| Is Health Care Making You Better—or Dead?
Professor Regina Herzlinger has been studying the U.S. health care system for decades, advocating for consumer-driven reform as the best remedy. But the slow pace of change, which she attributes to a fat-cat network of insurers, policymakers, hospitals, and even employers, has her fed up. Her new book, Who Killed Health Care? adopts the emotional language of a manifesto in demanding change to make health care more responsive to customers, affordable to those in need, and a hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurship. Key concepts include: Today's American health care system is set up structurally to reward the major players—hospitals, health insurers, and lawmakers—while short-changing patients and taxpayers. Health care is not the hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurial activity one might expect from a $2 trillion industry.
Dragon Boat festival all fired
PORT PERRY -- The battle against breast cancer got a huge boost locally last weekend as the third annual Dragon Flies Dragon Boat Festival garnered in excess of a record-setting $125,000 for the fight against the disease. With hundreds of spectators taking in the hugely popular event from the shorelines of Lake Scugog in Palmer Park last Saturday, 47 Dragon Boat teams, powered by more than 1,000 paddlers, raced across the lake throughout the day in an effort to raise awareness surrounding breast cancer. "It was a great week, it was a great Saturday. We had such a very, very successful day," says Muriel Blaine, a co-chair of the event's media and marketing efforts and a breast cancer survivor herself. "The weather co-operated and the people were so supportive and the teams were just pumped.
Surviving the US health care system
Cynthia Kline knew exactly what was happening to her when she suffered a heart attack at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She took the time to call an ambulance, popped some nitroglycerin tablets she had been prescribed in anticipation of just such an emergency, and waited for help to arrive. On paper, everything should have gone fine. Unlike tens of millions of Americans, she had health insurance coverage. The ambulance team arrived promptly. The hospital where she had been receiving treatment for her cardiac problems, a private teaching facility affiliated with the Harvard Medical School, was just a few minutes away. The problem was, the emergency room at the hospital, Mount Auburn, was full to overflowing. And it turned her away. The ambulance took her to another nearby hospital but the treatment she needed, an emergency catheterization, was not available there.
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