1. Socialized medicine interferes with the free will choices of individuals in a society
2. Ceding power to government to make health care choices erodes personal freedom
3. Choice of diagnostic code can be a self-fulfilling prophecy in socialist society
4. Treatments for mental health are more vulnerable to the loss of freedom since diagnoses affect individual rights in the legal system.
5. Diagnoses for mental health are by nature more subjective than other diagnostic codes and more subject to manipulation based on political agenda
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Use of mental hospitals for identity changes
I have done an extensive investigation of the process used by the Mafia to change people's identities. This involved three different mental hospitals in the Northern California area.
People are admitted to these hospitals under false pretenses and then are given opportunities to trade identities with other patients before release. This is also using federal government funding such as Medicaid.
They try to match medication and vital signs with patients they want to release. Several opportunities are given to switch food trays or ID bracelets with other patients before release. This activity is under cover of the Mafia information shield. So all major hospitals participate in this process.
The relevance of this is that in socialized medicine, it will be easier to do this because there would be less freedom for the individual patients with their own medical records, which are used to create an identity. The importance of medical records controlled by the patient is apparent to prevent this from occurring involuntarily.
This includes frequent use of the local statutes for 14 day hold for involuntary care. In a national system, the patients rights would be further reduced.
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Christopher Grell
People are admitted to these hospitals under false pretenses and then are given opportunities to trade identities with other patients before release. This is also using federal government funding such as Medicaid.
They try to match medication and vital signs with patients they want to release. Several opportunities are given to switch food trays or ID bracelets with other patients before release. This activity is under cover of the Mafia information shield. So all major hospitals participate in this process.
The relevance of this is that in socialized medicine, it will be easier to do this because there would be less freedom for the individual patients with their own medical records, which are used to create an identity. The importance of medical records controlled by the patient is apparent to prevent this from occurring involuntarily.
This includes frequent use of the local statutes for 14 day hold for involuntary care. In a national system, the patients rights would be further reduced.
--
Christopher Grell
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Factors Leading to Excessive Federalization of Health Care Financing
The Obama healthcare agenda is to accelerate the path toward socialized medicine, but it can be stopped. Growth of the aging population will naturally lead to significant increase in the ratio of federal to total health care financing from the current 33%. This already implies a shift toward more centralized government control of health care through expansion of Medicare rolls. In addition, as employees move among companies with periods of unemployment, those caught in between employers will desire portable coverage, leading to further accumulation on the federal budget if a public option is considered.
Lack of cost containment or adaptation by the insurance industry will negatively affect business competitiveness, leading to a tipping point where employer based insurance loses viability, unless a hard stop is put in to prevent this and force parties to the table to find a hybrid solution that includes private enterprise and patient directed health care. Socialism is about the power of centralization and not the freedom of the individual to make their own choices. If not checked, this road map leads to a single payer system, with budgetary constraints forcing care rationing at a national policy level, and with fallout to compromise religious beliefs in the practice of medicine for expediency.
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Christopher Grell
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Importance of Local Decision Making in Health Care Delivery and Access
While the current initiative on health care reform is being debated as a national policy, health care is mainly delivered locally. Considerations such as urban versus rural environment, variations in state and local laws, and participation by community organizations lead to discriminating the concepts of coverage versus access to health care. Even if universal coverage were affordable at this point in time, it is a much more expensive proposition than simply offering local access to the poor and homeless, to alleviate the free rider problem with emergency room medicine. Federalized altruism is poor substitute for local care by community and faith based organizations.
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Christopher Grell
President Obama's speech
Pushing forward this year is imperative and I commend the efforts to transform the process. However, we must maintain the long term perspective and constrain the roadmap so that our system remains uniquely American. The balance of free enterprise and government involvement, the balance of power between state and local and federal funding of health care, and the preservation of individual rights are at stake as we move ahead over the next 15 years. In addition, we must consider the ethical framework of the treatment decisions as new technologies emerge. Ultimately too much concentration of power may overshadow the patient's rights to direct their own healthcare, leading to interference with the basic freedom of the Constitution.
Sent from my iPhone
Christopher Grell
Sent from my iPhone
Christopher Grell
Patient Controlled Healthcare
One of the most important aspects of the heath care reform package is in the efficiencies and cost savings from full implementation of interoperable electronic medical records. Up until now, there has been a division of medical record keeping between the HMO/PPO provider networks and the hospitals, with these systems for the most part not interoperable. The data sets that are currently available in the health care system include pharmacy prescription record data, health insurance reimbursement claims data, hospital stay medical records, and physician office medical records. In addition to these, there are government data sets for Medicaid and Medicare payers by fee for service and DRG.
All of these data sets combined provide a 360 degree view of a person's medical history. But these pieces of information are owned by parties with different vested interests. And presently there is no way to link them all together in one comprehensive longitudinal medical record for a particular identity record. This ambiguity benefits individuals by retaining some measure of privacy because if federalized then these records would become the property of the government rather than the individual. The question then becomes how do we achieve the efficiencies in health care that we desire through IT enablement without ceding our freedom and our privacy.
One model for electronic medical records is the integrated health system model, exemplified by Kaiser and the VA Medical systems. These institutions control and disease manage a population and integrate ambulatory and hospital care in a seamless system. In the case of the VA the control is derivative of military service. In the Kaiser model, it is a non-profit with voluntary participation. But since they have experience with the end-to-end data captured across the entire health care delivery, their systems are more advanced and yet not flexible enough to be used in a more hybrid system of care, where patients would have portable records under their control to take from one site of care to another.
The framework for a portable, tamperproof, encrypted, interoperable record could be based on an extension of some emerging models for personal health records (PHR's) that have been introduced by Google and Microsoft, as well as an open source platform developed at Children's Hospital in Boston and funded by Intel and others called Indivo. Given the urgency of unifying the electronic records to move forward, it may take too long for an open source solution to mature. So for the first generation of this re-engineered process, we should look to Google and Microsoft to harmonize their APIs and provide a choice so that there is a check and balance in the system.
The interfaces to these records could be a standard Application Progamming Interface usable by all health systems in the United States. They would need to add the flexibility for the patient to open selected parts of the record to each institution on a need to know basis. And the central servers for these would need to be put into some neutral framework not controlled by a corporation.
This approach would give us time to integrate the IT across the system while developing a more complete second generation solution to include the genomic data, which will need to have a higher level of security. Once our genomes are sequenced in the next decade it will be especially important to have strong controls on the disclosure by patients to third parties. Data can be grouped into categories based on their impact for medical treatment. Some genomic data will be useful prospectively to predict disease susceptibility and guide disease management programs. Other data such as susceptibility to drug response will need to be kept as current drug allergy data is currently maintained -- for example, so that an emergency hospital visit would trigger opening the data.
The current state of electronic medical records is such that most doctors do not use them because of the amount of time needed to be invested to integrate them into practice. In addition to the software needed to provide secure interoperable records, there will need to be some hardware components optimized for physician office workflow and for patients maintaining an electronic key to their records.
These measures are more complex than just letting the government take over the process. So in countries where socialized medicine is in place, the one size fits all model with no control by the patient has allowed greater efficiency in the short term. But there is no reason why we cannot have a hybrid system that provides a baseline of critical care combined with a broader spectrum of alternatives beyond this, determined by the individual patients' values, stage of life, and economic situation. Altruism aside, we need to plan for how the government can actually pay for the expanding the coverage to uninsured or temporarily unemployed individuals at reasonable rates, and avoid drafting regulations that seem to create greater efficiency but limit the choices in the system for all.
All of these data sets combined provide a 360 degree view of a person's medical history. But these pieces of information are owned by parties with different vested interests. And presently there is no way to link them all together in one comprehensive longitudinal medical record for a particular identity record. This ambiguity benefits individuals by retaining some measure of privacy because if federalized then these records would become the property of the government rather than the individual. The question then becomes how do we achieve the efficiencies in health care that we desire through IT enablement without ceding our freedom and our privacy.
One model for electronic medical records is the integrated health system model, exemplified by Kaiser and the VA Medical systems. These institutions control and disease manage a population and integrate ambulatory and hospital care in a seamless system. In the case of the VA the control is derivative of military service. In the Kaiser model, it is a non-profit with voluntary participation. But since they have experience with the end-to-end data captured across the entire health care delivery, their systems are more advanced and yet not flexible enough to be used in a more hybrid system of care, where patients would have portable records under their control to take from one site of care to another.
The framework for a portable, tamperproof, encrypted, interoperable record could be based on an extension of some emerging models for personal health records (PHR's) that have been introduced by Google and Microsoft, as well as an open source platform developed at Children's Hospital in Boston and funded by Intel and others called Indivo. Given the urgency of unifying the electronic records to move forward, it may take too long for an open source solution to mature. So for the first generation of this re-engineered process, we should look to Google and Microsoft to harmonize their APIs and provide a choice so that there is a check and balance in the system.
The interfaces to these records could be a standard Application Progamming Interface usable by all health systems in the United States. They would need to add the flexibility for the patient to open selected parts of the record to each institution on a need to know basis. And the central servers for these would need to be put into some neutral framework not controlled by a corporation.
This approach would give us time to integrate the IT across the system while developing a more complete second generation solution to include the genomic data, which will need to have a higher level of security. Once our genomes are sequenced in the next decade it will be especially important to have strong controls on the disclosure by patients to third parties. Data can be grouped into categories based on their impact for medical treatment. Some genomic data will be useful prospectively to predict disease susceptibility and guide disease management programs. Other data such as susceptibility to drug response will need to be kept as current drug allergy data is currently maintained -- for example, so that an emergency hospital visit would trigger opening the data.
The current state of electronic medical records is such that most doctors do not use them because of the amount of time needed to be invested to integrate them into practice. In addition to the software needed to provide secure interoperable records, there will need to be some hardware components optimized for physician office workflow and for patients maintaining an electronic key to their records.
These measures are more complex than just letting the government take over the process. So in countries where socialized medicine is in place, the one size fits all model with no control by the patient has allowed greater efficiency in the short term. But there is no reason why we cannot have a hybrid system that provides a baseline of critical care combined with a broader spectrum of alternatives beyond this, determined by the individual patients' values, stage of life, and economic situation. Altruism aside, we need to plan for how the government can actually pay for the expanding the coverage to uninsured or temporarily unemployed individuals at reasonable rates, and avoid drafting regulations that seem to create greater efficiency but limit the choices in the system for all.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Important week for Health Care Reform
The health care reform debate has narrowed down to the issue of how to introduce competition in the health insurance market. The compromise position is the formation of regional health insurance cooperatives. While the implementation of these is still unclear, this would provide the vehicle for the new business model for health insurance. The public option is too big of a step to take in order to just increase the level of competition because it creates a shift in power from state and local financing of health care to the federal government, unless this can be limited in some way. In the long term roadmap, the preservation of private enterprise in the delivery of health care depends on keeping a balance that is different than the socialized single payer financing model.
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