Comments on: Pricey little pill.

By: brian stouder

brian stouder — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 20:57:37 +0000

Mary - I know what you mean. I remember years ago - in my ‘religion period’ (to take a line from Little Big Man) the realization dawned on me that one is never really doing as much as one could.

The whole concept of the “Third World” sort of illuminates that defensive apartness. Church-goers could give up their western life-styles, and run missionary schools in the east Africa; Doctors could volunteer to work in Paraguay; regular workaday schmoes (like me) could work every day and every weekend, at whatever local cause needs the help.

I think very few of us do all we can do; and likewise, not many people are flat-out doing nothing.

By way of saying, I suspect the world is a better place for having you in it

By: mary

mary — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 20:09:40 +0000

It’s not the same, Brian. He’s doing bone marrow transplants and saving lives. I was just playing chicken with a plastic surgery victim.

By: brian stouder

brian stouder — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 19:02:40 +0000

I feel like such a lame slacker by comparison

well, the world needs people like him to slay medical dragons (or at least give them a good fight) - AND people like you, who can go toe-to-toe with (reputed) corporate ones, such as Leona Helmsly

By: mary

mary — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 17:31:30 +0000

I have a nephew who watched his best friend die if pediatric leukemia at the age of 10. Joe Menardi, we still remember you. He decided then to become a doctor, and now he’s an oncologist, specializing in leukemia. He went to Ivy League schools on scholarships: Dartmouth, Columbia, Yale. I’ve never seen such a driven person. He’s doing exactly what he said he would do thirty years ago. I feel like such a lame slacker by comparison.

By: Jim in Fla

Jim in Fla — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 16:01:28 +0000

On the other hand, it occurs to me that most of the medical advances we’ve see in the last half century came about because somebody (or some company) believed they could make a boatload of money developing a cure. Without the financial incentive, polio, leukemia, aids and many other diseases would probably still be an early death sentence.

By: Jen

Jen — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 15:10:38 +0000

We need GM and other such large organizations to be telling it like it is to government leaders. Americans have been trained to think that they should have perfect autonomy in making choices about healthcare even though, in many cases, they lack the information needed to make medically sound choices. And doctors have, historically, relied too much on their clinical judgment and experience rather than tested paractice guidelines.

All that is changing now. The cost is out of control, and, although the mortality rates for AIDS and leukemia have dropped dramatically, there are many indications that the quality of care most people get–as opposed to what is available–is poor. It’s incompatible w/ established standards of practice; it’s riddled with medical errors that lead to needless deaths; and, compared to some other countries, it produces poor results.

Somebody needs to have the political courage to tell the American people and the health care establishment that we need to change. We are paying too much and getting too little.

By: Pam

Pam — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 13:16:14 +0000

If the Gumbinger’s in Port St. Lucie were on my corporate plan, they would have seen their share of the pharmacy tab jump to $2,100 annual out of pocket expense before the co-pay of $6 kicks in. And depending upon your pharmacy tab, that total amount could be due in January, not spread out over the entire year. The $6 looks pretty good then. It’s expected that the $2100 share will go up next year and the year after. The medical side saw similar jumps. I used to work with a man who took so many pills that he didn’t know what half of them were for. And many people who do this need to take pills to sleep and pills to wake up because the pharmacy load screws up their biorthymns. After he retired, he weaned himself off almost all the pills and can finally sleep without the aid of a pill. While I think that workers should share more in the expense of health care, I agree with Joe K. above, that we’re not seeing equal pain at the CEO level.

By: Danny

Danny — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:51:03 +0000

You know, sometimes I am just not the sharpest tool in the shed. I just got you play on Alanis Morissette’s song “Jagged Little Pill.”

Duh.

By: Dwight Brown

Dwight Brown — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:02:40 +0000

“Oncologists learned how to attack leukemia, enabling most children who receive a diagnosis of it today to triumph over a disease that was almost inevitably fatal a half-century ago. ”

I remember watching a PBS special a few years back that talked about this at some length. I still get kind of moved thinking about it: we’ve gone from “almost inevitably fatal” to…well, I don’t know what the cure rate is now, but I believe it is pretty darn high.

And I keep thinking about those doctors 50 years ago, who were basically watching these small children dying, trying desperate treatments (because, hey, something might work, and they’re going to die if it doesn’t). I wonder how many thought to themselves “If I was just a little bit smarter, could I cure these patients?” I’m not a doctor, but I think it wasn’t a question of smart: it was a question of having the tools to make the tools that could make the cures.

I know I couldn’t do the kind of work those doctors were doing back then. Or, from a more contemporary viewpoint, in the early days of AIDS. Not only am I not cut out to be a doctor for a lot of reasons, but I don’t think I could stand there, watching patients die, and asking myself the “If I was…” question.

I don’t know how the people who do this endure.

By: nancy

nancy — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 15:44:20 +0000

Joe, your problem is legion here. When Delphi announced its bankruptcy-related cutbacks, which involved making salaried workers take a 50 percent pay cut, they also quietly disclosed they’d be paying fat bonuses to certain managers. They didn’t want the brass running for lifeboats when the ship needed to be pumped out.

One writer here said the thinking was, “What’s the harm? How could the rank and file hate us any more than they do now?”