Mastectomy Bill in Congress

[deathlynx]

Mastectomy Hospital Bill in Congress

A mastectomy is when a woman's breast is removed in order to remove cancerous breast cells/tissue. If you know anyone who has had a mastectomy, you may know that there is a lot of discomfort and pain afterwards. Insurance companies are trying to make mastectomies an outpatient procedure. Let's give women the chance to recover properly in the hospital for 2 days after surgery.

Mastectomy Bill in Congress

Breast Cancer Hospitalization Bill - Important legislation for all women.

There's a bill called the Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act which will
require insurance companies to cover a minimum 48-hour hospital stay for patients undergoing a mastectomy. It's about eliminating the "drive-through mastectomy" where patients are forced to go home just a few hours after surgery, against the wishes of their doctor, still groggy from anesthesia and sometimes with drainage tubes still attached.

Lifetime Television has put this bill on their web page with a petition drive to show your support. Last year over half the House signed on.

PLEASE!! Sign the petition by clicking on the web site below. You need not give more than your name and zip code number.

http://www*****timetv.com/breastcancer/petition/signpetition.php

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I know many of you might have seen this already, but it's worth making sure considering the importance of the issue...

 

[S-Des]

Thanks, I'll be using the link. My mom had one a few years before she died. Luckily, she was a nurse at the hospital she had the surgery done at, so was extended every courtesy. Unfortunately I know everyone isn't taken care of in the same manner.

 

[TE999]

Petition signed. Thanks DL.

I was not aware of this practice.

Whatever happened to 'Above all, do no harm'?

'Drive-Thru Mastectomies' indeed. How barbaric.

 

[reignophelia]

Just signed my name.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Sorry, no signer here. When politics sticks it's ugly foot into the process the law of unintended consequences takes charge. I guarantee any such law will result in perverse outcomes and a net increase in human suffering - women not able to get masectomies, women waiting too long, prices higher, etc. This is very likely not a real problem anyway. More likely some narrow interest group is pitching a few horror stories and some carefully confected statistics, and pols exploiting the confection for some quick points with a key voting block.

I don't mean to dis the others in the thread or the maker, I know your hearts and intentions are pure, but I have seen these campaigns up close and personal, and their consequences, and the underlying realities are very different from the appearance.

 

[Pure]

in simple terms, the free market will sort this one out. the well to do women will pay for the extra day(s) and the poor women, will not. that will be an incentive for them to better their incomes, avoid separating from their husbands.

the constitution after all does not give a *right* to excellent health care.

the libertarian approach respects women too much to coddle them.

 

[S-Des]

in simple terms, the free market will sort this one out. the well to do women will pay for the extra day(s) and the poor women, will not. that will be an incentive for them to better their incomes, avoid separating from their husbands.

the constitution after all does not give a *right* to excellent health care.

the libertarian approach respects women too much to coddle them.

I know what Rox is talking about, and it's not as black and white as you're trying to make it seem. Hospitals and insurance companies cut corners to save money and keep costs down. If you force them to spend extra money, it will get passed along to the consumers, which will hurt some people's ability to get quality medical care. One of the counties on the border that is protesting illegal immigration estimated that they paid so much in care just of illegals who skipped out on bills, that they had to cut back on care for citzens.

Life is rarely black & white, good & evil Pure. I know you're very fond of Canada's system, but I also know of examples of people who came across the border because the care they'd receive there was less than they were willing to tolerate. Nothing is perfect and so we struggle to find a balance that cares for people the best it can, without running hospitals and doctors out of business. Rox's concern is legitimate, but I respectfully disagree in this specific case. I believe the solution is in offering discounts for people who can live with less services. I also think that patients should have the right to agree not to sue (or to limits on suits) in exchange for lower rates. Maybe even a discount for people who sign up to volunteer for community service (i.e. candy stripers, etc...). I don't know if it would work, but it seems like a good start to me.

 

[Stella_Omega]

You get a big piece of your body chopped off-- you ought to have the choice to stay in one bed for a couple of nights.

Here's hoping you never need one, Rox.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

You get a big piece of your body chopped off-- you ought to have the choice to stay in one bed for a couple of nights.

Here's hoping you never need one, Rox.

Cheap shot. You didn't engage the substance of my post, which was that when you go passing laws based on good intentions the result is a bunch of unforseen negative consequences that will increase the net sum of human suffering, not reduce it. It's not good enough to just say, "Do something!" and evade that reality. This is not a matter of free market idealism.

 

[deathlynx]

Well, I do have to agree that any laws that regulate corporate america tend to come around and bite the consumer on the ass anyway...However, as for the people behind the petition, it's run by Lifetime television network...for those not familiar with the cable station it is designed for women and generally does keep faithful to their target audience...

 

[Stella_Omega]

Cheap shot. You didn't engage the substance of my post, which was that when you go passing laws based on good intentions the result is a bunch of unforseen negative consequences that will increase the net sum of human suffering, not reduce it. It's not good enough to just say, "Do something!" and evade that reality. This is not a matter of free market idealism.

Well, I just hope that you never need a mastectomy, then. Perhaps on that day, it will help you to remember that your actual pain is merely negligible within the net sum of human suffering...

 

[Lee Chambers]

Petition signed. Thanks DL.

I was not aware of this practice.

Whatever happened to 'Above all, do no harm'?

'Drive-Thru Mastectomies' indeed. How barbaric.

Doctors can't force patients to stay overnight. What it comes down to is that the patient can stay as long as they wish, but the insurance company won't cover the costs of those extra days after the surgery is complete. The bill will be sent to the patient, in full, which can total several thousand dollars for only two days of bed rest, three (horrific) meals, and whatever meds the doctor prescribes. However, patients who can't afford that will choose to leave rather than struggle for years with such a huge debt.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Doctors can't force patients to stay overnight. What it comes down to is that the patient can stay as long as they wish, but the insurance company won't cover the costs of those extra days after the surgery is complete. The bill will be sent to the patient, in full, which can total several thousand dollars for only two days of bed rest, three (horrific) meals, and whatever meds the doctor prescribes. However, patients who can't afford that will choose to leave rather than struggle for years with such a huge debt.

There you go-- free market!

 

[Pure]

rox. You didn't engage the substance of my post, which was that when you go passing laws based on good intentions the result is a bunch of unforseen negative consequences that will increase the net sum of human suffering, not reduce it.

you didn't engage the substance of the proposal either, but merely recycled your formulaic cliches about lefties: good intentions and lack of knowledge of economics.

this is the free market objection, among other things, to mine safety regulations: expressing great concern for the poor, the free marketer says, "think of all those poor people that will be thrown out of work, if owners have to either close unsafe mines or spend lots of money making them safe. and since the costs are passed along, think of the poor familiies unable to afford coal."

a more straightforward approach is to say, hospitals are businesses and their profits are an inalienable right and not to be reduced by legislation depriving sharefholders of the legitimate benefits of their investment. if you ever interfere will business profits, the unforeseen consequences fatally undercut any such a do-gooder scheme. the public benefits from a profit driven system, and any individual hardships are best dealt with by the local churches, who could undertake to give additional days of respite to needy women after surgery.

 

[TE999]

Doctors can't force patients to stay overnight. What it comes down to is that the patient can stay as long as they wish, but the insurance company won't cover the costs of those extra days after the surgery is complete. The bill will be sent to the patient, in full, which can total several thousand dollars for only two days of bed rest, three (horrific) meals, and whatever meds the doctor prescribes. However, patients who can't afford that will choose to leave rather than struggle for years with such a huge debt.

Point taken.

I still am at a loss to understand why insurance companies give such short shrift in terms of hospital stays for major operations such as mastectomies.

I realize that the 'profit motive' may be behind it, but what if the patient develops complications and must be re-admitted? Where are the 'savings' then?

Just wondering.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Point taken.

I still am at a loss to understand why insurance companies give such short shrift in terms of hospital stays for major operations such as mastectomies.

I realize that the 'profit motive' may be behind it, but what if the patient develops complications and must be re-admitted? Where are the 'savings' then?

Just wondering.

They give short shrift because there is no law forcing them to do otherwise.

The percentage of women who develop complications is pretty low; if the insurance company has to allow a readmittance for three, say, out of every thousand-- just look at all the money they've saved!


Well anyway, Roxy, you have the inalienable right to not sign any petition you so choose

 

[The_Fool]

When we were having kids, the average stay in the US was 3-4 days for moms and babies. In Germany, it was a week. Today, I hear of moms going home the next day. Times change.

That being said, I am not sure that hospitals are all they are cracked up to be for post-operative care. By that I mean that I hear so many horror stories of people getting sick with stuff that is totally unrelated to why they went to the hospital in the first place.

So I guess I am for whatever is the best care for the patient. Be it home, hospital or some other patient facility.

To Roxanne's point about law. Laws are meant to govern behavior deemed inappropriate. That includes behavior of businesses. This goes back to the code of Hammurabi.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Truth to tell, I would not want to stay in a hospital any longer than I had to. IF I'd have enough support at home, I'd go there right after any surgery I could. however, and the point is, not every woman will have support at home. These are the ones that would benefit from an extra day or two.

With my daughter, I had two days, three nights in the hospital-- drove me nuts, I hated it. My baby was perfectly fine, and there was no reason to keep me except the hospital's policies.

In contrast, I delivered my son in a birthing center-- came home the same afternoon and spent my laying-in properly, in the State Bedroom.

 

[lucky-E-leven]

On a personal note, I'm with Stella. I'd probably prefer to go home and rest up in my own comfort zone. Then again, I'm a nurse, and my partner is a nurse, so I have no doubt I'd be taken care of.

As Stella points out, though, many women don't have these advantages. Additionally, it's not just about being sore and uncomfortable. There are typically drains that are left in, and a boatload of education that needs to be done. Depending upon the amount of tissue and nodes removed, there is a lot of teaching a patient requires. It'd be hard enough to fit it into a 48 hour period, let alone a situation where you know the patient won't hear a word you're saying before the procedure due to nerves, and they'll be pretty groggy while the residual anesthesia/sedation wears off afterward. I think it's an issue of safety more than mere comfort.

~lucky

 

[English Lady]

On a personal note, I'm with Stella. I'd probably prefer to go home and rest up in my own comfort zone. Then again, I'm a nurse, and my partner is a nurse, so I have no doubt I'd be taken care of.

As Stella points out, though, many women don't have these advantages. Additionally, it's not just about being sore and uncomfortable. There are typically drains that are left in, and a boatload of education that needs to be done. Depending upon the amount of tissue and nodes removed, there is a lot of teaching a patient requires. It'd be hard enough to fit it into a 48 hour period, let alone a situation where you know the patient won't hear a word you're saying before the procedure due to nerves, and they'll be pretty groggy while the residual anesthesia/sedation wears off afterward. I think it's an issue of safety more than mere comfort.

~lucky

In this kind of thing, I think it's wise to go with what the nurse thinks.

I'd sign but it seems I can't as I'm not from the US.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Cheap shot. You didn't engage the substance of my post, which was that when you go passing laws based on good intentions the result is a bunch of unforseen negative consequences that will increase the net sum of human suffering, not reduce it. It's not good enough to just say, "Do something!" and evade that reality. This is not a matter of free market idealism.

All right, I'll engage with the substance here - although I think Pure has a fair point in saying that you didn't engage with the specific issue either. You gave us a generalized statement of your personal economic theory, not a specific address to this issue. I'll take a stab at both.

A free market relies on freedom in more than setting prices. It also relies upon freedom of information. People have to know what they are actually buying in order for market forces to weed out inferior products. So long as consumers don't understand the product enough to make informed choices, there are no market controls on inferior products because consumers can't select the good products and leave the bad, or refuse to pay the same price for shoddy goods as for useful ones. That's why we have laws stating, for instance, that if you sell something that looks like a joint of ham but has actually been soaked in and injected with so much "broth" that it's no longer what people would expect ham to be, you have to label it "water and ham food product." (True story; saw it in the grocery store some years back and shrank back in horror).

That issue of informed choice is also why we have auto safety standards, accreditation of universities, and food and drug safety regulations. They are a recognition of that fact that some types of products, such as cars, four-year educations, or cancer medications, require consumers to have a great deal of specialized knowledge in order to evaluate them for quality and effectiveness. They require so much knowledge of so specialized a nature, in fact, that the average consumer cannot make an informed decision about quality without the help of experts.

Of course, most of us when buying a car go out and do some research, but just imagine if you had to invest the same level of research every time you wanted to fill a prescription, choose a safe toy for your child, or buy a breakfast cereal that was reasonably likely not to be made of recycled wood shavings. We wouldn't have time to do anything else. Hence, we have laws governing product quality and labelling. They exist to help consumers act swiftly and with confidence when purchasing goods, because the other two options are either consumers sacrificing all productivity to spend hours researching every purchase, or a market in which no controls can penalize inferior goods because no one can figure out what they are.

Now, consider the question of health insurance. It's vital to most consumers, and yet it's also very complicated. How many consumers have both the education necessary to evaluate every individual procedure coverage choice and the time to investigate each and every one? Imagine if you had to go through a list of every procedure medically possible, from amputation of a leg to lancing of a boil, and check how much the company paid, how long you could stay in the hospital, and whether they would agree that it was actually a medical procedure.

Worse, imagine that your insurance company was permitted to sell you "health insurance" with a general statement that they would cover your medical care after you paid XXXX deductible, but were also legally permitted to insert into that list of every possible medical procedure known to man, anywhere they liked, little riders that read "we don't cover amputations" or "dialysis is considered a drug and not a medical procedure and is thus not covered" or "we only cover the first thousand dollars of this particular procedure, regardless of the total cost" - or "we consider the amputation of your breasts to be a minor outpatient procedure and will not pay for any hospital stay afterwards." What you would have would be a choice between spending months trying to check every procedure anyone might ever need and see if you really were covered for it in the sense that most people would read the word, or buying a pig in a poke - plumping down money for a product that could actually be anything.

Passing a law that requires insurance companies to cover a hospital stay for someone who requires it (by the doctor's advice) after a major surgery is not a matter of dictating to the free market. It's a matter of ensuring that it is a free market, and that people are getting what they are paying for. No fair person would assume, when purchasing health insurance, that "we pay for XXXX amount of coverage after your deductible" actually means "we will refuse to pay for care that you require and that your doctor has deemed medically necessary." Allowing people to market a product as "health insurance" when they fully intend to refuse necessary medical care does not support a free market; it only supports deceptive practices that consumers will not know are there until they are hardly in a position to offer vigorous objection.

At the very least, if people wish to market insurance that refuses to pay for hospital stays even when doctors advise it, they ought to be required to market it under a name that clearly indicates that: "Non-hospital-stay insurance," "Non-doctor-directed-care insurance," or some other clear and direct term that tells customers what it is that they are actually buying.

 

[TheEarl]

Well, I just hope that you never need a mastectomy, then. Perhaps on that day, it will help you to remember that your actual pain is merely negligible within the net sum of human suffering...

That's a little cheap Stella. I may not agree with her POV (I myself agree with Shang in that, in this case, the law is needed to prevent fuckery by insurance), but she raises a good point in that stopping fuckery by businesses is like pushing down bubbles in wallpaper. You push down one and another pops up, as the fuckery has to go somewhere.

I'd sign, but not US citizen.

The Earl

 

[SlickTony]

I think Shang said it best.

My boss at my last job had to have a mastectomy, and she did get to stay overnight. But they kicked her out the next morning. That was almost five years ago, and I was shocked.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

When we were having kids, the average stay in the US was 3-4 days for moms and babies. In Germany, it was a week. Today, I hear of moms going home the next day. Times change.

That being said, I am not sure that hospitals are all they are cracked up to be for post-operative care. By that I mean that I hear so many horror stories of people getting sick with stuff that is totally unrelated to why they went to the hospital in the first place.

So I guess I am for whatever is the best care for the patient. Be it home, hospital or some other patient facility.

To Roxanne's point about law. Laws are meant to govern behavior deemed inappropriate. That includes behavior of businesses. This goes back to the code of Hammurabi.

Laws and government are meant to prohibit and punish fraud and theft, not to require one person to give another something for nothing. As an example, it's a proper government function to punish a restaurant that charges someone for a hot dog and only gives half a dog, but not to force restaurants to give lobster to people who have paid only for a hot dog. If it does the latter that government has become just another thief, and makes us all poorer. Most immediately, their owners will close all the hot dog stands, but a moment's thought will suggest a thousand other negative unintended consuences.

This proposed insurance mandate is different from that example only in that the dog stands subject to a lobster mandate are allowed to charge for lobster. But most people can't afford lobster, so they would end up having neither dogs nor lobsters. Of course the government could tax everyone and pay the dog stands to serve lobster at hot dog prices, in which case the scarce lobster would quickly run out and most people would still neither have dogs nor lobster.

The fatal conceit is to think that some group of wise central planners can sit at the center and make little "adjustments" to the market like the one proposed here, and yet avoid the negative unintended consequences. They can't, and people will suffer if they try. I refuse to evade my knowledge of that reality, and seek popularity by saying, "sure, let's force insurance companies to provide a little extra - I'll sign the petition." For refusing to play "lets pretend" I get called heartless and subjected to cheap shots.

 

[Pure]

roxLaws and government are meant to prohibit and punish fraud and theft, not to require one person to give another something for nothing. As an example, it's a proper government function to punish a restaurant that charges someone for a hot dog and only gives half a dog, but not to force restaurants to give lobster to people who have paid only for a hot dog. If it does the latter that government has become just another thief, and makes us all poorer. Most immediately, their owners will close all the hot dog stands, but a moment's thought will suggest a thousand other negative unintended consuences.

P: ok, let me get this straight. your analysis is that requiring an 'extra' day of hospital coverage of insurance companies--who can charge what they wish for their policies-- it like asking hot dog vendors to supply lobsters to those who've only paid for a 'dog.'

and just as the vendors would close up stands, the insurance companies will exit this area of health coverage, it only being possible to lose money.

such irrelevant skits bespeak an utter contempt for the intelligence of your audience.