Darrell White

Every year I'm on this app I remind my readers about Medicare open enrollment. It's often a very confusing process for many. Please be informed. Read the attached for more information. kff.org/medicare/medicare-op…

Yep. And years ago your primary doctor would have admitted you and rounded every day. I did it for years.

The most blatant flip flop I’ve ever seen. Abdul El-Sayed today on Medicare for All: "If you would like to have a private insurer, you’re welcome to do that." This man has spent YEARS vowing the exact opposite. Here are 11 times Abdul promised to ELIMINATE private health insurance plans: 08/04/2018: “Instead of having multiple insurance companies... what you have is the state operating as your insurance company. That's what we want.” 11/18/2019: "Medicare for All guarantees you a public health care plan and eliminates your private one." 11/18/2019: "Under Medicare-for-All, the federal government is the only payer—hence single payer—for healthcare to everybody in the nation." 06/04/2020: "What does Medicare for All do? Medicare for All comes in and says, ‘No more of this insurance industry,’ which costs us far more, whose CEOs make tens of millions of dollars a year, and which creates redundancy in the healthcare system that increases the overall cost for all of us." 07/12/2020: “My issue with private health insurance is that I see it as fundamentally a middleman that we've allowed to persist and exist in our healthcare system for no added value except that a lot of people profit off of it... the best way to do that is cut out the middleman.” 09/29/2020: "The only insurer in town is Medicare" 12/16/2020: “What Medicare for All does is it does away with the private insurance market. It now has one single payer—that's why we call it single-payer, right? One insurance, and that is the government of the United States.” 03/15/2021: “We are going to create one insurer that operates on behalf of the taxpayer, on behalf of the American public, so that we can reduce prices as much as possible and collectivize as much as possible.” 04/13/2021: “Instead of having a whole bunch of payers you have one payer and that is the federal government.” 05/25/2021: “We have an entire industry — the insurance industry — that does not need to exist, that should not exist. There’s a world that’s possible where it didn’t exist. The question becomes are we willing to do the morally right thing as a society?” 04/07/2022: "I advocate for a government takeover of health insurance because health insurance offers no value in the American health care system"

Sure, but complications are a part of every life saving procedure. A pericardiocentesis is hundreds of times a day across hospitals around the country. A needle is slipped into the space around your heart to drain fluid that if left untouched would cause your death. Some small number of times, for a variety of reasons that are beyond the control of the operator, even when the correct protocol is followed death may result when performing the procedure. There are medical malpractice courts to adjudicate cause of death where medical experts way in on protocol deviations that where outside of standard of care ( separate discussion about that flawed process) But this doesn’t mean every complication should be regarded as a “medical error”. You can turn the medical error rate to zero by not going to the hospital when in distress. But that’s probably a bad idea.