Are you familiar with the symptoms of heart disease that are killing us?

Heart disease is killing us more than everything else!

Heart attack is not the only way heart disease can kill you.

A partial list of heart diseases:

• Heart Attack
• Coronary artery disease (CAD)
• High blood pressure
• Heart rhythm disorders
• Tachycardia
• Rheumatic heart disease
• Pulmonary heart disease
• Pulmonary infection
• Heart muscle infection
• Heart Failure

You are home relaxing and you start to feel a tightness in your chest.

What do you do?

Chest tightness is one symptom that you might associate with a heart attack.

But feeling “uncomfortable and tight” might not feel like you imagined the chest pain of a heart attack to feel.

Are you aware of the symptoms of heart disease that should concern you?

• Chest Pain or Chest Discomfort
• Heart Palpitations
• Lightheadedness or Dizziness
• Syncope (Fainting/Loss of Consciousness)
• Fatigue, Lethargy or Daytime Sleepiness
• Shortness of Breath
• Dizziness
• Nausea and vomiting can be symptoms of a heart attack as well
• Profuse sweating

 

If you have great health insurance (or think you do) you are likely to pick up the phone and dial 911, or head to an emergency room sooner than later.

However, if you have lousy insurance or no health insurance you are likely to hesitate before you commit to paying a huge hospital bill!

Fear is a great motivator, so if you get concerned enough, you will go to the hospital!

Hopefully, your symptoms are nothing serious, or you get the care you need to recover fully and get back to living your life.

Unfortunately, you may never recover from the shock of your medical bill!

Stress is a HUGE factor contributing to the deterioration of your cardiovascular health.

You go to the hospital for help, but if you end up buried under medical debt it may end up CAUSING your symptoms of heart disease!

 

Do you expect to be charged the same amount as anyone else who receives care?

If you go to a restaurant and they charge you several times more for your food than the people at the table next to you, would you be upset?

Of course!  It would be absurd to accept that you need to pay much more if you are paying cash than say if you are paying with credit.

You would refuse to eat at that restaurant!

 

Yet hospitals all across the US charge much higher prices to those who are not insured or under insured (many people think they have good health insurance until they find out they don’t!)

Medicare only pays non profit costs to hospitals and big insurance companies negotiate a payout for their clients.

The hospitals say they are forced to charge shocking prices for those least able to pay so that they can recoup their losses.  However, no matter how you look at it, the prices charged on medical bills are unreasonable if not straight up OUTRAGEOUS!

No hospital has to take Medicare patients, but in Florida where there is a huge elderly population, hospitals are expanding and advertising to get more Medicare patients in their doors.

Medicare patients really aren’t the folks who should be worried.

But anyone under the age of 65 should understand exactly why they should be worried about how their health care can effect finances.

 

If you think you’ve got your health care covered and your portfolio is looking good, you better read this information!

 

The following information was originally published on Time.com and is excerpted below to highlight key points of the 11 page article.  (28 page .pdf file)

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us In the US people spend almost 20% of the gross domestic product on health care, compared with about half that in most developed countries. Yet in every measurable way, the results our health care system produce are no better and often worse than those countries. We spend more on health care than the next 10 biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the UK, Italy, Canada, Spain, and Australia.  We may be shocked at the $60 billion price tag for cleaning up after Hurricane Sandy.  We spent almost that much LAST WEEK on health care. A heavily lobbied Congress forces Medicare to pay 25%-75% more for equipment than it would cost at WalMart. The drag on our overall economy that comes with taxpayers, employers and consumers spending so much more than is spent in any other country for the same product is unsustainable.  Health care is eating away at our economy and our treasury. The health care industry seems to have the will and the means to keep it that way.  $5.36 billions was spent lobbying in Washington by health care special interests.  That dwarfs the $1.53 billion spent by the defense and aerospace industries and the $1.3 billion spent by oil and gas interests over the same period.  That’s right: the health-care-industrial complex spends more than three times what the military-industrial complex spends in Washington. (Check the original article for sources.) We will spend: $2.8 trillion this year on health care $750 billion, or 27% more than we would spend if we spent the same as other developed countries tax money on medicare at a price increasing far faster than inflation and the gross national product This is what’s driving the federal deficit!

 

So, how is this issue destroying so many people financially?

How does this issue threaten YOUR physical and financial well being?

You had better figure out exactly what’s at stake here before you have no choice!

Let’s look at an excerpt that will explain how the hospital decides what to charge you in the event that your sudden symptoms of heart disease scare you enough to seek emergency help.

 

The “chargemaster” is every hospital’s internal price list.Decades ago it was a document the size of a phone book:  now it’s a massive computer file, thousands of items long, maintained by every hospital.Although every hospital has a charge master, officials treat it as if it were an eccentric uncle living in the attic.All questions are deflected in hopes that outsiders pay no attention to the chargemaster or the process that produces it.For there seems to be no process, no rationale, behind the core document that is the basis for hundreds of billions of dollars in health care bills. IF YOU ARE NOT YET 65: You do not qualify for medicare, and if you do not have insurance fighting to keep your costs down you will be singled out by the chargemaster to pay the highest rates! (The report uses REAL case studies.) For Example, You Might Pay: $7,997.54 for a CT scan Medicare pays $554 for $872.44 for the dye used in the CT scan Medicare pays $96 for $600 Doctor bill for reading the test on top of the doctor’s examination fee All for a test that could have been accomplished with a much more simple and cost effective test; adding to a medical debt for a false alarm that would pay for a semester of college. $283 for a chest x-ray that Medicare pays $20.44 for $15,000 for an assortment of lab tests that Medicare would have paid a few hundred for $13,702 for a miracle cancer drug that the hospital is marking up by 400% (that is 400% OVER what the hospital paid for the drug) As part of a half-million to million dollar tab on a cancer diagnosis.

HUGE administrative salaries are being paid across the nation while the least able to pay are buried under unreasonable medical debt!

You can’t say you need to recoup losses when you are paying multiple administrators $500,000 to $3,000,000 PLUS annually!

This is HUGE profit being paid out in salaries!

 

What does this mean for you?

Until you are 65 years old you will have to pay MUCH higher prices for all your medical care if you are not adequately represented!  That doesn’t mean that you need the best insurance, it means you need the insurance company that is negotiating the best price within a system that is not playing fair!

Unless you are lucky enough to secure an insurance carrier that will cover your needs WHEN you need them OR representation to negotiate more reasonable payment, the creditors will not be stopped.  One person may have absolutely no hospital bill for an illness that will leave another equally hard working – insurance premium paying – health conscious person BANKRUPT!

This is a dangerous game that destroys the lives of many honest hard working people while it creates grotesque unwarranted wealth for a few.

Even honest hard working doctors are being squeezed financially!  If they aren’t gaming the system they can’t afford to pay their liability insurance!

 

Hospitals say that the inflated chargemaster prices should not be given much weight because the hospital rarely collects that amount.

This is absurd!

If prices are unreasonable, they are unreasonable.

Nobody is asking the hard questions.

In what world are these charges reasonable?

$77 for gauze pads $24 for niacin pills $18 for diabetes strips $5,890 for saline that was also included in the room charge so was double charged $65,600 for oxygen management that was also included in the room charge $2,293/day room charge BEFORE any real charges are added TRIPLE billing for items used in ICU $132,000 for basic lab tests

 

This report gets down right depressing as it gets into:

• Just how GROSS cancer drug PROFITS are
• How US laws restricts Medicare from even trying to negotiate drug prices
• How US law forces payment for less effective over-priced drugs
• The power of hospitals to bankrupt individuals without transparent or even reasonable pricing!
• Complete LACK of research in deciding how US citizens are cared for!

This is a service industry with customers that are desperate!

Where does the insanity end?

 

Are you anxious and upset about what you think “Obamacare” is?

The sad part is … you don’t know the half of it!

This ground breaking article exposes the truth about reforms that were attempted with this legislation.

If you are ranting and raving about the government or the “current administration” you are making yourself sick and getting no where!

This is not a “government” activity driving the unfair pricing practices of medical care in the US.

Those profiting from our very broken health care system pay big money for the lobbyists that were successful at blocking any damage to their profits with the current attempt at health care reform.

Let’s at least acknowledge that there are brilliant caring people in the system TRYING to make a difference!

Peter Bach, an epidemiologist at Sloan Kettering reported in a New England Journal of medicine article that Medicare’s spending on the category dominated by cancer drugs ballooned from $3 billion in 1997 to $11 billion in 2004.Bach says costs have continued to increase rapidly and must now be more than 20 billion.With that escalating bill in mind, Bach was among the policy experts pushing for provisions in Obamacare to establish a patient centered outcomes research institute to expand comparative effectiveness research efforts.Through painstaking research doctors would try to determine the comparative effectiveness not only of drugs but also of procedures like CT scan.  However, after all provisions spelling out elaborate research and review were embedded in the draft law, Congress jumped in and added eight provisions that restrict how the research can be used.The prime restriction:”Findings shall not be construed as mandates for practice guidelines, coverage recommendations, payment, or policy recommendations.”With those 14 words, the work of Bach and his colleagues was undone.  And costs remain unchecked.

 

That means people will continue to receive unreasonable bills they can’t pay without financial devastation!

This issue will continue to CRIPPLE the United States economy!

Until WE the People get pissed off enough to make some noise nothing will change!

There are decent people working hard for Truth and Transparency!

But this report highlights just how powerless they are in the face of BIG MONEY interests.

Sick people facing collectors coming for huge debt don’t make BIG noise.  They often don’t live long enough.

If your chest pain is a false alarm, the stress caused by the hospital bill you can’t pay will cause plenty of damage!

The hospital chargemaster is the equivalent of organized crime.  It’s absurd to think that this is ethical activity!

 

The fight for health care with integrity has been going on for decades!

Those on the front lines know exactly what the issues are, they have just been unable to do anything to cause significant change, YET.

Complacent citizens help prevent the change we desperately need!

Obamacare does some good work around the edges of the core problem. It restricts abusive hospital­ bill collecting. It forces insurers to provide explanations of their policies in plain English. It requires a more rigorous appeal process conducted by independent entities when insurance coverage is denied. These are all positive changes, as is putting the insurance umbrella over tens of millions more Americans — a historic breakthrough. But none of it is a path to bending the health care cost curve. Indeed, while Obamacare’s promotion of statewide insurance exchanges may help distribute health­ insurance policies to individuals now frozen out of the market, those exchanges could raise costs, not lower them. With hospitals consolidating by buying doctors’ practices and competing hospitals, their leverage over insurance companies is increasing. That’s a trend that will only be accelerated if there are more insurance companies with less market share competing in a new exchange market trying to negotiate with a dominant hospital and its doctors. Similarly, higher insurance premiums — much of them paid by taxpayers through Obamacare’s subsidies for those who can’t afford insurance but now must buy it — will certainly be the result of three of Obamacare’s best provisions: the prohibitions on exclusions for pre-­existing conditions, the restrictions on co­-pays for preventive care and the end of annual or lifetime payout caps. Put simply, with Obamacare we’ve changed the rules related to who pays for what, but we haven’t done much to change the prices we pay. When you follow the money, you see the choices we’ve made, knowingly or unknowingly. Over the past few decades, we’ve enriched the labs, drug companies, medical device makers, hospital administrators, and purveyors of CT scans, MRIs, canes and wheelchairs. Meanwhile we’ve squeezed the doctors who don’t own their own clinics, don’t work as drug consultants, or don’t otherwise game a system that is so gamable. And of course, we’ve squeezed everyone outside the system who gets stuck with the bills.  We’ve created a secure, prosperous island in an economy that is suffering under the weight of the riches those on the island extract.   And we’ve allowed those on the island and their lobbyists and allies to control the debate, diverting us from what Gerard Anderson, a health care economist at the John’s Hopkins Bloomberg School of public health, says is the obvious and only issue: “All the prices are too damn high.”

 

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that the President of the United States is brilliant.

Just because he got us debating the health care crisis.

If we don’t KEEP debating the health care crisis NOTHING will change!

The voice of the People must be MUCH louder if it hopes to be heard.

We aren’t asking for what we need!  The chargemaster should be illegal!

 

If you suffer from low oxygen and/or fluid retention you need the Life Breath Club.

It’s never too late to heal, and it’s never too early to worry about your health care!

Sometimes you don’t notice symptoms of heart disease until they cause an emergency health crisis!

The Life Breath Club can teach you how to stay safe!

 

Many blessings,

Carrie Tucker, RCP

The Life Breath Coach

Heart Failure Solutions