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Are your legs keeping you up at night?®
Do you have trouble falling asleep because of strange sensations in your legs? Do you dread long business meetings, going to the movies, or traveling on an airplane because you know your restless legs won't let you sit still?

If this sounds familiar, you may have Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS), a common medical condition characterized by an uncontrollable urge to move the legs when sitting or lying down. In its mild, moderate, and severe forms, RLS affects approximately 1 in 10 adults living in the United States.

You may have asked yourself if anything could be done about the symptoms of RLS. Talk to your doctor about Requip, a prescription medication, the first medication approved by the FDA for the treatment of moderate-to-severe primary RLS.

If you think you're experiencing the symptoms of RLS, see your doctor. If diagnosed, ask your doctor if Requip is right for you.

Important Safety Information: Prescription Requip is not for everyone. Requip Tablets may cause you to fall asleep or feel very sleepy during normal activities such as driving; or to faint or feel dizzy, nauseated, or sweaty when you stand up. Tell your doctor if you experience these problems or if you drink alcohol or are taking other medicines that make you drowsy. Also tell your doctor if you experience new or increased gambling, sexual, or other intense urges while taking Requip. Side effects include nausea, drowsiness, vomiting, and dizziness. Most patients were not bothered enough to stop taking Requip.

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NEW YORK STATE
New law for care of indigent praised
BY SARA FOSS Gazette Reporter

   There’s a huge pool of money in New York to compensate hospitals for medical care provided to people who cannot or do not pay for it. Even so, uninsured patients often struggle to get the treatment they need.
   Last year, the state passed a law requiring hospitals to notify patients that they’re eligible for fi - nancial assistance and discounted bills. The law is known as “Manny’s Law,” named for a 24-year-old Long Island man without health insurance who died of a ruptured blood vessel in his brain after a procedure to reduce swelling was postponed for months by his hospital.
   Advocates for the poor have praised the new law, saying lowincome patients should be able to get the health care they need at reasonable rates. They are also encouraged by another development: The state Department of Health plans to review the state’s system of reimbursing hospitals for charity care to see if there are ways to improve it. The department’s new Indigent Care Technical Advisory Committee is holding public hearings on the issue; the next one is set for Aug. 13 in Syracuse.
   This year, the state will provide $847 million in Medicaid funding to hospitals for losses from bad debts and charity care. Bad debts are amounts considered uncollectible, including unpaid co-payments and deductibles, insured services that insurance companies decline to cover and money owed by patients who do not pay their bills. Charity care includes the reduction in charges a hospital makes when a patient is considered indigent.
   Experts view the state’s upcoming indigent care review as part of a broader process: providing all New Yorkers with health coverage.
   The state Health Department has put out a request for proposals for achieving universal health coverage in New York. The goal is to develop alternative proposals for achieving universal coverage, either through a system that combines private and public health coverage mechanisms, a publicly financed system or a combination of both types of systems.
   When he took office in January, Gov. Eliot Spitzer made it clear that one of his priorities is universal health care.
   The state has already started working toward that goal. In the fall, officials will begin reaching out to uninsured children and enrolling them in Child Health Plus, New York’s insurance plan for kids. The budget for 2007-08 makes more families eligible for Child Health Plus. And the state is streamlining enrollment in all publicly sponsored health insurance programs to make it easier for low-income people who qualify for such programs to get coverage.
SAME GOAL
   According to the state Department of Health, 16.5 million New Yorkers have health insurance, while close to 2.5 million remain uninsured. Of those with insurance, 9.3 million have employer-sponsored insurance and more than 7.2 million are covered by governmentsponsored health insurance such as Medicare, Medicaid, Family Health Plus and Child Health Plus.
   “We’re doing a lot of things at once all with the same goal, which is changing the way the state pays for health care through the Medicaid program to come up with a better, fairer reimbursement system,” said Claudia Hutton, spokeswoman for the state Department of Health. Hospitals that handle a disproportionate amount of the indigent care cases in their area are unhappy with the current system, but other hospitals think it’s fine, Hutton said.
   “If we’ve got that much of a pool of money, it seems like we should be able to provide it in a way [hospitals] think is fair,” Hutton said. “Right now, we reimburse [hospitals] based on the quantity of visits or the complexity of what you perform during a visit. That discourages primary care, and we don’t want that.”
   One of the Indigent Care Technical Advisory Committee’s big tasks will be to review how indigent care pool funds are allocated, and whether that formula needs to be changed.
   Right now, hospitals with higher rates of bad debt and charity care get a higher percentage of those costs covered by the indigent care pool. The committee will study whether that practice should continue.
   Trilby de Jung, a health law attorney with the Empire Justice Center and a member of the state’s indigent care committee, said it’s difficult to tell how much money New York is providing for charity care. “The money from the pool does not follow the patient,” she said, adding that better definitions of bad debt and charity care are needed, as is more information on how hospitals are using money from the pool.
MASS. MODEL
   According to the Department of Health, hospitals report almost twice as much bad debt as charity care; in 2004, public hospitals reported more than $400 million in bad debt, versus $176 million in charity care.
   Last week Raymond Sweeney, executive vice president of the Healthcare Association of New York State, which represents hospitals, nursing homes and home care agencies, testified before the Indigent Care Technical Advisory Committee. He said the state’s hospitals provide more than $1.6 billion annually in uncompensated services to low-income insured and under-insured patients, and absorb approximately $2 billion in losses annually in providing care to Medicaid recipients. “The indigent care funding that is made available is, therefore, critical to sustain the state’s not-for-profit and public hospitals to provide continuous access to low-income, medically indigent patients,” he said. He said distributions from the indigent care pool cover only about 50 cents of every dollar recognized as the cost of care for the poor.
   After Massachusetts mandated health coverage for every resident as part of its new system of providing universal care, it cut charity care funding, de Jung said. But she warned that charity care is always going to be needed because, even when insurance is mandatory, some people will slip through the cracks. Forty-five percent of New York’s uninsured residents, she said, qualify for public programs such as Medicaid, but are not enrolled. “We can cut down on that number, but I don’t know if we can eliminate it,” she said.
FOCUS ON SERVICES
   “New York,” de Jung continued, “has a lot to learn about how to bring people into coverage. Even if you’re bringing people into coverage, that doesn’t mean they can get care.” She said coverage has to be meaningful — if people have coverage, but doctors refuse to accept it because the reimbursement rate is too low, then it’s not meaningful.
   “If you go to the trouble of signing up for Medicaid, and you still can’t find a dentist, you may let your coverage go and become uninsured,” she said. “With universal coverage, we need to do more than just sign people up. We need to make sure people have services.”
   The big issue with universal coverage, de Jung said, is whether the state can make it affordable for low-income people.
   Manny’s Law requires hospitals to charge patients with incomes at or below 300 percent of the federal poverty level amounts on par with what insurance companies would pay for such services; patients who earn less will receive a sliding scale discount that is even lower. Hospitals must also set up a charitable program and publicize it.
   A February report by the Healthcare Association of New York State titled “When Will it End? Eight Straight Years of Losses for New York’s Hospitals” says that Medicaid payment shortfalls make it difficult to ensure that patients have access to the services they need. In 2004, the report says, New York hospitals lost $1.7 billion providing emergency and outpatient services to patients whose care is funded by Medicaid.  

Quoted from Shadow

The only problem is that old Hillary caused health care costs to rise and now it costs us more money than it did b4. It only makes sense that if you treat x number of people for nothing the hospital/doctors have to raise their rates to break even and every year the cost of medical care goes up and up with no end in sight.

Quoted from senders

Is healthcare birthcontrol--or is birthcontrol just a convenience, kind of like the clapper when you want to turn off a light in your house without making much of an effort?

Is healthcare viagra--or is viagra just a convenience, kind of like keeping a job your not so good at anymore even when ya know the boss isn't too pleased with your work, because it truly was all about you?

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‘We’re number forty two!’ U.S. lags in life expectancy
BY STEPHEN OHLEMACHER The Associated Press

   WASHINGTON — Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries.
   For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles.
   Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.
   “Something’s wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
   A baby born in the United States in 2004 will live an average of 77.9 years. That life expectancy ranks 42nd, down from 11th two decades earlier, according to international numbers provided by the Census Bureau and domestic numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics.
   Andorra, a tiny country in the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain, had the longest life expectancy, at 83.5 years, according to the Census Bureau. It was followed by Japan, Maucau, San Marino and Singapore.
   The shortest life expectancies were clustered in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region that has been hit hard by an epidemic of HIV and AIDS, as well as famine and civil strife. Swaziland has the shortest, at 34.1 years, followed by Zambia, Angola, Liberia and Zimbabwe.
   Researchers said several factors have contributed to the United States falling behind other industrialized nations. A major one is that 45 million Americans lack health insurance, while Canada and many European countries have universal health care, they say.
   But “it’s not as simple as saying we don’t have national health insurance,” said Sam Harper, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal. “It’s not that easy.”
   Among the other factors:
   Adults in the United States have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. Nearly a third of U.S. adults 20 years and older are obese, while about two-thirds are overweight, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
   Racial disparities. Black Americans have an average life expectancy of 73.3 years, five years shorter than white Americans.
   Black American males have a life expectancy of 69.8 years, slightly longer than the averages for Iran and Syria and slightly shorter than in Nicaragua and Morocco.
   A relatively high percentage of babies born in the U.S. die before their first birthday, compared with other industrialized nations.
   Forty countries, including Cuba, Taiwan and most of Europe had lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. in 2004. The U.S. rate was 6.8 deaths for every 1,000 live births. It was 13.7 for Black Americans, the same as Saudi Arabia.
   “It really reflects the social conditions in which African American women grow up and have children,” said Dr. Marie C. McCormick, professor of maternal and child health at the Harvard School of Public Health. “We haven’t done anything to eliminate those disparities.”