CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – An engineer in North Carolina has filed a patent for a new medical-care system that he says would be a good business fit with the Minot area.Then this on 11/11/08 in the "Minot Daily News"
C. Alex Chien said Wednesday that Minot has the technology, transportation and environment to host a prototype “medical onshoring” clinic.
Chien, a self-employed engineer, is a former rural economic developer with RochesterTel, former owners of Minot Telephone Co. SRT purchased Minot Telephone Co. in 1994.
Nice coincidence that a long-delayed IHS project accelerates -- or separate matters? You decide.NEW TOWN, N.D. -- The design plans for a $20 million health-care facility for the Three Affiliated Tribes on the Fort Berthold Reservation are moving forward.
"We're looking at a groundbreaking next spring or early summer, with a completion of 2010," said Jim Foote, project manager for the Three Affiliated Tribes' Elbowoods Memorial Health Facility.
In September, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., announced that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had awarded a $1.48 million contract to launch the design phase to build the health-care facility on Fort Berthold.
Xiao Xu, a research investigator in the University of Michigan Health System's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, won the 2008 BCBSM Foundation McDevitt Excellence in Research award in the area of policy research.
Xu received the award for a paper that was published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, examining the effects of medical liability risk on the availability of obstetric care in the state. The study by Xu and her co-authors found that many obstetricians, family physicians and nurse midwives in Michigan planned to discontinue delivering babies or reduce their provision of high-risk obstetric care in the next five years.
The award comes with a $10,000 grant from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation.
Xu discussed her findings with reporter Gary Gosselin.
Business Review: Hasn't tort reform helped mitigate malpractice liability some?
Xu: A variety of tort reforms have been adopted by states, such as caps on damages, abolition of joint-and-several liability, elimination of prejudgment interest, amendments of the period of limitation of actions (statutes of limitations), caps on attorney contingency-fees ... Overall, the literature finds limited impact of state tort reforms on the size and number of paid medical malpractice claims. Only certain tort reforms, such as caps on damages, collateral-source rule reforms, and reduction of the statutes of limitations, have generally been shown to increase physician supply and reduce malpractice premium rates and severity of medical malpractice payments.
BR: Since malpractice insurance rates dropped this year, wasn't Michigan's reform enough to help obstetrics?
Xu: Obstetrical providers are one of the groups most affected by the increasing medical liability insurance premiums and malpractice litigation risk.
Despite the various efforts made to constrain malpractice insurance premiums and claims costs, concern among obstetric providers remains widespread.
For example, data from the 2006 American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists survey on professional liability found that nationwide, 65 percent of obstetrician-gynecologist respondents had made some changes to their practice over the previous three years for fear of professional liability claims or litigation.
This ACOG survey showed that, for District V - in which Michigan is situated - almost 9 percent of obstetrician-gynecologists had ceased practicing obstetrics and 34 percent of obstetrician-gynecologists had reduced the number of high-risk obstetric patients since 2003 because of risks for medical malpractice claims or litigation.
.. Consider the shoppers at the Save-A-Lot supermarket in Hamlin, West Virginia. At the beginning of the month, when the food stamps arrive, they snap up buckets of lard so big that the label says: “Warning—Children can fall into bucket and drown.” The manager, Key-Ray Adkins, shrugs: “People now say lard isn’t good for you. But it’s what we grew up with.”Thinking and "developing policy" are not the same as knowing, engaging, and authentically teaching.
What does a pack of cigarettes cost a smoker, the smoker's family, and society?Does "universal healthcare" make smoking a moral hazard?
This longitudinal study on the private and social costs of smoking calculates that the cost of smoking to a 24-year-old woman smoker is $86,000 over a lifetime; for a 24-year-old male smoker the cost is $183,000.
The total social cost of smoking over a lifetime—including both private costs to the smoker and costs imposed on others (including second-hand smoke and costs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security)—comes to $106,000 for a woman and $220,00 for a man. The cost per pack over a lifetime of smoking: almost $40.00.
The first study to quantify the cost of smoking in this way, or in such depth, this accessible book not only adds a weapon to the arsenal of anti-smoking messages but also provides a framework for assessment that can be applied to other health behaviors.
The findings on the effects of smoking on Medicare and Medicaid will be surprising and perhaps controversial, for the authors estimate the costs to be much lower than the damage awards being paid to 46 states as a result of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement.
Six in ten people in the United States are overweight, with a third crossing the boundary into obesity. The extra weight leads to at least 100,000 deaths annually. Obese people are at a much higher risk for heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, arthritis and some cancers.---
Doctors call people obese if their weight in kilograms is more than 30 times bigger than their height in meters squared. This is known as a high body mass index, or BMI.
Even kids are getting fatter. Nineteen percent of children between the ages of 6 and 11 are overweight, up from 4% in the 1970s. Doctors are turning to intensive behavioral therapy to try to keep these children from gaining more weight.
The economic cost of all this extra fat is immense. Direct medical costs are easiest to calculate, coming in at $93 billion, or 9%, of our national medical bill.
Your boss might want to forget about making you wear that BlackBerry and take away your bourbon instead.---
Businesses spend big bucks on both the little, addictive wireless e-mail gadgets and programs that screen for and treat problem drinkers. Both make back the cost of investment.
But searching for alcohol abusers brings in $2.15 for every dollar spent, compared to a mere $1.62 for keeping workers connected with Blackberrys.
In fact, just by surveying employees and offering counseling sessions of 30 minutes or less, employers might be able to put a big dent in the $35 billion that excessive drinking adds to health care coverage annually, according to the George Washington University researchers who came up with the comparison.
What is striking is that the GWU researchers don't recommend counseling only alcoholics, who require years of treatment, but also people who aren't addicts but simply drink too much.
"Since there are so many more people who drink in hazardous or harmful amounts, about 60% of the costs of alcohol to society are from people who are not dependent," says Eric Goplerud, who heads an alcohol abuse program at GWU called Ensuring Solutions.
"There are people who drink even though they have sore stomachs, or drink and get into a fight and get hurt or engage in unprotected sex."
Each year, alcohol abuse costs the United States an estimated $185 billion, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. But only $26 billion, 14% of the total, comes from direct medical costs or treating alcoholics.
Almost half, a whopping $88 billion, comes from lost productivity--a combination of all those hangovers that keep us out of work on Monday mornings, as well as other alcohol-related diseases. People who drink too much and too often are at greater risk for diabetes and several kinds of cancer, according to some studies.
The economic cost to U.S. society of drug abuse was an estimated $97.7 billion in 1992, according to recent calculations. The new cost estimate continues a pattern of strong and steady increase since 1975, when the first of five previous cost estimates was made.
The current estimate is 50 percent higher than the most recent previous estimate - which was made for 1985 - even after adjustment for population growth and inflation.
The parallel cost to society for alcohol abuse was estimated at $148 billion, bringing the total cost for substance abuse in 1992 to $246 billion. This total represents a cost of $965 for every person in the United States in 1992. The per-person cost for drug abuse alone was $383.
" .. In this relatively favorable scenario, we may follow the path recently sketched by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, with the economy recovering by 2010. On the other hand, the 59 nonwar depressions in our sample have an average duration of nearly four years, which, if we have one here, means that it is likely recovery would not be substantial until 2012.
"Given our situation, it is right that radical government policies should be considered if they promise to lower the probability and likely size of a depression. However, many governmental actions -- including several pursued by Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression -- can make things worse.
"I wish I could be confident that the array of U.S. policies already in place and those likely forthcoming will be helpful. But I think it more likely that the economy will eventually recover despite these policies, rather than because of them."
Joke about economists -- nice young lad, afraid of blood, who still wants to be called "doctor."
Moral hazardPer the Fannie/Freddie disaster -- when Americans travel overseas in questionable areas -- who bears the cost of saving them? As in this case --One of two main sorts of MARKET FAILURE often associated with the provision of INSURANCE. The other is ADVERSE SELECTION. Moral hazard means that people with insurance may take greater risks than they would do without it because they know they are protected, so the insurer may get more claims than it bargained for. (See also DEPOSIT INSURANCE, LENDER OF LAST RESORT, IMF and WORLD BANK.)
Taliban insurgents released all remaining South Korean Christian aid workers held in Afghanistan today.The world is a dangerous place. Obviously.
The remaining seven hostages were released in two groups on Thursday, one day after 12 of the hostages held since mid-July were freed.
Agreement had been reached on Monday between the Taliban and South Korean negotiators to end the hostages' ordeal.
South Korea will remove its 200 troops and all missionaries and other civilians from Afghanistan by the end of the year in return for the release.
The 23 South Koreans originally captured were abducted as they travelled from Kandahar to Kabul on July 19th.
Two male hostages were subsequently killed after Taliban gunmen said their demands were not being met, while two female missionaries were later released as a goodwill gesture.
