HOLYOKE — A program that has improved the health of low-income patients with chronic illnesses faces deep funding cuts in the pending state budget, even though top state officials touted similar disease management strategies just a month ago as a crucial way to improve healthcare quality and cut costs.
The 2008 budget, now being hammered out in a legislative conference committee, is likely to contain less than one-third of the $2.6 million that the statewide CenterCare program received this year to pay for a broad range of health education and support services at community health centers.
You know, once upon a time it took a major public health push to get rid of polio. Couldn’t we do the same with diabetes, for instance? How can we look to these areas to save a few bucks in the budget?
Unconscionable.
why aren’t “shots” universal?
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MMR, Tetnus, all of ’em. Even that new anti-cervix cancer one. Why do I have to decide between $65×3 for Hep shots, when public health would have me get ’em?
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It seems to me that all vaccines should be free. You go to any GP, doc, whatever. He gives you the shots that are appropriate [database, checks your file, etc]. You sign the paperwork. He bills the gov’t. They occasionally audit the doc to make sure he’s issued the right number of shots and isn’t cheating the gov’t. Vaccination rates tend toward 100% of eligible. Avoidable diseases become eradicated.
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Isn’t it that easy?
It’s all about the money. And control. Which is about the money.
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Any major changes to the current corporate controlled hc system, vaccine coverage included, will be fought.
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And why the hell should wee settle for try to get peices of what we need and deserve? why can’t we get a real cure?
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It’s called HR 676
Just ask the parents of all the autistic kids that are suing the immunization pharmaceuticals.
equals less green house gases. A whole lotta dead people means that global warming will stop and then decline. Not a bad idea.
You know, once upon a time it took a major public health push to get rid of polio. Couldn’t we do the same with diabetes, for instance?
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…I suppose that we could but recognize that public health per se dealt primarily with sanitation and communicable diseases. As far as I can tell, polio (as well as influenza, tuberculosis, and numerous other diseases) are communicable. Diabetes, as far as one can tell, and as problemmatic (to say the least) that it is, is not communicable.
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And therein lies the difference. Typhoid Mary was a danger to the publicum. A person suffering from type II diabetes, well, maybe not so much.