Health Care Planning

One of the foremost challenges faced by health care professionals is to formulate a well-devised, well-thought out plan for assisting both the patients as well as the health care givers. Care planning is an essential part of health care, but is often misunderstood or regarded as a waste of time. Without a specific document delineating the plan of care, important issues are likely to be neglected. Care planning provides a sort of 'road map', to guide all who are involved with the patient's/resident's care. The health care plan has long been associated with nursing; however, all health care professionals need to be assisted in the care giving process. In today's world, highly expensive Health Insurance policies are not viable for most individuals. Therefore, the government needs to play a crucial...

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What is an Advance Health Care Directive (or Living Will)?

Helping someone prepare for end-of-life medical decisions can be of great comfort to both the person and to others in his family. The document that helps you do this is an advance health care directive, or living will -- what it's called and what it includes depends on where the person lives -- sometimes paired with a power of attorney for health care. For information about how to set up an advance health care directive or living will, see Advance Health Care Directives and Living Wills: A Step-by-Step Guide.Such a document is important because, given a medical situation in which someone can't speak for himself -- anything incapacitating, from a short, temporary condition to a long terminal illness -- it lets medical providers and other decision makers know his preferences, and it can authorize...

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Union Organizing in the Health Care Industry - New Unions and Alliances Among Rivals

Though our nation's economy has recently lost millions of jobs, the health care industry has continued to add them. Not surprisingly, unions are eager to sign up health care workers. In the last 10 years, the rate of union wins in the health care industry has grown faster than the national average. Unions are uniting to lobby for labor-friendly legislation to promote increased union membership in the health care sector.In addition to traditional organizing, health care union organizers are using more radical corporate campaigns that target hospital donors, shareholders, community groups, and even patients. The unions push these target groups to put pressure on hospital owners to allow unions to organize their employees. Many critics have argued that some of these agreements with employers...

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Health Care Reform is Not Healthy

HEALTH CARE REFORM IS NOT HEALTHY!LET'S CALL IT WHAT IT Is - HEALTH INSURANCE MONEY ALLOCATION AND RE-DISTRICTINGHealth insurance premiums are driven by the success or failure of actual health recovery maintenance and the costs required to deliver of service. Harris L. Coulter, Ph.D., of Washington, DC, and editor of the 8th edition of the HPUS,is an internationally renowned medical historian and author of over 30 books and essays, which include: THE DIVIDED LEGACY, a four volume epochal history of medicine, which covers its origins to present day."Society today is paying a heavy price in disease and death for the monopoly granted the medical profession in the 1920's. In fact, the situation peculiarly resembles that of the 1830s when physicians relied on bloodletting, mercurial medicines,...

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Making the Choice to Execute a Health Care Power of Attorney and Living Will

Advances in medical technology, recent court rulings and emerging political trends have brought with them a number of life-and-death choices which many have never before considered. The looming prospect of legalized physician-assisted suicide is one such choice which severely erodes the inherent value and dignity of human life. The much-publicized efforts of certain doctors to provide carbon monoxide poisoning or prescribe lethal drugs for their terminally ill patients constitute euthanasia. So may the removal of certain life-sustaining treatments from a patient who is not in a terminal condition. Euthanasia and willful suicide, in any form, are offenses against life; they must be and are rejected by the vast majority of U.S. states.However, people faced with these difficult dilemmas should...

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