Erick and Whitney Anderson | Courtesy Whitney Anderson

For the past seven years, Erick and Whitney Anderson have tried and tried and tried to have children. They’ve prayed countless hours, struggled to put on happy faces when surrounded by friends with families, and at times isolated themselves in despair.

They’ve consulted doctors in Roanoke and Charlottesville: gynecologists, reproductive endocrinologists and a hematologist.

Whitney, 35, has had surgery twice. Three times she was artificially inseminated. Seven times they’ve tried in vitro fertilization. They’ve spent more than $40,000 in pursuit of a family, and they’re still spending.

The results? Five miscarriages, each more crushing than the last.

They formed an infertility support group here in Roanoke, and Whitney started a blog on the subject, whitneyanderick.com.

Whitney and I met at a coffee shop in Salem on Tuesday morning. She’s a Salem native and Virginia Tech graduate who works in Roanoke College’s public relations department. Read more »

Wikimedia Commons

Your daily Letter to the Columnist — April 16, 2013

Dear Dan,

Thanks for bringing to light the atrocity of the $26,000 cat bite.  I understand very well why this is happening.

Our health care system is the most expensive in the world because it is a profit-making industry.  If we take the insurance industry out of the health-care equation we can save enough money to give everyone the health care they need at an affordable cost

Canada and England have a national health service and their average per capita spending annually is about $3,000.  In the US we spend about $9,000 per person and have worse health care.

We need a national system of single payer health care that is affordable and comprehensive.  We don’t need more insurance — we need more health care.  The CEO’s of these insurance companies make millions of dollars in salaries – and we don’t have the care we need.

Yours for a healthier country,

Maria Termini
BOSTON, MASS.

David Kilmer (center front) with his wife Susan (right) and daughter Julia (left) surrounded by his friends in the Blue Ridge Bicycle Club who are raising money to help cover his bone-marrow transplant. The Club was meeting at The Cornerstone restaurant to kick-off the fundraising campaign for Kilmer. | Photo by Don Petersen

Some years ago here in the valley, Roanoke chiropractor David Kilmer had a job collecting and preparing transplant organs as part of a Virginia organ-donation network.

Now Kilmer, who’s 60 and lives with his wife and daughter in Botetourt County, is the one who needs the transplant.

Next week, after four years of battling blood cancers that have left him transfusion dependent and with no other options, he’ll travel to Arizona for a bone-marrow transplant.

That treatment will take most of six months and more than $500,000 — much of which won’t be covered by insurance. So, many people here in this region are rallying around Kilmer and his family with prayers of support and donations of money.

“You learn all kinds of things in struggles like this that you wouldn’t otherwise learn,” Kilmer told me in a conversation this week. “One of them is, people are really amazing. They come out of the woodwork to help you.”

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

Wikimedia Commons | Text on the bottle changed by Dan

Note from Dan: This was such a popular and eye-opening weekend thread that I decided to recycle it today, which marks Mitt Romney’s last visit to Roanoke before the election. It truly is troubling in terms of the kind of “(de)regulation” we can look forward to if Mitt Romney is elected president. Plus, I’m very miffed nobody has commented on the clever label work I did with the vial on the left.

We learned in The Roanoke Times Friday that medicines from the tainted compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts went to far many more Virginia clinics, hospitals and surgery centers than had been previously identified.

Locally, Carilion Clinic hospitals, Lewis Gale Medical Center hospitals, and many other hospitals and independent practices and surgery centers across the state used stuff from the New England Compounding Center.

So far, only steroids from NECC used in back-pain injections have been implicated in a deadly outbreak of fungal meningitis that as of Thursday had sickened 328 and killed 24 people in 18 states, including Virginia.

But 3,000 or so other hospitals and medical clinics in Virginia and across the country also purchased other medications from NECC. Those medical facilities are now notifying hundreds of thousands of patients that they have also been exposed to medicines from the tainted-drug manufacturer.

So it’s worth asking: how did this happen? How could the state of Massachusetts have allowed such an apparently incompetent drug manufacturer to grow and expand in a manner that became so deadly for so many people?

And the answer to that question goes directly back to 2004, and the we-don’t-need-no-regulations administration of then Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Read more »

Sandra Fluke | AP

Remember Sandra Fluke? She’s the former Girl Scout and recent Georgetown University law grad who Rush Limbaugh branded “a slut” and “a prostitute” earlier this year after she dared speak out in favor of healthcare coverage for birth control at Catholic employers such as Georgetown.

She’s coming to Hollins University Oct. 18 at 8 p.m. for an event that’s open to the public.

From the Hollins U website:

Fluke will take part in a conversation on civil discourse with Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Jill Weber beginning at 8 p.m. in the Richard Wetherill Visual Arts Center’s Niederer Auditorium. Admission is free.

Fluke testified before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee in February on the need to provide access to contraception. Since that time she has spoken about this and other issues of concern to women and young people across news outlets.

Recall, Fluke had sought to testify about the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. But Chair Darrell Issa, R-Calif., rejected her.

She later testified before a Democrats-only committee, and Limbaugh shortly afterward teed off her her remarks and branded her a “a slut” and a “prostitute.” Read more »

Mitt Romney continues to get asked about his federal income taxes, and he still refuses to answer the question as to how much he paid.

Now, he claims he never paid less than 13.6 percent, but his answer carefully referred to taxes generally, not income taxes specifically. That seemingly keeps the door open for Romney having paid zero federal income taxes during 2000-2009, which is what Sen. Harry Reid says he was told.

You’d think if Romney REALLY wanted to move onto those topics like the poverty rate in the U.S. or nukes in Iran, like he says, he’d just release his returns, and get back to food stamps or mullahs-with-nukes. But no. Watch:

Bonus: Check out this grafic charting the Mittster’s 5-day evolution on Medicare. He moved from gutting the program  by more than $1 trillion, to promising to restore $716 billion future savings under the Affordable Care Act.

That’s a $1.7 trillion swing in 5 days! It’s a faster flip than the one he did on the individual mandate!

Joe Mabel | Wikimedia Commons

Note from Dan: While I’m away with my family on vacation, I’m treating you to some columns from the past year. This one appeared March 13. The health insurance industry is alive and doing very well.

Once again, I’m pondering what to do after I get out of this writing business.

I’ve decided to form a health insurance company. In my own increasingly jaded view, it’s the best racket going.

Boiled down to its core, insurance is bookmaking. When you buy auto insurance, you’re placing a bet you hope you don’t win, because that probably means you got into an accident. The same goes for life insurance. It’s a bet you will die.

If an auto insurance company or a life insurance company fails to pay off, customers will flee and the company will go out of business. The same happens to a bookie who welshes on paying off sports bets.

But health insurance is different in a number of ways.

First, most of us are captive customers, signed up with the insurer their employer chooses and subsidizes. We can’t easily or affordably jump to another company.

Second, health insurers employ legions of desk-jockey goons. Their goal is to find loopholes on how not to pay off on health insurance claims, and to deny coverage for procedures your doctors say are necessary.

One of the ways they keep you confused is via those confounding Explanation of Benefits forms, which are hard for anyone who doesn’t have a master’s degree in accounting to understand.

These are separate from your medical bills, mind you (which are always formatted differently than EOBs). Actually, that’s the point — to create a big ball of confusion so consumers will just give up trying to get their insurance company to pay. Read more »

Michaela Scott | from Mike Scott

(Note from Dan: The following is by Michaela Scott, the charming daughter of regular poster Mike Scott.  Mike introduced me to her in Martin’s in downtown Roanoke  last Christmas-time, when we met to hear Richard Beason’s son and his band play at Martin’s downtown. Michaela’s in South Korea, teaching English, and will soon move to Saudi Arabia, where she’ll be doing the same thing for 9 months, which may prove to be a culture shock. Here, she describes access to health care in South Korea. Hold on to your seats.)

By Michaela Scott

“Tea-cher!” my students scream. They have answered a question correctly but I gave the points to another team. Why? I’m an otherwise healthy 25-year-old that has gone completely deaf in my right ear. I can’t hear anything. It’s not just affecting my work but my balance as well.

Yesterday I was caught off-guard and ran smack into a pole. Which was entertaining for everyone around me but not so great for me. Or team three sitting closest to my bunk ear at the moment. I have to go to a doctor but there’s one problem: I live in Busan, South Korea. It’s the second largest city in Korea with 4 million people, roughly the size of Chicago, but it’s virtually unknown. I had to Google it when I discovered my placement.

Come to think of it, the whole of Korea is basically unknown. Geographically people often picture a third world country somewhere between Japan and “that country where my jeans are made”. While still technically at war, South Korea has defied all expectations and rocketed to economic super stardom over the last 30 years.

Everything was built a little too quickly to be anything but utilitarian. With its massive concrete apartment blocks rising up en masse and neon-lit everything the country looks a little like the Eastern bloc to a trip to Vegas. It much more closely resembles Japan a few decades ago than the squalid conditions still prevalent in China or India, other recent economic success stories. Of course, there is still the whole “technically at war” caveat but it feels like any other bustling Asian country from day to day.

Still, I am not excited about the prospect of seeing a doctor. The last time I saw a doctor was the summer before I moved to Korea. I managed to break my knee cap in a devastatingly stupid rope swing accident. This happened roughly a month after my graduation from the University of Virginia and in the middle of sending out job applications for the coming year. Read more »

And now hear this from The Roanoke Tea Party

(Note from Dan: This is an email I received Tuesday from Leslie Tarbutton).

“The Roanoke Tea Party will be having a meeting, on July 5th, 2012. The meeting will begin at 6:30 P.M and will be held at the Holiday Inn Tanglewood.

The meeting’s theme is that “Submission is Not An Option.” We will be looking at the options available to fight the steadily increasing level of tyranny displayed by the Federal Government.

People are frustrated and angry because they continue to see the steady march to socialism moving forward unchecked. They are looking for answers. The answers are readily available to these questions. Read more »

Listen to President Obama describe the whys and wherefores of the individual mandate:

Oops! Sorry! That was Mitt Romney, not the president.

Silly me.

(h/t Americablog)