. Bishop III, The Money Connection
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