Olympian Mary Lou Retton made a stunning revelation when asked why she didn’t have health insurance while she was in intensive care fighting for her life. “I couldn’t afford it,” Retton told the Today Show on January 8 when she was faced with a life threating pneumonia recently. Retton’s daughter started a “Go Fund Me” page to help her mother pay for what was likely to be tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills.

Health Care News managing editor AnneMarie Schieber talked to Kansas State Senator Beverly Gossage as to why Retton may have gone without health insurance. The likely answer is Obamacare, the only option for people without an employer health plan. Gossage discusses what Retton might have paid for an Obamacare plan without subsidies and why there are almost no other options today for middle income people. She also discusses what Congress needs to do about it.

Read more: https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/02/i-couldnt-afford-it-olympic-champion-mary-lou-retton-on-health-insurance/

PHOTO: ROBIN MARCHANT/GETTY IMAGES NEWS

You see the reports in the news all the time, a patient on life support has given the “gift of life” by donating organs. Few people realize but organ donors needs to be alive to do this. Hospitals can legally declare people with a brain death diagnosis allowing them to take their vital organs for transplant. Dr. Heidi Klessig is author of The Brain Death Fallacy. She discusses whether brain death is irreversible and how the organ transplant business has grown since the decision in 1968 to include brain function in the legal definition of death.

Klessig: “People defined to be brain dead or dead by neurological criteria have beating hearts, digest food, excrete urine, and even gestate pregnancies and deliver healthy babies. These people are not biologically dead, and their spirits have not departed. Brain death is not death. Many people who were diagnosed as being brain dead have recovered. If brain death was real death, people should not recover even once.”

Klessig also discusses the Uniform Declaration of Death Act, and how New Jersey is the only state that allow families to demand treatment for patients declared “brain dead.” Patients and families can take measures before a crisis to make sure hospitals do not violate their wishes when it comes to life and death issues. For more information, see respectforhumanlife.org

In this episode of Health Care News, we delve into the recent revelation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that certain over-the-counter decongestants, specifically those labeled with "PE" (phenylephrine), are no more effective than a placebo. Our guest, Dr. Jeffrey Singer, a practicing surgeon from Phoenix, Arizona, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, sheds light on how these medications found their way onto store shelves.

Dr. Singer traces the issue back to the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act (CMEA), enacted 18 years ago in response to the methamphetamine crisis. This legislation pushed pseudoephedrine, an effective decongestant, behind the counter, leading drug companies to modify their formulas to include PE for over-the-counter sales.

Throughout the episode, Dr. Singer discusses several key points:

• The factors that led the FDA to reconsider its stance on over-the-counter decongestants.
• An overview of different decongestant drugs and tips for consumers to differentiate them.
• The process for purchasing pseudoephedrine, the effective decongestant.
• An exploration of why the FDA initially overlooked the ineffectiveness of PE.
• The sales strategies of drug manufacturers for OTC decongestants.
• Evaluating the CMEA's impact on the Meth epidemic.
• The potential for a class-action lawsuit against this misleading practice.
• The future: Is there a possibility that Congress will repeal the CMEA?

For further insights, don't miss Dr. Singer’s op-ed in Health Care News, linked in the episode description.