Epiphany

In two days, some Christians will celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany. Like Thanksgiving, Christmas, real Christians should celebrate epiphanies year round. An epiphany is when you come to a realization, a sudden manifestation, a real experience that should have been clear to you many times before, but hits you in the here and now...a beautiful sunset, the innocence of a small child, the indescribable aroma of a flower, or even good food. Thank God part of the beauty of human existence is the experience of epiphanies.

One of my friends, a well-known minister and his wife were on vacation, traveling to visit their daughter in Tennessee. They just wanted to get away from everything and visit their grandchildren. They stopped in a small town, a small restaurant, and were no more than seated when an older man, clean, well-dressed, came over and greeted them. They thought, “now what does he want, we just want to be alone.” This old man said, “welcome to *name of the town* we are so happy to have visitors. Where are you from, and what do you do?”

Annoyed, my friend told him where he was from and that he was a pastor of a church. The old man said, “I must tell you my favorite preacher story: I was from a very poor home of drunk parents. There was a church up the road and I decided to slip up there one Sunday, sat in the back row but something caused me to go back. I would always get up and leave early, before the pastor came to the door. But one Sunday, he caught me because he came to the backdoor to the give the benediction. He said, 'I see you here every Sunday, and I want to meet you. Whose boy are you?'” I resisted to give my father's name, because he was such a menace in the community. The pastor said, 'I know, we have the same father, the heavenly father.' This pastor started a relationship with me which led to my salvation, even my attending college. Don't ever think you are not important.” Then, the man got up and left.

The waitress had been kind in waiting to take our order until the conversation was finished. She said, “I didn't want to bother you while the governor was talking to you. You know that Mr. Prentice Cooper was governor from 1939 to 1945?” Think of that epiphany, a Christian with a Christian testimony, even a former governor.

I can think of no greater epiphany than realizing the importance of raising godly children in an ungodly world. Satan is using everything wicked to bring mankind down to his level. I have said to my only child, my son, “Satan wants your two sons.” Both of my grandsons were raised on the foreign mission field, where both of their parents were foreign missionaries. Both grandsons are now college graduates. The greatest epiphany in the world for these two boys, like their father, like their grandfather and the ancestry before me, would be for these two boys to spend time on the family farm as did their father. Now in heaven, two have seen their great grandfather, a solid rock of Christian endeavor and endurance. To have seen their godly great grandmother, both nurturing animals and children, plant life, their daily walk in the simplicity of nature. The good earth, God's rewards of sunshine and fresh water.

For one who is educated, with a life spent in the complexities of the trillion industry of death and disease, the epiphany of health care has been an awakening. Why not treat life instead of disease? Why cover up symptoms, intermediate relief, just to have someone coming back? The greatest player in the New World Order is Big Pharma. Have you noticed the proliferation of drug stores in your community? The same Greek root-word describes both pharmacia and sorcery. The purveyors of death have captivated pharmacy schools, healthcare schools. Since healthcare depends entirely on government grants and largess, no one questions anything anymore, we have become a “pharmaholic” society. Even the big three: heart attack, cancer, and stroke, all controlled by phamaholics. Six million Americans are alcoholic, at least 50 million Americans are pharmaholic. A pharmacist moved out of my building, his library was mostly pharmacy manuals and sales catalogs. The tragedy, pharmacists are educated by Big Phama, prescribers of pharmaceuticals, doctors of every discipline educated by Big Pharma.

It all started in the garden, eating the wrong things; when did you hear that cancer thrives on sugar? Sugar, one form or another, usually fructose, is added to every processed food. God installed filtration systems in our body such as the liver, because He knew the earth would eventually be turned into a big garbage can. If any sick among you, let him pray, if any afflicted (James 5:13, Isaiah 53) Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.(1 Peter 2:24)

Remember when you go to the communion table, you celebrate not only Christ's remission of sin, but His healing of your sickness. America has become a wilderness of corruption, the most blessed nation, corrupted by those not only content to pick your pockets here, but send your means of making a living, your job, over seas. In traveling the world, every continent, I've seen American industry and know-how everywhere. Most religious denominations were started in America, and you would be amazed to see how many churches, most of them cults are strewn around the islands of the South Pacific.

In November, a Carnival luxury cruise liner was stranded 200 miles off of the California/Mexican coast. These 4500 people aboard were imprisoned in a prehistoric world of eating cold food with none of the air conditioning by which we all have been spoiled, without power they had none of today's excesses, games, television, computers, even swimming pools. In an century of enlightenment, when we know more about microbiology than ever before, spoiled people have not learned yet that the swimming pool is a cauldron of disease.

It should be an epiphany to any thinking person that we cannot live without convenience...computerized cash register, instant gratification everywhere. It should be an epiphany that with all our knowledge, billions on research, and the history of human reactions, if drugs are bad for you, don't use them. Alcohol is a drug, 50% of all murders attributed to alcohol, 50% of all divorces are alcohol-related, 60% of all emergency room visits alcohol-related, 75% of all prison cells filled by those who could not control alcohol. Like smoking tobacco, now limited in every way, if these drugs are so bad for you, why not make them totally illegal? We are like sheep and as the great radio commentator Edmond Murrow said, “we are sheep ruled by wolves.”

NY Times Article

With Medicaid Cuts, Doctors and Patients Drop Out
By KEVIN SACK
Published: March 15, 2010


FLINT, Mich. — Carol Y. Vliet’s cancer returned with a fury last summer, the tumors metastasizing to her brain, liver, kidneys and throat.
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Stephen McGee for The New York Times

Rebecca and Jeoffrey Curtis searched for care for their son. In the process, they felt like “second-class citizens,” Ms. Curtis said.
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Carol Y. Vliet began chemotherapy to treat her cancer, but lost her doctor because he stopped seeing Medicaid patients.
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As she began a punishing regimen of chemotherapy and radiation, Mrs. Vliet found a measure of comfort in her monthly appointments with her primary care physician, Dr. Saed J. Sahouri, who had been monitoring her health for nearly two years.

She was devastated, therefore, when Dr. Sahouri informed her a few months later that he could no longer see her because, like a growing number of doctors, he had stopped taking patients with Medicaid.

Dr. Sahouri said that his reimbursements from Medicaid were so low — often no more than $25 per office visit — that he was losing money every time a patient walked in his exam room.

The final insult, he said, came when Michigan cut those payments by 8 percent last year to help close a gaping budget shortfall.

“My office manager was telling me to do this for a long time, and I resisted,” Dr. Sahouri said. “But after a while you realize that we’re really losing money on seeing those patients, not even breaking even. We were starting to lose more and more money, month after month.”

It has not taken long for communities like Flint to feel the downstream effects of a nationwide torrent of state cuts to Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor and disabled. With states squeezing payments to providers even as the economy fuels explosive growth in enrollment, patients are finding it increasingly difficult to locate doctors and dentists who will accept their coverage. Inevitably, many defer care or wind up in hospital emergency rooms, which are required to take anyone in an urgent condition.

Mrs. Vliet, 53, who lives just outside Flint, has yet to find a replacement for Dr. Sahouri. “When you build a relationship, you want to stay with that doctor,” she said recently, her face gaunt from disease, and her head wrapped in a floral bandanna. “You don’t want to go from doctor to doctor to doctor and have strangers looking at you that don’t have a clue who you are.”

The inadequacy of Medicaid payments is severe enough that it has become a rare point of agreement in the health care debate between President Obama and Congressional Republicans. In a letter to Congress after their February health care meeting, Mr. Obama wrote that rates might need to rise if Democrats achieved their goal of extending Medicaid eligibility to 15 million uninsured Americans.

In 2008, Medicaid reimbursements averaged only 72 percent of the rates paid by Medicare, which are themselves typically well below those of commercial insurers, according to the Urban Institute, a research group. At 63 percent, Michigan had the sixth-lowest rate in the country, even before the recent cuts.

In Flint, Dr. Nita M. Kulkarni, an obstetrician, receives $29.42 from Medicaid for a visit that would bill $69.63 from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. She receives $842.16 from Medicaid for a Caesarean delivery, compared with $1,393.31 from Blue Cross.

If she takes too many Medicaid patients, she said, she cannot afford overhead expenses like staff salaries, the office mortgage and malpractice insurance that will run $42,800 this year. She also said she feared being sued by Medicaid patients because they might be at higher risk for problem pregnancies, because of underlying health problems.

As a result, she takes new Medicaid patients only if they are relatives or friends of existing patients. But her guilt is assuaged somewhat, she said, because her husband, who is also her office mate, Dr. Bobby B. Mukkamala, an ear, nose and throat specialist, is able to take Medicaid. She said he is able to do so because only a modest share of his patients have it.

The states and the federal government share the cost of Medicaid, which saw a record enrollment increase of 3.3 million people last year. The program now benefits 47 million people, primarily children, pregnant women, disabled adults and nursing home residents. It falls to the states to control spending by setting limits on eligibility, benefits and provider payments within broad federal guidelines.

Michigan, like many other states, did just that last year, packaging the 8 percent reimbursement cut with the elimination of dental, vision, podiatry, hearing and chiropractic services for adults.

When Randy C. Smith showed up recently at a Hamilton Community Health Network clinic near Flint, complaining of a throbbing molar, Dr. Miriam L. Parker had to inform him that Medicaid no longer covered the root canal and crown he needed.

A landscaper who has been without work for 15 months, Mr. Smith, 46, said he could not afford the $2,000 cost. “I guess I’ll just take Tylenol or Motrin,” he said before leaving.

This year, Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, has revived a proposal to impose a 3 percent tax on physician revenues. Without the tax, she has warned, the state may have to reduce payments to health care providers by 11 percent.

In Flint, the birthplace of General Motors, the collapse of automobile manufacturing has melded with the recession to drive unemployment to a staggering 27 percent. About one in four non-elderly residents of Genesee County are uninsured, and one in five depends on Medicaid. The county’s Medicaid rolls have grown by 37 percent since 2001, and the program now pays for half of all childbirths.

But surveys show the share of doctors accepting new Medicaid patients is declining. Waits for an appointment at the city’s federally subsidized health clinic, where most patients have Medicaid, have lengthened to four months from six weeks in 2008. Parents like Rebecca and Jeoffrey Curtis, who had brought their 2-year-old son, Brian, to the clinic, say they have struggled to find a pediatrician.

“I called four or five doctors and asked if they accepted our Medicaid plan,” said Ms. Curtis, a 21-year-old waitress. “It would always be, ‘No, I’m sorry.’ It kind of makes us feel like second-class citizens.”

As physicians limit their Medicaid practices, emergency rooms are seeing more patients who do not need acute care.

At Genesys Regional Medical Center, one of three area hospitals, Medicaid volume is up 14 percent over last year. At Hurley Medical Center, the city’s safety net hospital, Dr. Michael Jaggi detects the difference when advising emergency room patients to seek follow-up treatment.

“We get met with the blank stare of ‘Where do I go from here?’ ” said Dr. Jaggi, the chief of emergency medicine.

New doctors, with their mountains of medical school debt, are fleeing the state because of payment cuts and proposed taxes. Dr. Kiet A. Doan, a surgeon in Flint, said that of 72 residents he had trained at local hospitals only two had stayed in the area, and both are natives.

Access to care can be even more challenging in remote parts of the state. The MidMichigan Medical Center in Clare, about 90 miles northwest of Flint, closed its obstetrics unit last year because Medicaid reimbursements covered only 65 percent of actual costs. Two other hospitals in the region might follow suit, potentially leaving 16 contiguous counties without obstetrics.

Medicaid enrollees in Michigan’s midsection have grown accustomed to long journeys for care. This month, Shannon M. Brown of Winn skipped work to drive her 8-year-old son more than two hours for a five-minute consultation with Dr. Mukkamala. Her pediatrician could not find a specialist any closer who would take Medicaid, she said.

Later this month, she will take the predawn drive again so Dr. Mukkamala can remove her son’s tonsils and adenoids. “He’s going to have to sit in the car for three hours after his surgery,” Mrs. Brown said. “I’m not looking forward to that one.”

Addition by Dr. Morris:

The above should be read by every American. I well remember the first issue of “Medical Economics” which came out while I was still in school. Even a bird, (with a brain about the size of a pin head) does not defecate in its own nest. From the beginning of this republic, there has been a wonderful privacy and confidence between doctors and their patients. In one year, with the present Obama-Democrat Administration, we have seen most of the values of American life destroyed...now healthcare...defecating in our own nests. Now, instead of Veterans and welfare patients being subjected to Communist care, all of you will know the trauma. As with most things, you don't realize the value in what you have until you have lost it. The same people who have brought disaster to so many areas of this once wealthy, happy, nation, could have corrected many of the abuses such as run away insurance rates, asinine big Pharma costs propped up by advertising. We have waited our lifetime to see people become interested in their own health, know their own body, learn prevention and supplements, just to see the ship go down with an overload of excess in the form of government regulations, federal, state, and local control.

Dr. Morris