I am going to take a detour through our planned goal of coming up with the answer to the health care problem. Why? Because of this next article that made my spine tingle with fear. This article appeared in FoxNews.com and was about a 1-year baby. In September, doctors told 1-year-old Marwa’s parents that their little girl was facing impending death and put her in an induced coma. On Nov. 22, just as doctors were preparing to end her life support, the girl awoke.

Doctors put Marwa, who is from Marseilles, France, in an induced coma after an aggressive virus attacked her nervous system, Inside Edition reported. After Marwa was hospitalized in September, doctors said the outlook was grim. “Doctors think she will never be able breath on her own,” her father, Mohamed Bouchenafa, wrote online, including that she may not walk or eat on her own. The family then started a social media campaign to raise support for Marwa, whose twin sister is named Safa.

In a video posted to Facebook, little Marwa, from Marseilles, France, could be seen with her eyes wide open, and smiling as her father repeated her name. 1-year-old twin girl awoke from a coma, just as doctors and family members were preparing to take her off life support. Doctors put her in an induced coma after an aggressive virus attacked her nervous system, but after months of respiratory assistance, doctors suggested it was time to turn off life support.

“Doctors think she will never be able breathe on her own,” her father, Mohamed Bouchenafa, wrote in a Change.org petition, including that she may not walk or eat on her own. The family started the petition to raise money to take the case to court.

Over 115,000 individuals signed the petition, but doctors told the family that, due to budgetary issues, they would turn off the girl’s life support within a week.

Even though their community gained more than 100,000 supporters, Bouchenafa said the hospital was going through budget issues, and doctors said they would turn off life support within a week.

Then days later, Marwa awoke on her own unassisted by the ventilator. Mohamed captured the moment in a video posted to Facebook.“My little wonder can smile at me, finally continuing to battle,” Bouchenafa wrote in an update. “Her face has softer traits than normal … but her condition remains stable, aside from a fever from time to time.”

According to Marwa’s father, she continues to receive ongoing treatment, but the family is grateful for every small milestone.

 

Also, here is another case, this 22-year-old, once in a coma, is now being called a “walking miracle” after wiggling her toe only moments before family members prepared to take her off life support.

“I can’t remember the crash at all,” U.K. resident Sam Hemming said. “When I look at pictures of me in the coma, it seems unreal, and when I hear that my toe saved me, it’s amazing.”

Hemming was in the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s car in July when it crashed, and flipped over. She had just recently graduated from Bangor University in Wales with a law degree.

“Her head smashed through the window and hit the central reservation and took her left ear off and she was knocked out,” her mom, Carol, told SWNS.

Her boyfriend, Tom Curtis, suffered minor injuries, but Hemming’s family was informed that she was brain dead with no hope of recovery. Doctors deemed one side of her brain “dead” and the other side, left undamaged, is not a part of the brain that is normally used.

After 19 days of being unresponsive in a coma, “the doctors told us it was time to say goodbye,” (again probably due to budgetary problems) her mom, 44, said. “We gathered in her room and said our farewells.”

Suddenly, doctors noticed Hemming’s big toe wiggle. According to SWNS, she had not been responding to other tests that days, but when a medic accidently touched her right foot with an ice-cold wipe, her body reacted. “It was amazing,” Carol said. “She had literally come back from the dead.”

Doctors put her back on life support and within the next few days, Hemming was breathing on her own. Within eight weeks, Hemming was able to return to her home in Hereford, where her parents would continue her care. Within months, she taught herself to speak and walk again.

“Why her condition is different to other people is that the part of her brain, which most people don’t use, hers has developed into speech and movement,” Carol said. “Doctors are totally in shock.” Hemming now receives daily physiotherapy and treatment for PTSD.

In addition, doctors are continuing to help her develop brain function, but according to SWNS, she’s willing to put in all the hard work toward one goal. “Before the accident I wanted to be a solicitor,” Hemming said. “That ambition hasn’t changed. I still want a career in the law.”

This is the European health care system. Could this happen here in the U.S.? With the overwhelming desire to have a health care system that is available to all, with no restrictions to how much care, drugs, surgery and the cost there will be difficult decisions to be made. And the “powers that be” may have to set restrictions as to the approved drugs allowed and limitations of care-the death panels!

Let’s look at the real cost of health care. Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar wrote in the Associated Press on December the second that the nations health care tab grew at the fastest rate in eight years driven by the coverage expansion in President Barack Obama’s law and by costly prescription drugs, the government said Friday.

The growth of 5.8 percent in 2015 boosted total health care spending to $3.2 trillion. That’s an average of $9,990 per person, although the vast share of that money is spent caring for the sickest patients.

Health spending grew about 2 percentage points faster than the overall economy in 2015, said the report from nonpartisan economic experts at the Department of Health and Human Services. That’s a problem because it makes it harder for government programs, employers, and individuals to afford the level of health care that Americans are used to having.

The report was disappointing news for the outgoing Obama administration, which had enjoyed a long stretch of historically low increases in health care spending, and had sought to credit its 2010 health care overhaul for taming costs. It’s a reality check for President-elect Donald Trump, who did not focus much on health care during his campaign and implied that problems could be easily fixed.

America has struggled for decades to balance health care cost, access, and quality. Obama’s law made significant strides to expand access, and the report found nearly 91 percent of U.S. residents now have coverage. But the problem of costs has re-emerged. That’s partly because people with health insurance use more medical care than the uninsured, which tend to postpone going to the doctor. Some of the newly insured turned out to be sicker than those who were already covered.

The report “casts further doubt on the extent of a permanent slowdown in health cost growth,” said economist Eugene Steuerle of the nonpartisan Urban Institute.

In a milestone for data-watchers, the report found that the federal government became the largest payer for health care in 2015. Washington accounted for 29 percent of overall spending. That was followed by households (28 percent), businesses (20 percent), and state and local governments (17 percent). In doing the analysis, the HHS experts count the employee share of premiums for job-based insurance as spending by households.

Spending by private health insurance plans increased by 7.2 percent in 2015, and Medicaid spending grew by 9.7 percent. In both cases, the health care law was a driver. Nine million people had private insurance through the health care law’s subsidized markets, and nearly 10 million had Medicaid coverage as a result of the law. Increases in Medicaid spending will be a problem for states. Starting next year, states that expanded the program under the health law must gradually pick up a share of the costs.

Spending on prescription drugs dispensed through pharmacies increased by 9 percent in 2015. Although that rate of growth was less than in 2014, the report said drug spending grew faster any other category, including hospitals and doctors. It wasn’t only pricey new drugs for hepatitis C infection driving the trend, but also new cancer drugs and price increases for older brand-name and generic drugs.

Medicare was a bright spot in the report, growing only by 4.5 percent, despite roughly 10,000 baby boomers a day reaching eligibility age. Calculated on a per-beneficiary basis, Medicare spending grew by just 1.7 percent.

Former White House official Ezekiel Emanuel said that’s partly due to the Obama administration’s stewardship. Not only did the health care law cut payments to service providers, it set into motion a series of initiatives that aim to reward quality, improve coordination and penalize poor performance.

Republicans would be foolish to sweep away Obama’s Medicare changes, Emanuel said. “In the long term, the only way we get rate of increase down is by experimenting with alternative payment models,” he said. “We need to push harder and harder.”

Still, there seems to be little to cheer about as health care costs start to accelerate. Two of the major brakes on costs in the Obama health care law — a Medicare spending board and a tax on high-priced insurance plans — are in limbo and likely to be repealed if ascendant Republicans follow through on their promises. It’s unclear whether the GOP has better ideas, and even more uncertain whether Democrats would support them.

“You get back to this old problem we have of spending growing faster than the economy,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the America Action Forum, a center-right think tank. “If you don’t solve the cost problem, it will undercut coverage expansions because they get too expensive.”

• Luke Gale wrote that providing care to high-cost patients is a central challenge to the healthcare system as reported by Uwe Reinhardt.
• In 2013, 10% of patients accounted for nearly two-thirds of healthcare spending and 1% accounted for more than one-fifth of spending.
• Whether Republicans repeal the ACA with or without a replacement, it will not solve a fundamental problem with healthcare, Reinhardt wrote, posing the questions: What treatments should high-cost patients receive and how should they be financed?

Most high-cost patients are chronically ill individuals with multiple conditions that can be treated, although at a high cost they cannot individually afford. If the goal of health reform is provide these patients with access to affordable healthcare services through a private health insurance system, it is inevitable that some people will have to pay more than is “fair,” Reinhardt wrote. Or a more onerous, fearful thought- maybe we will have to limit the amount of care and/or terminate a patient’s care after a predetermined time or budget limit.

The ACA subsidizes care for high-cost patients through provisions like the individual mandate, community-rating premiums, and guaranteed issue. These provisions essentially force healthier individuals to pay more than their fair share in premiums. Republicans have adopted an ideological argument against the ACA that targets rising premiums, but “the health insurance debate will be driven mostly by actuarial logic, not ideology,” Reinhardt wrote.

So far, Republican proposals for a replacement to the ACA, which generally include a combination of tax credits, health savings accounts, and interstate insurance sales, would not protect high-cost patients from extreme financial burden. It is possible that components of the ACA reappear in Republican healthcare plans.

“However, there is no getting around the actuarial mathematics on which health insurance everywhere in the world rests — public as well as private,” Reinhardt concluded. “Unless, that is, our government is content to leave millions of Americans without the benefits of health insurance, and the access to essential healthcare it provides.”

I think that is why we are seeing such a push for a change in the health care system as well as the realization of the cost, which everybody is finally realizing as non sustainable and may lead to some difficult future decisions regarding care if both the Republicans and the Democrats don’t work together to solve the major costs and specifics of delivering care to all and who is going to be responsible for decisions regarding possible limitations, who is paying the tab and finally come up with a realistic system of Tort reform.

I think that we should next look at what Tom Price, the new Head of HHS has planned for the new health care program that the GOP has designed to “replace” the Affordable Health Care “law.”

And let’s get over the fact that the “most unlikely” candidate for the Presidency won the election. Accept the results as declared by the law. Stop spending or more…waste millions of dollars ($7 million) on recounts when those millions of dollars could be used to fund real charities and not lining the pockets of ridiculous Jill Stein. Get a life Ms. Stein and please fade into the background or better disappear all together.