Cell Phones & High Blood Pressure

The highlight of the 28th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Society of Hypertension this week was a study suggesting that mobile phone calls may raise your blood pressure. The study, conducted at Northern Italy’s Guglielmo da Saliceto Hospital, found that subjects talking on their telefonini had a significant rise in blood pressure, from 121/77 to 129/82. Frankly, we wonder if BP rose because subjects were irritated when their phone calls were interrupted by blood pressure tests.

More:

“New research shows what raises and lowers blood pressure: Cell phones, salt and saying om,” EurekaAlert

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Image (“Cell Phones & Blood Pressure, after Adriaen Brouwer”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Paul Ryan’s Healthcare Reform Crusade

“We are not going to give up on destroying the healthcare system for the American people.”

— House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R, WI-1)

Source: The Hill

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GOP Healthcare Plan

Republicans have an eight-point healthcare plan to replace “Obamacare” insurance coverage with tax cuts for the rich.

“This isn’t a plan to ‘replace Obamacare.’ It’s a plan to do the opposite of replacing Obamacare. It’s as if I said I had a plan to fix the house by replacing the leaky roof, and you said you had a plan to fix the house by getting rid of the roof.”

– ”The Republican plan for replacing Obamacare doesn’t replace Obamacare,” Ezra Klein, Washington Post blog

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Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Dr. Goldacre’s American House Call

Writer and physician Ben Goldacre is coming to the USA and Canada this month:

“Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma North American Tour,” Scott Gavura, Science-Based Pharmacy

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Health Care

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressing the Medical Committee for Human Rights, 1966

Image source: Library of Congress.

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Healthcare Reform & Jobs

Will “ObamaCare” kill jobs? The new Affordable Care Act healthcare reform law is modeled after the Massachusetts healthcare law, “RomneyCare,” and the Urban Institute recently studied the situation there. So has RomneyCare killed jobs in Massachusetts?

No.

“Will the Affordable Care Act Be a Job Killer?” Lisa Dubay, John Holahan, Sharon K. Long, and Emily Lawton, Urban Institute Health Policy Center

But beware. ObamaCare will affect your job if your boss is a lunatic, right-wing, GOP ideologue:

Mitt Romney’s ‘Death Panel’ Nostalgia

“Obamacare ‘puts in place an unelected board that’s going to tell people ultimately what kind of treatments they can have.’ Romney is reviving Sarah Palin’s old death panels lie here. Obamacare does establish an Independent Payment Advisory Board to help constrain the growth of Medicare spending. The body has no authority to dictate the practices of the private insurance marketplace. And the law also makes explicit that this body is banned from rationing care or limiting medical benefits to seniors.”

– from “The First Debate: Mitt Romney’s Five Biggest Lies,” Tim Dickenson, Rolling Stone
“The truth behind that $5 trillion tax cut, pre-existing conditions and more”

Read more actual, reality-based facts here.

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Image (“Paula Abdul Appointed to Obama Death Panel”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Mitt Romney: ‘Death Panels! Death Panels!’

“Just what to do with the nation’s healthcare system has been argued time and again – but it always seems to come back to the ‘death panels.’

Such was the case at the debate in Denver on Wednesday night, when moderator Jim Lehrer asked the candidates whether Obamacare, one of the most contentious issues this election season, should be repealed.

Romney Health Care Plan for the 47 Percent

Ex-financier Willard Mitt Romney on CBS “60 Minutes“:

“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance. If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance and take them to the hospital and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”

Odd talk for a man whose chief accomplishment in his single term in public office was a successful universal health insurance program. ER care costs three times what primary care does, and taxpayers and policyholders pick up the tab for the uninsured, so that’s odd math from a man who claims he’ll fix the economy. Something else is odd: Mitt Romney was against emergency room primary care before he was for it. Someone needs to remind him that the emergency department is not health insurance.

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Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Ryan Tells His Medicare Plans to Oldsters. They Boo.

Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan spoke to the national AARP convention on Friday about his plans to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. “The first step to a stronger Medicare is to repeal Obamacare, because it represents the worst of both worlds,” he said. In response, the jolly gathering of grandparents booed the pompous little twerp. He went on to propose privatizing Medicare and giving seniors healthcare coupons. He was heckled by an audience old enough to remember the that same plan was pushed 12 years ago by another Republican financial genius, George W. Bush. You know, the GOP MBA President who crashed the world economy. Hey, Paul Ryan’s running mate is a Harvard MBA too!