I thought that Those Non-profit Packers was a wonderful article about how the Packers made it to the Super Bowl this year being the only tem in the league to be owned by their fans. It’s cool that volunteers run the stadium and the community really cares and feels apart of the team. They donate 60 cents on the dollar of concessions to local charities. Though I am not a huge football fan, knowing this information has defiantly changed my view of the Greenbay Packers. I wanted to find out a little more about the team and their history so I looked them up on Wikipedia. It turns out that the Packers are the second oldest franchise in the NFL and the last vestige of “small town teams”. If you are interested take a look. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bay_Packers
The Value of Nonprofit Health Care article had a line in it that stood out to me. “The nonprofit sector is where we go to protect our values and cultures. The nonprofit sector is societies safety net.” I have never considered that a nonprofit might be more culturally sensitive or even more accommodating to specific values than government programs. I can see the religious organizations being more appeasing to those who hold strong beliefs regarding their religion but under what other circumstances is a nonprofit more appealing morally to a particular individual? I was also surprised to see that according to the article, nonprofit health care and insurance providers typically provided their services at a lower price and offer a wider variety of health plans for quality member satisfaction. I am doubled covered through my parents at Kaiser so all of my prescriptions are free. I have a lot of friends that cannot afford health insurance so they never go to the doctor and have to get their medication alternative ways ( like through Planned Parrenthood). With so many Americans being uninsured, how can these “nonprofit” hospitals be such saviors to the middle and lower class? The priceis are still outrageous and so for many, health care takes a back seat. This goes back to the argument we had in class about the pros and cons to universal health care but I do not believe that the current system is working and I certainty don’t think that health care, even through a nonprofit hospital, is affordable for all.
The main concern of the Mergers of For, Profit, Nonprofit Hospitals was; will the same, low-income generating services be provided to the same lower class population? Burn centers, drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers and trauma centers are all areas in medicine that don’t typically turn over a lot of profit but these are the services many nonprofit hospitals are willing to provide. This article left me wondering about all the rehab centers in the US and how many of them are nonprofit. Places like Serenity Lane charge their patients a lot to get treatment, how do the insurance companies play into this and what to rehab centers have to do to get that nonprofit status?
ADD grows up was my favorite article for this week. I completely agree with the last speaker and think that America relies to heavily on drugs. Any imperfection results in a little blue pill to make it better. ADD pills can really affect people’s personality and the change between medicated and not medicated days can be drastic. My mom is a first grade teacher and while all of those out of tern speaking fidgety students are challenging, when they are their medication they often seems sad and not themselves. It seems like a pretty fine line between doing what is best for your child and giving them what would appear to be the “upper hand” and letting them be who they are. I Youtubed pros and cons of ADD and found that MTD did a “True Life” series about being addicted to Adderall. I think it does a pretty good job of showing some extreme cases of ADD meds gone wrong. Interesting stuff, though, obviously, I don’t think it is representative of all people who take Adderall. Take a look
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXZOOnZXAaQ
The chapter in the book we read for this week had a lot of information and statistics in it about the health care and nonprofit versus for profit hospitals, but I felt all the numbers were really outdated. How much has the world of health care changed since 1997? Probably quite a bit. It is challenging to take in all this information about the health care sector when we don’t know if these same trends are continuing today, 13 years later.
Thank you for the video on the darker side of ADD meds. That was really scary. Can you imagine being addicted to drugs before you hit puberty? I wonder how that affects your body's growth. It is hard to imagine how you can take a pill that makes you focus, then expect someone to lead a "normal" life without the drug once they have achieved good grades in high school. It is just prolonging the failure. It seems as though you should have to learn to deal with your condition. (**I know some people need it)
ReplyDeleteAs for the comment you made about non profit hospitals and how can they be such saviors to the middle and lower class? No kidding! I am unclear too. All I can think of is that they will see you even if you can't afford it therefore you won't die. Still though, you owe the money.
The Green Bay Packer article was a really interesting read. I like that you researched further and found out they were the last of the "small town" teams. That made me think of our community. The Packers are really just a further extension of what most towns do every friday night in the fall. Go to any High School football game and you'll find volunteers or nonprofit clubs running the concession stands, parking cars and selling 50/50 raffle tickets. A lot of times the referees and coaches are volunteers as well. Even at a Duck game, you'll find different clubs and organizations running the concession stands or attending to other duties. Think how much money that saves the School districts or the U of O. It's much easier to mobilize a group than individuals. If it wasn't for nonprofit groups having any kind of event would cost much more money. Green Bay saw that early on and chose to help out in order to save their teams. I hope that communities step up and volunteer to help offset the current budget cuts happening across school districts.
ReplyDeleteThanks for including more research on the Packers, it continued to be interesting to read more about how they give back to their community. I too have seen the video you posted and it's a big wake up call to how out of control the system can be and how patients aren't always protected. I agree that the statistics we read in the book were really outdated, it would be interesting to get more recent numbers.
ReplyDeleteLike I mentioned on Chrisi's blog, I think a large part the problems we see in our health care system is the fact that insurance companies are ran primarily for-profit. Why is it that we have been okay with this as a nation when we have had this issue of costly health services and costly insurance. It should be one or the other, and I vote insurance cover more stuff, and be available to more people! I feel so ignorant when learning about these issues. Talking about them brings too many questions to mind that I have no clue how to begin answering. I know I am not the only one. But why aren't more people asking these questions too? I just think that if services aren't going to become cheaper--which I don't think they will--then, insurance should, the only way it can truly be cheaper is by covering more of the cost of these services as well.
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