"Yet more is at work here than the powerful words. The speech contained all the elements of drama: the man of quiet faith, whose presidential campaign underplayed his charitable works; the handsome politician, whose political career involved both high office and the failure to achieve it; the public figure, who briefly became a hero to opponents who had shamefully vilified him seven years earlier; the successful businessman, who returned repeatedly to public affairs; the patriarch of a large and loving family, whose own niece repeatedly yielded her conscience to the man he rightly condemned. Comparing Romney with the grifter president and his venal clan yields an instructive contrast.
The Romney story plays to something very deep in the American self-conception, to myth—not in the sense of fairy tale or falsehood, but of something Americans want to believe about who they are and who, because of what they want to believe, they can become. Americans embrace the story of the lone man or woman of conscience who does the right thing, knowing that the risks are high.
They remember Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat for a white passenger on a Montgomery bus in 1955, but forget the three other passengers who prudently moved. They relish the staple theme of Western stories and films—John Wayne in Stagecoach saying, “Well, there’s some things a man just can’t run away from.” They honor John Adams for defending British soldiers accused of shooting down his fellow Americans, in an era when tar and feathers could be the consequence of that act. In an altogether different vein, they laud Henry David Thoreau for choosing civil disobedience and marching to the beat of his own drum, resolved to remain indifferent to what his fellow Yankees thought of him.
In this style of lone heroism, the motif is not bravado or impetuous courage. Gary Cooper in High Noon plays a marshal awaiting the return of four killers seeking to settle scores with him. He refuses to abandon a town that abandons him, which leaves his new Quaker bride bewildered:
“Don’t try to be a hero. You don’t have to be a hero, not for me,” she says.
“I’m not trying to be a hero. If you think I like this, you’re crazy,” he replies.
And this may be why the lonely man or woman of courage is so endearing. Such heroes are not crazy, not cheerful, and not necessarily optimistic. The story may turn out well in the end, but it might not. Indeed, John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, and even more so the fine television series that spun off from it in the mid-’60s, featured plenty of politicians whose careers ended in ruin after they took deeply unpopular stances, like battling the Klan, defending the Union, or opposing the creation of NATO"
The program, the first of its kind in the nation, applies to about a dozen medications for which the travel has been found cost-effective. Of the 160,000 employees covered by the state's health insurance plan, fewer than 400 are eligible, but the program is now being expanded to Canada, where there's a clinic in the Vancouver airport. The trips are legal: U.S. regulations allow patients to bring in limited quantities of drugs for their own use from other countries.
Ann Lovell, a teacher in the state, travels to Mexico every few months to get etanercept (Enbrel) for her rheumatoid arthritis, which in the U.S. has an annual price tag of $62,000.
[Insert: Astounding! Lovell and so many others like her sure have it tough. Living in America should not be so punishing.]
She flies from Salt Lake City to San Diego, where she's picked up by a company that drives her across the border to a Tijuana hospital for her refill. She brings the script from her U.S. doctor and sees a doctor in Mexico who gets the script filled by the pharmacy.
Then, she's shuttled back to the airport in San Diego and gets back to Salt Lake City the same day.
Lovell had been paying $450 in copays every few months for her medicine, but said that copay was going to soar to $2,400. Now, her trip is paid for and she gets a $500 per-trip bonus -- and even with that, the state pays just half of what it would if Lovell got the drug in the U.S., AP reported.
When Stacey Richter's husband went to a New Jersey emergency room with a suspected heart attack, she crossed out sections of the consent form that required her to pay whatever the hospital charged. Then she hand-wrote a line capping payments at twice the Medicare reimbursement rate.
Richter is something of a ringer: she's co-president of Aventria Health Group, which consults for pharma companies' market access teams. But Al Lewis, CEO of Quizzify, a healthcare education company, has made wallet cards with language similar to what Richter used to enable more patients to defend themselves this way.
Still, the question remains as to whether such a move would hold up in court.
One attorney who represents physician group practices told KHN that her firm has "never had trouble enforcing the terms of our original policy." But a legal scholar said it's been argued that hospital financial consent forms aren't valid contracts because patients are never told the true cost of care before signing them; another said Richter's strategy "would be legally effective."
The Richters didn't receive any surprise bills, though it's not clear if that's because all providers involved in the case were in-network, or because of the altered consent form.
From 2014 to 2019, almost 170 organs couldn't be transplanted and nearly 370 almost missed their window, being delayed two hours or more, because of transportation issues, mostly aboard commercial airlines.
KHN and Reveal reviewed data from more than 8,800 organ and tissue shipments from the United Network for Organ Sharing. There's no national system to transfer organs; rather, 58 non-profit organ procurement organizations collect and ship organs, often relying on commercial couriers and airlines. Thus, just as with passengers' luggage, organs become vulnerable to delays and missed connections that can diminish their viability.
There are 1,800 such shipments each year, including 1,400 kidneys, though that's just a fraction of the 40,000 organs transplanted in the U.S. each year.
This patchwork model for sharing organs needs to be updated, experts told the news outlets: "If Amazon can figure out when your paper towels and your dog food is going to arrive within 20 to 30 minutes, it certainly should be reasonable that we ought to track lifesaving organs, which are in chronic shortage," one transplant surgeon said.
The outcry comes in response to the news outlets' reporting on John Cox, MD, a former emergency room physician at Children's Wisconsin, whose infant daughter was taken away following reports from the hospital's child abuse pediatricians.
Four Children's Wisconsin doctors who spoke anonymously with reporters said many physicians from across the hospital have spoken out at meetings, and some have asked for an internal investigation of the specialists. Hospital executives promised an external review, but the doctors said they were concerned the investigation wouldn't be independent.
NBC News and the Houston Chronicle reported that 15 medical experts who treated the baby or reviewed the case said the child abuse team made serious errors. Cox and his wife Sadie Dobrozsi, MD, who also works at Children's Wisconsin, said a nurse practitioner erred in declining to consult a dermatologist before confusing birthmarks with bruises, and that independent hematologist reports showed the child abuse physicians misinterpreted test results that pointed to a bleeding disorder that could lead to easy bruising.
Cox and Dobrozsi haven't seen their daughter since Child Protective Services placed her in foster care eight months ago.
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