Posts under ‘health care’

Over the past 19 years since my first son was born, we have had a number of doctors care for us. Dr. G, our first pediatrician, was reassuring and supportive even when I was 2 hours late for the first baby check up.
When Dr. G accepted a partnership opportunity 80 miles away, we moved to [...]

Sorry, Eric (Schmidt, CEO of Google).
Google doesn’t belong in the health records business.
For those of you who don’t follow Google’s business on a daily basis, here is a brief rundown of what has happened.
Last year, Microsoft announced a new service called Health Vault to help individuals manage health records online. This is not a [...]

A Good Friend Remembered
A good friend of ours died the third week of December. We just received a note from his daughter responding to our holiday card. Unfortunately, it never reached him.
We sent cards every year even though we were never quite sure our friend could read the card. AG, now in his [...]

What’s all the fuss about the Medicare Prescription Drug Program?
Open enrollment started on November 15th and runs to December 31st. This is the time when anyone can change from one plan to another without paying a premium penalty. If your parent is already enrolled in a program, you may be wondering why you need to worry about this.
Medicare [...]

It wasn’t until Dad mailed me the collection notice that I realized he was losing his ability to track and pay his medical bills. He had complained during our phone chats on several occasions that the hospital had messed up his billing. They kept phoning him to get him to pay his bill.
He insisted that he [...]

One of the Yahoo Groups I regularly read has had an ongoing discussion about health care in the USA. One of the posts talked about the need for a medical power of attorney or Living Will as it’s sometimes called.
K lives in New England. She told us what happened when her mother, who did not [...]

What do you do when anemia keeps coming back?
In a previous post on Anemia, I talked about my 84 year old Dad’s recurring problem with fatigue and anemia. He (and I) thought the doctors had found the problem and taken care of it with medical procedures to stop the bleeding, most recently in his bladder,  and [...]

In an open letter to our Presidential Candidates in a recent issue of Fortune Magazine, Andy Grove, former Chairman of Intel, proposes that Medicare can help seniors stay in their homes longer by specifying and paying for monitoring devices for them. The devices would alert a human to help a senior when medication has been missed, for example.
Ignoring [...]

I had suspected for a few days that something wasn’t right. Today I found out what it was.
My Dad was sent to the ER by the staff at the nursing facility where he has spent the past four weeks recuperating after being hospitalized. They couldn’t wake him. He was lethargic and groggy.
The ER staff diagnosed [...]

A study* done by researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center found that anemia takes a serious toll on the elderly, threatening their ability to  remain independent.  The researchers recommended that doctors pay more attention to anemia in their older patients.
As I read the article, I was struck by how accurately it described my [...]