Hospital staffs sometimes must play detective when an unidentified patient arrives for care. Establishing identity helps avoid the treatment risks that come with not knowing a patient's medical history. The workers also strive to find next of kin to help make medical decisions.
States that have expanded Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act have the lowest uninsured rates, with most states in the northeast having uninsured rates in the single digits. Whatever you think about the Affordable Care Act, it has gotten a lot of people health insurance over the past few years.
Life expectancy only increased significantly a hundred years ago or so. And contrary to popular belief, this change had little to do with modern medicine.
“The most important thing is not medication; it’s sanitation,” Lieberman said. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people learned how germs worked and started doing things like building more sewers, boiling water for childbirth and making sure drinking water was clean. Countries also got better at distributing food, which decreased starvation, Vijg said. Subscribe to The Morning Email. Wake up to the day's most important news.
“We can thank public health far more than we can thank medicines,” Lieberman said, noting that by the time antibiotic use became widespread after World War II, mortality rates had already plummeted. In 1870, the average person in Europe or America lived to their mid-30s. Life expectancy rose steadily from there, reaching 58 to 65 years in 1950.
Not that medicine has been useless. After sanitation, antibiotics and vaccines have been the biggest boons to life expectancy, partly because they fight diseases that became common when people started farming.
“They’ve basically got us back to where we used to be,” Lieberman said, adding, “The average person who walks in to see a doctor is seeing them for a disease that we didn’t used to get.”
When inventor Frederick Banting discovered insulin in 1923, he refused to put his name on the patent. He felt it was unethical for a doctor to profit from a discovery that would save lives. Banting’s co-inventors, James Collip and Charles Best, sold the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for a mere $1. They wanted everyone who needed their medication to be able to afford it.
Today, Banting and colleagues would be spinning in their graves: Their drug, which many of the 30 million Americans with diabetes rely on, has become the poster child for pharmaceutical price gouging.
If you’ve ever spent a night tossing and turning, you already know how you’ll feel the next day — tired, cranky, and out of sorts. But missing out on the recommended 7 to 9 hours of shut-eye nightly does more than make you feel groggy and grumpy. The long term effects of sleep deprivation are real. It drains your mental abilities and puts your physical health at real risk. Science has linked poor slumber with all kinds of health problems, from weight gain to a weakened immune system.