Today I read an article detailing that Hillary Clinton will play
“nurse” for a day. Oh, really? How do you “play” nurse?
I ask because
I’ve spent the last twenty years apparently doing it wrong. I know this
because it sure felt like work! The hard, plain truth is this. The
Clintons and their political ilk have played for far too long with
healthcare already. The proof is in the pudding. HIPAA doesn’t work.
Not only does it NOT work, it actually made things worse!! The Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 failed to improve
the provision of healthcare and in fact, complicated the delivery of
that very care by muddying the issue of confidentiality and diverting
administrative analysis from actual patient care to frivolities such as
whether or not medical offices can use sign-in sheets legally. Patient
privacy was already considered a major indicator of a provider’s
medical professionalism before this
legislation was even deemed
necessary by our nation’s leaders. The complicated legalities and
hard-nosed penalties created by HIPAA, as well as the increased
paperwork and bloated cost of implementation, caused only financial
distress for physicians and administrators without any real benefit to
the patients. This is evidenced in the virtual disappearance of the
traditional “family doc” and widespread bankruptcies and financial
distress of doctors and hospital systems alike. It didn’t just affect
the provider/patient relationship. HIPAA
restrictions maimed research by limiting researchers’ ability to
contact patients for follow-up evaluations. “A study from the
University of Michigan demonstrated that implementation of the HIPAA
Privacy rule resulted in a drop from 96% to 34% in the proportion of
follow-up surveys completed by study patients being followed after a
heart attack.”1 The hard-to-read legal section added to consent forms
after HIPAA
creates confusion and unnecessary anxiety for the very patients who are
required to understand and sign them. This causes more emotional
distress to be delivered at the hand of healthcare professionals,
creating widening gaps in the very patient-provider trust issues
central to healthcare reform. Without that patient/provider trust, true
reform is unlikely. The second legislation touted by Mrs. Clinton as
her “valuable experience” is the Mothers and Newborns Health Protection
Act of 1996. This resulted in a generalized increase of
childbirth-related costs by
6%. Hospitalization costs were reportedly increased by $116 per
delivery, DESPITE claims that this act led to a decreased incidence of
re-hospitalization for both mothers and newborns. The truth is this;
there have been very few studies conducted to
examine the efficacy of The Mothers and Newborns Act in the area of
increased patient satisfaction. The argument that this act has at all
resulted in increased patient confidence would be unfounded and without
basis. The only studies conducted on the efficacy of this act lead one
to the conclusion that, in fact, since patient satisfaction with
healthcare decreased while patient cost increased, this attempt at
healthcare reform also not only failed but made matters WORSE.
The only possible conclusion that can be reached from studying the
legislation created during the Clintons’ administration is ENOUGH!! No
more “playing” with medicine, Mrs. Clinton. It’s an insult to those of
us who have spent long, hard, unrecognized years in the medical
trenches cleaning up after the war that has found our country. If you
are in disagreement with that statement, you must not watch the news or
read the papers. Drive-by shootings, gang warfare and drug use are
widespread. Contaminated foods could be looked at as dry runs for
terrorists. In the U.K., Hoof and Mouth Disease has been created in and
dispersed by a lab, spelling “BIO terrorism”. It’s time to stop playing
with the concept of healthcare reform and start cleaning it upin
reality. Socialized medicine is not the answer. The Canadian nurses
that I have worked with all identified their system as “broken”. That’s
the only word I can think of for a system that has a years-long waiting
list for “elective” procedures like endarterectomy, (clearing the
clogged carotid arteries to re-establish blood flow to the brain).
Conversely, capitalized medicine doesn’t work either. Just ask the
exhausted, dispirited nurses who lost their jobs when Martin Luther
King, Jr.-Harbor Hospital shut down their emergency department, along
with other parts of their hospital. The answer does not lie in
politics, Mrs. Clinton (and America). It lies in people. If you truly
want to help reform healthcare, you should create government incentives
for nursing graduates who successfully pass their licensure exams.
Provide tax relief for those of us fighting this war for you. HELP US.
I have been an LPN/LVN for literally half of my life. I became al LVN
at the age of twenty and I am now forty. Here’s the shameful
secret of all that money spent on legislation to “reform healthcare”. I
can’t afford healthcare, and I can’t afford health insurance.
Your legislation, Senator Clinton, was a waste of taxpayer money and a
waste of time for those of us required to implement them. You have
played nurse long enough.