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#health care
reasonsforhope · 3 days
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Less than three months after U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin and her colleagues launched an investigation into the four major American manufacturers of inhalers, three of the companies have relented, making commitments to cap costs for their inhalers at $35 for patients who now pay much more.
25 million Americans have asthma and 16 million Americans have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), meaning over 40 million Americans rely on inhalers to breathe.
Inhalers have been available since the 1950s, and most of the drugs they use have been on the market for more than 25 years.
According to a statement from the Wisconsin Senator’s office, inhaler manufacturers sell the exact same products at a much lower costs in other countries. One of AstraZeneca’s inhalers, Breztri Aerosphere, costs $645 in the U.S.—but just $49 in the UK. Inhalers made by Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, and Teva have similar disparities.
Baldwin and her Democratic colleagues—New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján, Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders—pressured the companies to lower their prices by writing letters to GSK, Boehringer Ingelheim, Teva, and AstraZeneca requesting a variety of documents that show why such higher prices are charged in America compared to Europe.
As a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Baldwin recently announced that as a result of the letters they had secured commitments from three of the four to lower the out-of-pocket costs of inhalers to a fixed $35.00 rate.
“For the millions of Americans who rely on inhalers to breathe, this news is a major step in the right direction as we work to lower costs and hold big drug companies accountable,” said Senator Baldwin.
A full list of the inhalers and associated drugs can be viewed here.
It’s the second time in the last year that pharmaceutical companies were forced to provide reasonable prices—after the cost of insulin was similarly capped successfully at $35 per month thanks to Congressional actions led by the White House.
-via Good News Network, March 25, 2024
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spacedocmom · 2 days
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Doctor Beverly Crusher @SpaceDocMom You shouldn't have to be a living text book about all of your conditions and be up on the latest science. That's your doctor's job. I'm sorry for those of you who have to spend your limited spoons to stay informed because your doctor won't. emojis: black heart, blue heart, masked 3:09 PM · Mar 27, 2024
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yaskie · 3 days
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Fighting for Cancer
All Stickers and emoji sales will be used for Uncle Dindo’s medical debts and balances for his wake and burial, Auntie Sam’s and my ongoing Hormonal and chemo treatment. We also set a targeted amount through our goal for donations. We thank you all, thank you so much for everything. We deeply appreciate all donations and purchases that will be made. To all who have helped me in the past. I am eternally grateful. Please help me share this post, reblog. It will help me a lot. ❤️‍🩹❤️🩷🧡💛 Hello Dear friends, I hope you are all doing well. It’s been a long time since I have made an update about my health and everything that is happening to my life. Life has been so busy.  As you read the title for this campaign. Yes, Fighting for cancer, as some of you know I fought with the same battle several years ago, to my friends who helped me financially and all. My never ending gratitude to all of you. 
I became okay and I chose to deal with financial struggles myself, because I know that I am already giving too much burden to my friends over the course of more than a year. I went back to do regular jobs despite lower grade pays in order to survive, and pay the remaining debt for my medication. Where I live, we are paid daily, not hourly and daily wages are between $12-$15/day. And work 8-12 hours a day. Unfortunately, life does not always end like a fairytale. I am doing this campaign again. Not just for myself but for the other two people that are important to my life. I guess this battle runs into the family. I lost so many family members battling this. I lost my Dad to Stage 4 lung cancer last 2015. And last night(March 25,2024) I lost my Uncle Dindo in the same battle, after several months of intensive treatment. It left us drowning with hospital bills, and debts and it cost us nearly $130,000 and is still running. Uncle Dindo left her wife and two daughters, one who is deaf and mute.  Not only that, my Aunt Sam, is also dealing with her Stage 3 Breast Cancer, and it costs us almost $2,000 - $3,000 a week. Her right breast has already been removed. But she is also under close observation. And she was forced to have her unpaid leave at her job, as she needed rest. This also adds up with the financial struggles that we are dealing with too. We have bad healthcare here in PH. And if you are not rich you will die easily.  As for me. After I survived my battle in the Lungs. Tumors have popped up in other parts of my body, most of them are benign(but closely monitored for changes), if there will be malignant tumors again that will also pop out too. If you will see my previous posts, last year there had been a concern about my breast and a surgery was needed, but I decided not to proceed and I went through herbal medication, as it is the most affordable way. They helped me, but some backfired. And I am so afraid to lose a body part. Unfortunately, I got bad pneumonia on-off, and the pain in my right breast is unbearable, after several tests. I am diagnosed with Stage 1. Doctors have already warned me in the past about this. And I also asked for a second opinion, because last year it was just only a close call. I will currently take hormone medication, and another chemo. I do not want another surgery at the moment, if it can be avoided. I have high hopes that I will survive this. I can still do jobs to pay for home and other bills. And be with you all. 
I decided not just to do this campaign alone, but I also made a Ko-Fi Shop to sell digital stickers. With a collaboration and help from a friend, we currently made 11 printable stickers that you can print on the comfort of your home or print shops with a size of 2x2 inches. You can also use the emoji stickers through your streaming channel, please message me through my Twitter, so I can follow your stream. And for those who printed the physical stickers, it would make us happy if you can tag a photo of them through my twitter. You can put them through notebooks, tumblrs….etc.
Here is the link for our Ko-Fi Store.
Please follow me on twitter or here on Ko-Fi for updates. As we are still working on more Sticker designs. We Can-CerVIVE.
I appreciate all the help that we could get. And thank you so much for understanding. Please take good care of yourselves. Never take your health for granted. Health is wealth. And prevention is better than cure.
Love, Jasky(Your Eternal Sprout)
P.S. To my friends in-game don’t worry you will still see me <3 I love you all! Stay happy and smiling.  These are the digital stickers that we are currently selling.
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To all my friends, I badly need your help. Please. Thank you. Sorry for tagging you. Reblog and if you can tag your friends too. Thank you for understanding.
@measurelessdreamer @c1a1r3r3df1e1d @samblerambles @nearlybitches @sunhatllama @leonshinkai @shotce @crazyworldhuh @sparkie96 @silvertonguelover @fossil-finder @vietnoodle @irishspringyum @kevinbuiyin @angelspin @thecloudstan @neji-vuldarak @takuyasaeki1001 @valhethella @artofshiroginko @yuko27 @junie-junette @chris-is-not-evil @wuekka @nelyth-v @ya2do @rebrandedbard @tielmamon @signalboostr @mcqraw @risingoflights @travelling-hydaelyn @thedemonofcat @leonisdumbasallhell @litoperezito @priscilla-a-moreno @waywards-thing @chreonweek @heliosani @residentevilx4 @lemonadeswift @prozdvoices @doomednarrative @neil-gaiman @aussiepineapple1st @matchalilly @highball66 @purpledusty @diviedrawn @residenceevil
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therottengirl · 2 days
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reposting the link because I think the other got nuked, but I'm trying to raise $ for my mom, who just finished her chemo treatments and is in recovery from a bone marrow transplant for multiple myeloma. she's struggling to pay bills due to the medical debt, which has also caused her to develop insomnia, depression/anxiety, and panic attacks, JUST over the finances. this last weekend she had to spend in the hospital due to the lack of sleep and a mental health crisis.
the total debt is $100,000, but I've once again lowered our goal to just take care of the mortgage. and as of 3/27/24, $175 has been raised out of $5,000, but she needs more help. help I cannot provide alone because I am currently paying for my college tuition and not making more above that and above my own bills to alleviate her struggles.
please consider giving even just $5; it would mean so much to both of us. it would save her from herself and mean we wouldn't have to lose our property. even if you don't have $5 to spare, please share/boost this.
stay safe and a sincere, incredible thank you to everyone who has shown support so far as well as those who will. you have my deepest gratitude.
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typhlonectes · 8 months
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liberalsarecool · 2 months
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We need to end lobbyism as we know it. Corporate bribery is the worst way to provide a human right like health care.
Sad that $800 million/year in bribes costs us $650 billion/year in savings.
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autismserenity · 2 months
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know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!
hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh 3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.
I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.
It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases. It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely. The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe. It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad." It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.
Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body. It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.
It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses. People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.
(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.) Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense? They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."
Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.
Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.
People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it. Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.
(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?") One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.
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I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.
She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.
And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile. He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason. I think about that a lot. (Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.
He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.
He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired. Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.
I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.) Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.
But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.
It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.
(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)
(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!) All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths. Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.
We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons. Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened. During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID. But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.
People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started. COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example. The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.
Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.
3,000,000.
Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000. Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.
Five times as many.
That's bad. I don't like that at all. I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:
Here's a non-paywalled link to it:
https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates
Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:
Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.
You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.
They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them. These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)
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My sister rang me today.
Ever since she was six, she's had pain in her legs, which turns into pain in her hips and back for stretches of time. She's tried for years to get a diagnosis, with absolutely no joy. As a kid they thought she had collapsed arches in her feet; then it became clear her feet were fine, but something was wrong with her tendons; and then in her 20s they just shrugged it off with a "We'll never know probably" and that was that. She keeps on top of it with daily yoga, generally, though flare ups happen periodically. If she has to pause the yoga for some reason, she fairly rapidly regresses. Currently she has plantar fascitis again, which has halted everything once more, so right now she's back into a pain slump.
Anyway, she called me today while going from Doctors to pharmacy to get the codeine they've prescribed her for it.
"I think one of my yoga moves to help the fascitis might have exacerbated the legs," she said. "Trouble is, there's never been a diagnosis. I just have to trial and error what might help."
... And I had one of those lightbulb moments, you know? My brain suddenly went "Wait hang on, this is very familiar isn't it?" and rang the bells of memory.
"Did they ever test you for fibromyalgia?" I said.
They had not. It's never been suggested, even. My sister said she'd look up the symptoms and see if it chimed, and rang off.
Fifteen minutes later, she calls back.
Turns out she got to the pharmacy and gave them the prescription. While waiting, she googled fibromyalgia symptoms and found the NHS website.
"It was like someone had written a profile of me," she tells me on the phone. "Like, spookily, scarily accurate to me, right down to the temperature regulation bit. It felt like a practical joke."
And of course, as she stood there in the pharmacy, suddenly staring at the age of forty at the apparent answer she's been trying to get since she was six years old, she burst into tears.
"Oh no!" Said the pharmacist, hurdling the counter in a single leap and scattering the queue (I am exaggerating for humorous affectation.) "Quickly! Come into our little exam room, we'll get you tissues and water!"
My sister was duly ensconced into a Safe Place, and encouraged to cry it out. It took several hiccuping minutes, but finally, she managed to calm down and get back to an Extremely Watery Smile.
"Do you want to talk about it?" the pharmacist asked sympathetically.
"It's just..." my sister said, overwhelmed and searching for words. "My whole life I've been in pain, and they've never found why..."
"Ah," said the pharmacist thoughtfully. "Have you explored fibromyalgia?"
...
"TWICE IN ONE DAY," my sister yells on the phone to me later. "HOW THE HELL HAVE TWO SEPARATE PEOPLE ON THE SAME DAY FINALLY GIVEN ME THE ANSWER, AND NEITHER OF YOU IS A DOCTOR"
Anyway she has a doctor's appointment for tomorrow to discuss it, so we'll see
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politijohn · 7 months
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No surprise, though glad to see data behind this
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the-cimmerians · 6 months
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Vice President Kamala Harris announced this week that the Biden administration is looking to lessen the burden medical debt has on people by purging it from their credit report. This means that even if people have piles of medical debt — one in five Americans say they do — it’s not going to affect their ability to get a mortgage or a car loan. So they will at least have a place to rest their head and a car they can drive to work every day while paying off their medical bills.
Via AP:
Harris said that would make it easier for them to obtain an auto loan or a home mortgage. Roughly one in five people report having medical debt. The vice president said the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is beginning the rulemaking process to make the change. The agency said in a statement that including medical debt in credit scores is problematic because “mistakes and inaccuracies in medical billing are common.” “Access to health care should be a right and not a privilege,” Harris told reporters in call to preview the action. “These measures will improve the credit scores of millions of Americans so that they will better be able to invest in their future.”
It only seems fair that high medical bills for an emergency or serious illness shouldn’t affect one’s credit rating anyway. It’s not like we’re talking about someone irresponsibly dropping several grand at Versace and then never paying off the credit card bill. Fifty-seven percent of Americans could not afford a surprise $1000 emergency, so the inability to pay off massive amounts of medical debt is hardly a fair reflection of an inclination to default on normal payments — payments you can budget for — on something like a mortgage or auto loan. “Way to be irresponsible by getting cancer, lady! You should definitely be punished for that by not being able to find any place to live!” seems pretty harsh, no?
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rapeculturerealities · 4 months
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Do not ignore the suffering of Sudanese women | Women's Rights | Al Jazeera
Sudanese women are bearing the brunt of the vicious war that began in mid-April between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). More than six million people have been displaced since the new war erupted including an estimated 105,000 women who are currently pregnant, according to the United Nations. Of the 1.2 million who have fled to neighbouring countries, nearly nine in 10 are women and children. The healthcare system in Sudan is in a perilous state – 70 to 80 percent of hospitals in conflict areas are not operational – with devastating consequences for women in need of maternal health medicines.
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spacedocmom · 3 days
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Doctor Beverly Crusher @SpaceDocMom Your era's obsession with the unscientific nonsense called "sleep hygiene" comes from a capitalistic work ethic, not actual sleep science. Sleep problems associated with chronic illness can't be so easily managed away and are not "all in your head". emojis: black heart, blue heart, masked 3:49 PM · Mar 26, 2024
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antifainternational · 8 months
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liberaljane · 3 months
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Health care is a human right.
Digital illustration of a woman sitting crossed legged on the floor with a spotted cat on her lap. She’s wearing a white dress, red beret, and red boots. Text reads, ‘health care should be free’
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liberalsarecool · 6 months
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Abortion is not birth control. It is health care.
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animentality · 8 months
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