The No Insurance Club is the creation of an Arizona physician. The annual individual membership fee is $480 for up to 12 physician visits ($680 covers up to 16 visits per family). Most services during the office visits are free, including immunizations. Generic prescriptions are $4 or less. [link]
A few months back, we featured a rather personal piece on how early detection is key towards the prevention and treatment of colon cancer. From that, we learned how colon cancer does not need to be as fatal as it seems to be, only if more people subjected themselves to colon testing. The cancer is highly treatable for as long as it is discovered early enough.
However, this is hardly an ideal until now, even with the availability of home fecal occult blood testing kits. According to an article from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School) less than fifty percent of people who should undergo colon screening actually go through the procedure. And who should these people be? People who notice early symptoms such as blood with bowel movement and those with a family history of colon cancer are the obvious candidates. There is even data available proving that colon screening is not performed as extensively as those that screen breast, cervical or prostate cancers.
One-third of New York Medicaid patients don't bother to re-enroll. Paperwork is one problem.
Health IT in the UK. They text message STD test results to teenage patients.
We have always received bad news from studies that it has become hard to see the silver lining. But for a change, the Associated Press reports that a study is now saying that parents and anti-drug advocates may be getting through to Americas youth.
The study is set to be released today and was sponsored by The Partnership for a Drug-Free America. President and Chief Executive Steve Pasierb says further that one factor for the decline may be due to the proactive effort of parents to reach out to their kids, and their childrens positive response to their efforts. Kids nowadays, it seems, are more willing to listen and heed their elders advice, especially the girls.
On this day in 1600, Giordano Bruno, a proponent of heliocentrism, was burned at the stake for heresy. [link]
The twists do not stop coming. As if Nadya Suleman does not have enough to deal with as it is, an ex-boyfriend is now claiming he may be the father of all fourteen of her children and would like to undergo a paternity test to prove it.
Denis Beaudoin, allegedly a successful businessman who dated Suleman in the late 1990s, talked to the ABC show Good Morning America last Monday. He is claiming that he donated sperm to Nadya no less than three times during their three year relationship. He is now saying that Nadya told him that she had ovarian cancer and will need to use in vitro fertilization in order to conceive.
I have always been in favor of wellness. But wellness doesn't pay for itself. It's not like an investment good that pays a positive rate of return. It's like a consumer good that must be traded against other goods money can buy. The Institute of Medicine is making a push for wellness this week [link]. Nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with thinking that wellness programs will reduce total costs. They won't.
You might find it interesting that — with the economy seemingly crumbling around us — one line of business is doing very well indeed: mail-order pharmacies.
Medco Health Solutions Inc., the nation’s largest pharmacy-benefits manager (PBM), posted a 32 percent rise in fourth-quarter profits today — largely on the growth in the number of prescriptions filled by mail order. Working with employer-based insurance providers, Medco fulfills more mail-order prescriptions than any other company in the United States.
The occurrence of colorectal cancer may be reduced with high calcium intake, especially in women, according to a study by the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI).
Why calcium does not have exactly the same impact in men as in women is yet to be determined; hormonal or other metabolic factors may contribute to the difference, but this is still unclear.
