READ THIS BEFORE VOTING:
This is a special poll ONLY for those who oppose the health care bill.
Of course, anyone can comment.

This second poll is also ONLY for those who oppose the health care bill. Are you or do you plan to take Medicare benefits? The fact that you’ve paid into the system should be irrelevant. Your principles are at stake.

On March 16, Tea Partiers from around the country gathered (in disappointing numbers) in front of the Capitol building for their final protest against health care reform. Also in town, appropriately, was Barnum & Bailey’s actual circus.

UK Deaths from C-Diff shown above. USA is worse still.

MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, are bacteria that can’t be treated with common antibiotics. They are often harmless as they ride on the skin, but become deadly once they get in the bloodstream. They enter through wounds, intravenous lines and other paths.

C-diff, also resistant to some antibiotics, is found in the colon and can cause diarrhea and a more serious intestinal condition known as colitis. It is spread by spores in feces. The spores are difficult to kill with most conventional household cleaners or alcohol-based hand sanitizers, so some of the disinfection measures against MRSA don’t work on C-diff.

Deaths from C-diff traditionally have been rare, but a more dangerous form has emerged in the last ten years. Still, MRSA is generally considered a more lethal threat, causing an estimated 18,000 U.S. deaths annually

What do you think about ObamaCare?

This vote could change the entire country, according to The Wall Street Journal

With the House’s climactic vote on ObamaCare tomorrow, Democrats are on the cusp of a profound and historic mistake, comparable in our view to the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act. Everyone is preoccupied now with the politics, but ultimately at stake on Sunday is the kind of country America will be.

The consequences of this bill will not only be destructive for the health-care system and the country’s fiscal condition, though those will be bad enough. Inextricably bound up in a plan as far-reaching and ambitious as ObamaCare are also larger questions about the role of government, the dynamism of American enterprise and the nature of a free society. Above anything else, this explains why Democrats have had such trouble convincing the public, let alone their own Members.

Once the health-care markets are put through Mr. Obama’s de facto nationalization, costs will further explode. The Congressional Budget Office estimates ObamaCare will cost taxpayers $200 billion per year when fully implemented and grow annually at 8%, even under low-ball assumptions. Soon the public will reach its taxing limit, and then something will have to give on the care side. In short, medicine will be rationed by politics, no doubt with the same subtlety and wisdom as Congress’s final madcap dash toward 216 votes.

As in the Western European and Canadian welfare states, doctors, hospitals and insurance companies will over time become public utilities. Government will set the cost-minded priorities and determine what kinds of treatment options patients are allowed to receive. Medicare’s price controls will be exported to the remnants of the private sector.

Eventually, quality and choice—the best attributes of American medicine in spite of its dysfunctions—will severely decline.

So a vote for ObamaCare is also a vote against the vitality of American capitalism. Business elites have mostly held their tongues, or calculated that they can later dump their health-care liabilities on the government. Yet ObamaCare will lead to much higher levels of taxation across society. The tax wedge—the share of labor costs that never reaches workers but instead goes straight to government—will start flying towards the 50% that prevails today in most of Europe. In America, without the same welfare state obligations, it hovers near 30%.

Despite what the Republicans say, it isn’t for a lot of people, especially if you have insurance companies targeting people who want to, you know, actually use their insurance for anything but a money sink. Not saying a single-payer, government run system would be without problems, but if you’re like the guy in the article, it’s hard to imagine it being worse.

Previously undisclosed records from Mitchell’s case reveal that Fortis had a company policy of targeting policyholders with HIV. A computer program and algorithm targeted every policyholder recently diagnosed with HIV for an automatic fraud investigation, as the company searched for any pretext to revoke their policy. As was the case with Mitchell, their insurance policies often were canceled on erroneous information, the flimsiest of evidence, or for no good reason at all, according to the court documents and interviews with state and federal investigators.

The revelations come at a time when President Barack Obama, in his frantic push to rescue the administration’s health care plan, has stepped up his criticism of insurers. The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote later this week on an overhaul of the health system, which Obama has said is essential to do away with controversial and unpopular industry practices.

Insurance companies have long engaged in the practice of “rescission,” whereby they investigate policyholders shortly after they’ve been diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses. But government regulators and investigators who have overseen the actions of Assurant and other health insurance companies say it is unprecedented for a company to single out people with HIV.
[...]
Their motive, according to the judge, was obvious: “The court finds that Fortis wrongfully elevated its concerns for maximizing profits over the rights and interest of its customer.” In upholding Nettles’ verdict, the South Carolina Supreme Court similarly ruled that “Fortis was motivated to avoid the losses it would undoubtedly incur in supporting Mitchell’s costly medical condition.”

On a vaguely related topic, ever wonder how many doctors and nurses are beaten up by patients?

Finest health care system in the world.

Tracy [CA] residents will now have to pay every time they call 9-1-1 for a medical emergency.

But there are a couple of options. Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year which allows them to call 9-1-1 as many times as necessary.

Or, there’s the option of not signing up for the annual fee. Instead, they will be charged $300 if they make a call for help.

“A $300 fee and you don’t even want to be thinking about that when somebody is in need of assistance,” said Tracy resident Greg Bidlack.

Residents will soon receive the form in the mail where they’ll be able to make their selection. No date has been set for when the charges will go into effect.

Brothel owners in the [Swiss] Lugano area say electric shock treatment to restart customer’s hearts is needed because so many elderly customers are using their services.

The most recent victim was a pensioner, thought to be having fun with the help of anti-impotence medication.

His death followed a series of other incidents, some fatal, in which heart attacks have claimed brothel customers in the area.

The owner of one sex club said: “Having customers die on us isn’t exactly good publicity”.

“Smokers are never told that up to 75% of successful ex-smokers quit unaided,” said a public health expert, who reviewed hundreds of studies into quitting smoking and is now calling for more effective campaigns and policies worldwide.

Drug companies, tobacco control advocates and public health professionals are over-promoting nicotine replacement therapy and other smoking cessation drugs, according to Simon Chapman and Ross MacKenzie from the University of Sydney, Australia.

The pharmaceutical industry is influencing public health practice away from methods that are proven to help the majority of smokers to quit, they said in their review in the journal PLoS Medicine.

“For obvious reasons (a $1.7 billion market in 2006) the pharmaceutical industry is intent on pathologising a process that for decades saw millions of people quit unaided,” Chapman said.

Adults aged over 70 years who are classified as overweight are less likely to die over a ten year period than adults who are in the ‘normal’ weight range, according to a new study published today in the Journal of The American Geriatrics Society.

Researchers looked at data taken over a decade among more than 9,200 Australian men and women aged between 70 and 75 at the beginning of the study, who were assessed for their health and lifestyle as part of a study into healthy aging. The paper sheds light on the situation in Australia, which is ranked the third most obese country, behind the United States and the United Kingdom.

Obesity and overweight are most commonly defined according to body mass index (BMI), which is calculated by dividing bodyweight (in kg) by the square of height (in metres). The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines four principal categories: underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obese. The thresholds for these categories were primarily based on evidence from studies of morbidity and mortality risk in younger and middle-aged adults, but it remains unclear whether the overweight and obese cut-points are overly restrictive measures for predicting mortality in older people.