Americans are living through a multigenerational project of stamping out solidarity and insisting that we only ever view ourselves as individuals, with no stake in the plights of our neighbors. That's how the US got the most expensive, least effective health care system in the world. And even if you are in the vanishingly tiny minority of Americans who are happy with their health care, you live amongst people who are being killed by the system around you.
The health system is a perfect example of how monopolization drives more monopolization, and how that comes to harm the public and workers. Health consolidation began with pharma mergers, that led to pharma companies gouging hospitals. Hospitals, in turn, engaged in a nonstop orgy of mergers, which created regional monopolies that could resist the pricing power of monopoly pharma – and screw insurers. That kicked off consolidation in insurance, which is why most Americans have a "choice" of between one and three private insurers – and why health workers' monopoly employers have eroded their wages and working conditions.
A new study in American Economic Review: Insights puts some quantitative spine in this tale, tracking the relationship between hospital mergers and skyrocketed health-care prices: https://harris.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/consolidation-hospital-sector-leading-higher-health-care-costs-study-finds?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template
The researchers investigated 1,164 acute-care hospital mergers, finding that while the FTC only challenged 1% of these, they could – and should – have challenged 20% of them, based on the agency's own criteria for merger scrutiny. The researchers blame the rising costs of hospital care directly on these mergers, and point out that Congress has historically starved the FTC of the budget it needed to investigate these mergers. The annual additional costs to the American people from these mergers exceed the entire annual budget of the FTC.
It's not just hospitals: the entire investor class is hell-bent on spending their way to monopoly. Nowhere is that more true than in AI, where hundreds of billions are being poured into bids to attain permanent dominance through scale. Writing for their excellent AI Snake Oil newsletter, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor inject some realism into the AI scale hype: https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-scaling-myths
Narayanan and Kapoor challenge the idea that throwing more data at large language models will make the better: "With LLMs, we may have a couple of orders of magnitude of scaling left, or we may already be done." They are skeptical that this can be fixed with synthetic data (whose use is limited to "fixing specific gaps and making domain-specific improvements"). They also point out that if returns from data slow, then adding more compute or making bigger models might also be throttled.
They reserve their most skeptical take for "AGI" – the idea that LLMs are going to achieve consciousness. This is a fundamentally unserious idea, one that they unpack in detail in their forthcoming book: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691249131/ai-snake-oil
One thing I'm hoping for from the book is some analysis of the material usefulness of AI hype – what purpose does the hype serve? I mean, obviously, hype is useful if you're looking to suck up investor capital, or flip an investment to a greater fool. But there's a specific character to AI hype: namely, the claim that AI will displace labor, which is really a claim that a bet on AI is a bet on the increasing wealth of capital at labor's expense.
In other words, AI is a bet on oligarchy. In America, that's a pretty safe bet, and the odds just got even better, thanks to a string of brutal Supreme Court decisions that legalized bribery, banned most regulatory enforcement, and made being alive and unhoused into a crime (Poor Laws 2.0): https://prospect.org/justice/2024-06-29-whos-gonna-check-supreme-court-chevron-separation-powers/
Hepatitis C is a global public health threat, affecting 56 million people worldwide. The World Health Organization has committed to eliminating hepatitis C by 2030. Although new treatments have revolutionised the treatment and care of people with hepatitis C, treatment uptake has slowed in recent years, drawing attention to the need for innovative approaches to reach elimination targets. One approach involves using existing notifiable disease data to contact people previously diagnosed with hepatitis C. Within these disease surveillance systems, however, competing tensions exist, including protecting individual rights to privacy and autonomy, and broader public health goals. We explore these issues using hepatitis C and Australia’s legislative and regulatory frameworks as a case study. We examine emerging uses of notification data to contact people not yet treated, and describe some of the ethical dilemmas associated with the use and non-use of this data and the protections that exist to preserve individual rights and public health. We reveal weaknesses in rights protections and processes under Australian public health and human rights legislation and argue for consultation with and involvement of affected communities in policy and intervention design before notification data is used to increase hepatitis C treatment coverage.
The post The Application of Australian Rights Protections to the Use of Hepatitis C Notification Data to Engage People ‘Lost to Follow Up’ was curated by information for practice.
Since 1991 The National Psychologist has focused on keeping practicing psychologists current with news, information and items of interest. Check them out for more free articles, resources, and subscription information: https://www.nationalpsychologist.com
The filing on behalf of #YWCA#Kalamazoo in the Court of Claims comes 2 days after a judge in the SAME COURT blocked enforcement of other state #regulations on abortion in an order that found the state's 24-hr waiting period, #InformedConsent requirements & a ban on #abortions performed by advance practice clinicians violated the state's voter-approved #RightToAbortion.
The #Democratic-led Legislature had attempted last yr to repeal the ban on #abortions funded by #Medicaid, the state's #HealthInsurance program for #LowIncome residents. But a no vote from one Democratic House member from Detroit foiled the effort in the lower chamber, where #Democrats hold a slim 56-54 majority.
Doctor sent me for a scan. Help me cover the copay, pick a reward!
I hate this but US healthcare is a copay for everything. I need this to determine if I need a med fix or urgent infusion. Appointments, other meds, etc covered. But this is 100 extra I don't have. Help a weirdo keep on, please.
Charles Pierce zeroes in on the new Johns Hopkins study showing that infant mortality rates sharply increased in Texas following its draconian abortion ban. In one year, they rose 8% to 5.75 per 1,000 births, compared to a 2% increase in the rest of the US, with deaths due to birth defects going up by 23%, compared to a decrease of about 3% in the rest of the US.
As Pierce concludes, who says abortion isn't healthcare?
The #AntiAbortion movement may have won the battle 2 yrs ago w/ #Dobbs, but they’re losing the war—& turning an entire generation away from their cause.
And what about creating a “culture of life”? After all, this is what the term #ProLife was supposed to represent. For years, some conservatives …argued that pro-lifers needed to embrace pro-child policies such as tax credits & increased #access to #HealthCare. Some tried to create an infrastructure to support families post-#Roe. But after half a century, they had little to show for it.
The state law bans #HealthCare providers from offering #gender transition care to children.
The #SupremeCourt agreed on Mon to decide whether a Tennessee law that bans certain #medical treatments for #transgender minors violates the Constitution.
In that case, the decision split largely along ideological lines, w/ #SCOTUS’ liberals dissenting.
Along w/Idaho, the justices had been asked to weigh in on legislation in Kentucky & Tennessee.
The TN measure bans #HealthCare providers from offering #transition care to minors, including puberty blockers & hormone treatments.
The KY #law, known as SB150, bans doctors from providing #gender-transition surgery or administering puberty blockers or hormone therapy to people under 18.
"The medical costs incurred by the survivors of the shooting are hitting hard, and they won’t end soon. The average medical spending for someone who is shot increases by nearly $30,000 in the first year, according to a Harvard Medical School study. Another study found that number goes up to $35,000 for children. Ten kids were shot at the parade."
"Democrats are seeking to overhaul an 1873 federal law that bans abortion-related materials from being sent through the mail, worried that a future Trump administration could invoke the Comstock Act to crack down on abortion access or effectively ban the procedure altogether."
Will Justice Roberts lift a finger to defend the Court’s legitimacy? How can you revere a democratic institution while taking no steps to protect it against corruption and ideological capture?
@xankarn
CAN I POINT OUT that this #RightWing extremist ideological shift in the Court is a perfect example of that happens when #Conservatives have an unchecked majority?
When #Democrats (briefly) had a "SuperMajority" (for 23 working days) in 2009, what did they do with it? They made sure everyone had access to affordable #healthcare.
What do Conservatives do? They abolish #Roe, repeal The #VotingRightsAct, codify discrimination against #gay & #trans individuals, and ban #books. 🤬
A recent study has unveiled new insights into the neural mechanisms underlying treatment-resistant depression. By recording stereotactic electroencephalography signals (sEEG) from patients’ brains, the team identified specific abnormalities in how depressed individual process emotional information. This study, published in Nature Mental Health, provides a promising step towards understanding and potentially treating this challenging condition.
Depression is a common but serious mental health disorder characterized by persistent feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and a lack of interest or pleasure in daily activities. It affects millions of people worldwide and can significantly impair one’s ability to function at work, school, and in personal relationships.
While many individuals with depression respond well to standard treatments, such as medication and psychotherapy, a significant subset of patients do not experience sufficient relief from these approaches. This condition is known as treatment-resistant depression. It is defined as the failure to respond to at least two different antidepressant treatments administered at adequate doses and durations.
The new study conducted by the researchers at Baylor College of Medicine aimed to explore the neural basis of an emotion-processing bias observed in individuals with depression. This bias leads to a stronger response to negative information compared to positive information, which exacerbates depressive symptoms. Understanding the neural mechanisms behind this bias is crucial for developing targeted interventions that can better address the unique challenges of treatment-resistant depression.
“There has been a big question in the field about whether there was a physiological abnormality we could measure related to depression, as people had historically thought of it as a disorder of the ‘mind’ rather than one of the ‘brain’ and its cells. In this study, we were able to capture very sensitive data from awake, behaving human subjects that demonstrate a physiological basis for treatment-resistant depression,” said study authors Kelly Bijanki, an associate professor, and Xiaoxu Fan, a postdoctoral fellow.
For the study, sEEG electrodes were implanted in specific regions of the participants’ brains, particularly the amygdala and prefrontal cortex (PFC). These regions were chosen due to their known roles in emotion processing and regulation. The electrodes provided high spatial and temporal resolution recordings of brain activity, allowing the researchers to observe detailed neural responses to emotional stimuli.
The study included 12 epilepsy patients and 5 patients diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression. The epilepsy patients served as a control group since they were already undergoing stereotactic electroencephalography (sEEG) monitoring for seizure localization. The treatment-resistant depression patients had not responded to at least four different antidepressant treatments and were recruited as part of an early feasibility trial.
Participants were asked to rate the emotional intensity of human face photographs displaying various expressions, ranging from very sad to very happy. This task was designed to evoke and measure their neural responses to both positive and negative emotional stimuli. The emotional intensity ratings were recorded using a computer interface, ensuring precise synchronization with the brain activity data captured by the sEEG electrodes.
The researchers found that individuals with treatment-resistant depression exhibited a heightened and prolonged response in the amygdala when viewing sad faces compared to the control group. This increased activity began around 300 milliseconds after the sad faces were presented, indicating an overactive bottom-up processing system.
The treatment-resistant depression group also showed a reduced amygdala response to happy faces at a later stage (around 600 milliseconds). This finding suggests a diminished ability to process positive emotional stimuli, which may play a role in the persistent low mood characteristic of depression.
The researchers observed increased alpha-band power in the prefrontal cortex of the treatment-resistant depression patients during the late stage of processing happy faces. Alpha-band power is thought to reflect inhibitory processes in the brain.
Additionally, there was enhanced alpha-band synchrony between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, indicating stronger top-down regulation of the amygdala by the prefrontal cortex in these patients. This suggests that the prefrontal cortex may excessively inhibit the amygdala, contributing to the reduced emotional response to positive stimuli.
“sEEG can provide data with high temporal resolution and reliable anatomical precision of signal sources,” Bijanki and Fan told PsyPost. “With the help of sEEG, our results clearly revealed that different neural mechanisms are responsible for the biased negative and positive emotion processing in TRD patients.
The study also explored the effects of deep brain stimulation on neural responses in treatment-resistant depression patients. After deep brain stimulation was administered to the subcallosal cingulate and ventral capsule/ventral striatum regions, the neural responses to emotional stimuli in the patients showed significant changes.
The amygdala response to both sad and happy faces increased, and the alpha-band power in the prefrontal cortex decreased during happy-face processing. Furthermore, the alpha-band synchrony between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala during happy-face processing was reduced, bringing the neural activity patterns closer to those observed in the control group.
“Treatment-resistant depression has a signature in the firing pattern of neurons in the brain, especially during an emotional task,” Bijanki and Fan explained. “We see the brain being perhaps overly sensitive to negative emotional information in depression patients, and we see evidence of increased top-down inhibition from a moderating brain region that may explain the abnormality. Further, we see after therapeutic brain stimulation, this pattern is normalized. We hope with further study this signal may help clarify the mechanism of depression and suggest new potential treatments.”
The small sample size limits the ability to generalize the findings. Additionally, using epilepsy patients as controls, who may have varying levels of depressive symptoms themselves, might affect the comparison. Future research should aim to include larger and more diverse samples to validate these findings.
The researchers also plan to explore how these neural markers can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of depression treatments. “We hope to use the biased emotional processing signature as a biomarker to evaluate the effects of depression treatments and as an indicator of the severity of depression symptoms in future patients,” the researchers said.
The study, “Brain mechanisms underlying the emotion processing bias in treatment-resistant depression,” was authored by Xiaoxu Fan, Madaline Mocchi, Bailey Pascuzzi, Jiayang Xiao, Brian A. Metzger, Raissa K. Mathura, Carl Hacker, Joshua A. Adkinson, Eleonora Bartoli, Salma Elhassa, Andrew J. Watrous, Yue Zhang, Anusha Allawala, Victoria Pirtle, Sanjay J. Mathew, Wayne Goodman, Nader Pouratian, and Kelly R. Bijanki.
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Since 1991 The National Psychologist has focused on keeping practicing psychologists current with news, information and items of interest. Check them out for more free articles, resources, and subscription information: https://www.nationalpsychologist.com
Heat wave starting + overheating triggers seizures. Out of main meds + it price spiked. UPDATE: Progressing. 120 to go!
Just off of meds, I have breathing & swallowing problems. Scared of facing the heatwave w/o my medication. Overheating is bad enough on meds, let alone without. This is both humiliating & terrifying. Pls help.
This is US #healthcare y'all. Insurance can just choose not to cover a med. Pharmacies and distributors can raise prices without notice. On top of dropping 50 or 100 for each and every single test and visit. It's killing me. [And in this case, pushing up against literally, given the choking risk.]
Rather post about anything else, but need 160 for seizure meds. PLEASE help me refill my empty medication. 🙏 💕💸
w/o this, breathing & swallowing problems + seizures. Any repost or small tip helps! Choice of #TabletopGaming rewards available. Custom work too; just ask!
Need ~110 for seizure med + 50 prescription CBD. Help out & grab choice of game reward! Open for custom work; ask!
w/o this, breathing & swallowing problems + seizures. CBD is prescription & controls symptoms, but the main pharmacy med is the priority first. Any repost or small tip helps!
Out of pocket med jumped >200. Yay US healthcare! 😫 120 short. Grab a a choice of game reward! Custom work available; just ask!
Got taken to an infusion to hold me over. But it's just a temporary measure to control the worst. Need the refill to keep seizures + breathing & swallowing problems at bay. Please boost.
"A federal judge has ruled that Florida’s new restrictions on gender-affirming treatment for children are unconstitutional, and that Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republican lawmakers who supported them were not acting in the interest of public health."