Developing Standards ‘Of, By, And For’ Older Adults: Reflections On Patricia Gabow’s Narrative Matters Essay

Imagine three people: a healthy 30-year-old, a 60-year-old with high blood pressure, diabetes and arthritis, and a 90-year-old who is frail and has dementia advanced to the point where her speech often doesn’t make sense. If I lined them up, any doctor could instantly tell me which was which. Ditto if each broke a bone and I showed the physicians only their x-rays. And if I asked the clinicians to predict each patient’s risk of complications and adverse events based on nothing more than the few words above, they would again rapidly and reliably make accurate assessments. Yet, for the most part, our health system lumps these three people into a single “adult” category, an approach that flies in the face of anatomy,

About privilege

An excellent reminder from Toby Morris about how some people–more and more, it seems–end up where they are. I’m sorry to say, but I see an awful lot of the left-hand plate attitudes from people in leadership positions in hospitals–a belief that they deserve to be where they are, relative to those who’ve led less privileged lives.An excerpt, one of a sequence….(With thanks to Vijay Sadasivan, in Salem, India.)

Personnel Matters: Health tax credit could be revived

Employees who lose their jobs due to foreign competition, as well as retirees in failed pension plans, again would be eligible for generous federal health insurance premium subsidies under legislation approved by the U.S. Senate. The subsidy, known as the Health Coverage Tax Credit , expired at the end of 2013.