Word: patients
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Many students, like Sara M. Nayeem '99, say their interest in health policy was sparked by President Clinton's efforts to create a national health care system. Recent threats to the traditional doctor-patient relationship have aroused their concerns even more...
...There's a lot of loss of the patient-doctor relationship," says Nayeem, a biology concentrator taking Economics 1435: "The Economics of Health Care" this semester. "There's a loss of independence and the kind of care patients will receive...
Under this system, though, accidents of geography can create dramatic inequities. A patient who could afford to wait in, say, Dallas might get an organ that could have gone to someone on the brink of death in nearby Fort Worth, Texas. Varying patterns of supply and demand can create tenfold differences in waiting times. According to computer models cited by the government, these inefficiencies cost as many as 300 lives each year. Says John Fung, transplant director at the University of Pittsburgh: "There's no justification to keep the current system...
...equity argument is a smoke screen for a baser motive. They point out that transplants are down dramatically in big centers as smaller regional centers have proliferated. The University of Pittsburgh, for example, did 540 liver transplants in 1991, but only 200 last year. The cost per patient can be as high as $300,000. "You're talking millions and millions of dollars lost to those big transplant centers," says Iowa surgeon Maureen Martin...
...this political wrangling leaves potential transplant patients in limbo, adding uncertainty to the anguish they already suffer. Like Bryan Lee, Rita May Bolen has had enough. From her home in a New Orleans suburb, she calmly says her husband Leon, 71, is "sitting in a chair dying." They have been waiting 10 months for a liver. In August Leon was second in line for an organ that was about to become available, but it went to a sicker patient, a young father. "It's the fairest way," says Rita May. But watching the debate over regulatory changes--which could have...