"Healthcare is a right, not a privilege!"
May was Mental Health Awareness Month
A lot of good things have been done to help increase mental health awareness in the United States and around the world this year. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex team have launched a new 24/7 text messaging service named Shout that provides advice and help to people that are feeling suicidal or are having a mental health crisis. The program has a 1,000 member volunteer team that helps people talk through their situation and work through solutions. The service intends to "move from a moment of crisis to a calm state and form a plan for next steps to find longer-term support," according to an announcement from Kensington Palace.
Classrooms are also taking part in the global mindfulness lesson #MindfulMoment2019 by ClassDojo. On May 10th, it starts out with a 15-minute lesson to learn the basics of breathing and becoming mindful. The benefits of mindfulness just a few minutes per day reduces anxiety levels, and increases your ability to feel empathy for others, as well as benefiting learning. According to the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, “When students practice mindfulness, they’re more at ease and are more focused and compassionate in the classroom and in life. My hope is that our participation in A Mindful Moment will introduce millions more teachers and students around the world to the transformative benefits of this important practice.”
The Issue of Gaslamping in the Mental Health Community
Many people don't know this, but there are people in this world that wish harm to our mental health. Black Lives Matter has pointed out that law enforcement affects them disproportionately, which negatively affects their mental health – and African Americans are not the only people that are being targeted in this way. Gaslamping is the repression of your own self-assurances in your mental health by people that we fear, including people in positions of authority. It can happen because of police officers, it can happen because of doctors, and it can happen because of politicians. If you find yourself suddenly having a psychosis or mental breakdown because of the way that you've been treated by a person of authority, your mental health has been negatively affected by that person. It can happen intentionally, or unintentionally, such as because of psychological operations by intelligence organizations and the agents that act on behalf of them, foreign and domestic. The important thing to know is that you can overcome this problem without taking drastic actions. The systems will eventually correct themselves if you've been caught up in the heat of the moment – just be patient and don't overreact. Act like a professional if it's happening, and then protest it later when you have more freedom to point out what was done to you. Patrick believes that mental healthcare centers should not be located in old court buildings, or old police department buildings for this matter, as it can really damage the trust that mental healthcare professionals need with their clients.
Bringing Down the Costs of Prescription Medications
If you're receiving government benefits such as Medicaid, you may not know how much your insurance is paying for your prescriptions, and that's part of the problem. Patrick thinks that Congress should require that drug manufacturers print their cost for producing the medication on the medication label, because this will definitely bring down the fees that drug companies can charge for their products. Drug companies use the excuse that they need to charge a lot for medications, because they spend that money to develop new medications - but why not separate the services of developing new medications from the costs of manufacturing existing medications. Also, there should be more options earlier on for competitive drug companies to be able to produce generic versions of new medications, because that will also bring down the cost of drugs in America. Drug companies should provide new drugs because they want to help people become healthier, rather than make billions of dollars in profits. Drug prices in America should also be compared to market rates, internationally, in order to determine what the fair cost is for paying for a specific prescription.
Good news! 2019 was the first year in 51 years that prescription drug prices have reduced! Do you know why it happened?
One way that we could continue to reduce prescription prices is to have both states and the Federal Government pass laws that limit the amount that pharmacies can charge for out-of-pocket prescription drugs. This will help the poorest people that don't qualify for Medicaid, and other patients that don't have health insurance. It's not fair that patients have to choose between insulin and food, due to the high costs of insulin.
Improvements to Malpractice Laws
Patrick believes there should be improvements made to medical malpractice laws, in order to provide greater protections to patients. Malpractice cases typically go under-reported in America, especially by the lower class, because of the high costs that law firms charge to litigate doctors who have violated the Hippocratic oath. For an example, patients should be able to sue medical practices, not just physicians, in the case that the staff in a medical provider's office makes a serious mistake, such as in the paperwork or in refilling a medication on time. There should also be public resources available to the poor and disabled to seek Justice for cases that they have been mistreated by physicians or medical practices.
Medical Studies Into Scheduled Medications
Patrick supports medical studies into determining how certain scheduled drugs benefit, if at all, certain types of patients with specific conditions, such as veterans and the disabled. These drugs include psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, and special strains of marijuana. Patrick doesn't support legalizing these medications for recreational use, however if there are medical benefits, the medical community needs to know what they are so they will know how to improve the health of Americans, including veterans, that suffer from conditions such as PTSD and depression. Veterans that have served our country bravely should be provided every possibility of regaining the lives that they had before experiencing the traumatic events of war, and we owe that to them because of their service to our country. Patrick also supports legislation that ensures that Veterans don't lose their VA benefits if they go out of network to seek marijuana prescriptions for their conditions. He also supports providing the option of medical marijuana through the VA, so Veterans don't have to go outside the VA to get marijuana, and he supports the training and hiring of VA doctors that specialize in marijuana treatments. Oakland, CA became the second city to decriminalize entheogenic plants, including magic mushrooms. They can be used for the treatment of depression, as well as alcohol and tobacco addiction.
Better Care for the Elderly
Patrick was shocked to learn that there are business owners in America hiring migrants to work for the equivalence of $2/hr to take care of the elderly, while the business owners make millions of dollars in profits. It is very sad that these people are taking advantage of migrants that are just trying to make an honest living. This is the equivalence of enslaving people as modern-day indentured servants of illegal businesses, making their 'employees' work over 100 hours a week, and make so little that they have to live with the elderly that they take care of. It's also unfortunate that there are elderly that can't afford better care, due to a failing Social Security system. We need to do something about this problem - not just to root out the fraud, but also to provide better care to the elderly. We owe it to the generation before us, because we wouldn't exist without them!
Congress needs to pass legislation that provides better care conditions for the elderly, and increase funding for Social Security so that the elderly that can take care of themselves have enough money to live on. We need better caregivers for the elderly, so that retirement homes aren't like prisons. Even people that were not successful in their careers deserve to be taken care of in their elder years with compassion and respect, because elder rights are human rights.
Increasing the Minimum Age to Purchase Tobacco Products
Patrick supports legislation that increases the minimum age to purchase tobacco products to 21 years. Personally, Patrick thinks that tobacco products should be banned entirely, or that the sin tax, which is the tax that is applied to cigarettes and vaping products, should be increased to an exponential rate so that nearly all people can't afford to pay for them - causing the tobacco products market to collapse. Tobacco serves no purpose for a person's health. When Patrick's grandfather read an article that smoking tobacco caused cancer, he immediately got rid of all of his cigarettes and quit cold turkey - but not all people are that brave. That's why we need government to step in and save people from harming themselves with tobacco products. Patrick also supports banning smoking in poker rooms and casinos, some of the only public indoor places that people can still smoke. He also supports banning vaping indoors in public places, because the vapor can still give second hand effects to the people surrounding the user.
The Opioid Epidemic
Patrick McElhiney told then Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton in 2007 that opioids should be banned because of their addictive nature, based on his own experience with them, and she said publicly that we were not going to do that. It shows how out of touch our elected leaders were with the problem. Patrick no longer believes that all opioids should be banned, but he believes in strict controls that require that each patient taking them must contribute to society in some way that is verifiable by that patient's pain doctor. If the medications are causing the patient to not be able to function, then the patient shouldn't be given the medications, unless in the case of a fatal disease like cancer. Even then, the medications should still be under strict control.
Patrick believes that Johnson & Johnson, Purdue Pharma, and Israel-based Teva Pharmaceuticals need to be held accountable for the deaths of Americans, due to the false marketing that their products were not addictive. He has been personally negatively affected by at least one of these companies, as he used to take Oxycontin and Oxycodone for his chronic transformed migraines. Patrick has since then been put on a non-addictive pain medication. It took a lot of hard work to wean off of the Oxycontin - even when there was another medication waiting to take care of the pain. That's when Patrick really learned how addictive those medications really were. If you can feel withdrawals, even when you're taking another pain medication, then Oxycontin is definitely addictive.
Patrick is opposed to assisted injection sites, and even giving out clean syringes to drug addicts. There is no level of support for their illegal activities that can be tolerated by any government. The Crack House Statute of the Controlled Substances Act says that it's illegal, and the DEA will shut down assisted injection sites and prosecute individuals caught on premises, including the administrators. It's very sad how people are wasting away their lives due to drugs, and Patrick would like to hear about more ideas of how to solve these tough problems, but we shouldn't try to solve our nation's problems by breaking existing laws.
The EPA Lied About Monsanto's Products
It's a fact that the Trump Administration's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has lied about the harmful carcinogenic effects of Monsanto's Round-Up, which has rendered several multi-million dollar judgments against Bayer, the company that purchased Monsanto. There is a United Nations report that links cancer to Round-Up exposure for humans, and if it does that to humans, imagine what it's doing to the plants it is sprayed on! There are currently thousands of lawsuits pending against Monsanto's products in courts across the country. GMO foods, and foods produced using pesticides are likely as dangerous as the exposure to Round-Up its self, because the pesticides become part of the food. Agricultural Producers need to shift to affordably producing organic foods, because there will only be more and more lawsuits against Monsanto's products going forward. If you consume GMO foods, you may be prone to develop cancer!
Measles Outbreak
We've seen the most measles cases in America in 27 years due to anti-vaccination movements, which may lead the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to take measles off of the list of diseases that have been eradicated in the United States. It's unfortunate that people are going against science by suggesting that vaccines like MMR causes autism, when studies clearly show that they don't. Hundreds of people could die because of Measles in the United States, and it will likely infect everyone that isn't vaccinated eventually if the outbreak continues, because Measles is highly contagious. The CDC should declare a public emergency and require the vaccination of all Americans to ensure minimal loss of human life. When someone's life is in danger because of their bad decisions, governments have a responsibility to step in and make sure that that life isn't lost, and that's exactly what should be done with regards to the measles vaccine.
Professional Bias
It's been studied that doctors think that African Americans are stronger, and that they can handle more pain than white Americans - which isn't true. African Americans are treated disproportionately by doctors in the United States. The bias exists not just from physicians, but also from other professionals such as Police, primarily against African Americans. It's the equivalence of racism in the healthcare system - such as when doctors give less pain medication to an African American that has been injured because that physician believes that the patient can handle the pain better. It needs to stop, and it's difficult to get attention to it like you would at Starbuck's, that closed all of its stores for sensitivity training, because everything in the healthcare system is protected under the privacy of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). There should be sensitivity training of all doctors, but it's unlikely that all hospitals and doctors offices around the country would close up for business one morning, as they are all separate entities. There should be Federal mandates for the sensitivity training, to ensure that it is completed by every doctor.
Banning Surprise Medical Bills
Patrick supports legislation banning surprise out-of-pocket medical expenses for out-of-network expenses to patients that have health insurance, such as those that occur in hospitals. Surgeons, air transport, and ambulance charges are some of the types of fees that occur of this type. There is bipartisan support to tackle this issue in Congress and in the White House. Our nations leaders just need to do their job and pass it. It's completely unfair that you could incur a cost that you didn't know about when you're under anesthesia in the hospital, or in the most traumatic moment of your life. This is just another loophole that allows out-of-network providers to take advantage of the system for their own gain, regardless of the patient's wishes. The patient needs the services that are being provided, but they just expect that the providers must be in their network, or that at least the hospital provides a provider that is in-network for the patient.
