Wouldn't you prefer that your nurse be paying more attention to your vital signs--

--than to insurance company bullshit?



The picture is from a PNHP book published in 1994 during the last health care go-round. Billing stickers adorn this nurse’s uniform. She removed the stickers from the supplies needed to insert a central intravenous line in the Intensive Care Unit. Each piece of intravenous tubing and sterile towel has an individually numbered sticker affixed to it in the central supply room. The nurse removes the stickers when the supplies are used, and later places them in the patient's chart. At the end of the hospital stay, the chart is sent to the billing office where several full-time clerks enter the billing numbers into a computer system, and the computer produces the detailed bill which is forwarded to the patient and insur¬er. The hospital may very well have hundreds of different plans to deal with as well. The insurance company employs a large staff which reviews each item. Finally, patients are liable for any uncovered items, and often spend much of their convalescence dealing with detailed hospital bills. Nurses want to be nurses, not bean counters or paper pushers.

DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS!


Log on to http://change.gov/agenda/health_care_agenda/ frequently, and voice your support for single payer health care. As FDR once said to A. Phillip Randolph, "You know, Mr. Randolph, I've heard everything you've said tonight, and I couldn't agree with you more. I agree with everything that you've said, including my capacity to be able to right many of these wrongs and to use my power and the bully pulpit." He said, "But I would ask one thing of you, Mr. Randolph, and that is go out and make me do it." Contact the White House frequently. http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ is the email contact form, and the comment line numbers are 202-456-1111, 202-456-1112 and 202-456-1414,

You don’t have to be a doctor to join Physicians for National Health Care http://www.pnhp.org/

Join the Progressive Democrats of America’s Health Care Not Warfare campaign. http://pdamerica.org/articles/misc/2008-02-29-14-19-42-misc.php

Consumers Union, a long-time advocate of universal health care, is collecting health care stories. Tell them yours. http://www.prescriptionforchange.org/share_your_story.html

Use the free fax tool at http://www.1payer.net/ early and often.

Bookmark every universal health care URL you can find, and check them for local action opportunities. Some examples--

http://singlepayeraction.org/
http://www.uhcan.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
http://www.healthcare-now.org/

Leave private insurance as it it, and this time and money wasting crap will continue, even if you tack on a public option. Worse, it will bleed the public option of the money necessary for it to succeed.

but it's also for hospital inventory control.

It is an utterly stupid and wasteful form of inventory control.

Most hospitals have computerized cabinets where we just enter the pt's name and push buttons for the items we need. Medical supplies are expensive. In my job now, we enter forms before we take any supplies and most of our patients are on Medicare until we can electronically order them for home delivery. I think the rest are Medicaid and we don't give them supplies, they get prescriptions and they submit them to drugstores/medical supply companies which deliver them. It's important to control costs in any healthcare environment.

Our method of controlling costs is stupid, roughly analogous to controlling the movements of a herd of cattle by hiring a bunch of cowboys with individual sets of reins for each cow. Other countries do global budgeting, which is equivalent to putting a fence around them and letting them move at will within it.