Powerful stuff....a good reality check.

Tony,

Thanks for bringing us back to our central purpose. I know that at my age I do not have the time, talent, or temperment to try to go to medical school so that I can actually become a healthcare provider. But, as you have reminded us, I can make sure that the very best environment, support staff, and resources are available for those who are healthcare providers.

And although Derek's story is tragic, there are plenty of stories of patients who caught cancer early through a screening colonoscopy, who had a lumpectomy and averted advanced breast cancer, or who otherwise received quality and life-sustaining care at a hospital. That is why I am here. If there is any way I can help with that kind of support, count me in.

Very best regards,

Jeff

Thank you for blogging about Health Care Reform! The growing number of uninsured, now at over 47 million, the high cost of insurance and the release of the 2008 presidential candidates health care plans have brought the topic of health care reform to national headlines and prime time news.

But what about the individual stories of American citizens facing a health care crises today? How do they navigate the broken health care system? At Outrageous Times.org we talk about the issues concerning individuals and small businesses. In addition to reporting on pending legislation and the record profits of pharmaceutical and insurance companies, we address the real life stories -- emergency room care, mental health issues, drug abuse, obesity, preexisting conditions and children's health. By letting our voices be heard-together we can find common sense solutions to reduce health care costs and increase access to quality health care for all.

Outrageous Times is our monthly grass roots newspaper, dedicated to health care reform now and is distributed to over 20,000 readers in Mercer County, WV and Tazewell County, VA. The web site www.OutrageousTimes.org is a both a local and national health care resource. We would like to invite you and your readers to submit your stories, experiences, observations and opinions to OutrageousTimes.org. Comments posted on OutrageousTimes.org are often reprinted in the Outrageous Times.

Thanks in advance for your contributing your knowledge to OutrageousTimes.org.

Sincerely,
Brenda Turner
Publisher
Outrageous Times

Thanks Tony.

Somewhere, I think it was Jeff that wrote, we tend to focus on the bad.

It made me think a bit because there is beauty, healing and difficulty everyday in the world when it comes to health.

What has been gripping me as of late is how this is becoming so complicated at the level of societal scale that health care reform as we talk about it is not enough.

Health is not just a matter of insured or not being insured.

There are now 100M of 300M Americans with chronic illness and alot of the treatment and remedies for these people lie in solutions that have nothing to do with drugs, hospitals and insurance. In America it is also the way we live, how we eat, how we work and what we are exposed to and how we deal with the growing portion of health problems that are difficult to diagnose and treat.

I am glad this blog exists and a lot of other things. I hope somehow as a country we can find a way to build a forum that just reduces the increased climb in risk and living with an illness.