Biased LA Times Article About Cedars-Sinai

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An article in today’s LA Times about Anthem Blue Cross excluding Cedars-Sinai and UCLA Medical Center from the health plan provided to people employed by the City of L.A. (due to these two institutions’ prices being higher than some other community hospitals) omitted several crucial facts.  These facts were provided to the reporter, but for some reason were not included anywhere in the article.

As someone who knows the extraordinarily high quality of care that you and your colleagues provide to all of our patients, you may have taken exception to the statement that our clinical quality isn’t measurably better than other community hospitals and therefore is not worth the higher cost.

I’ve attached some key facts about Cedars-Sinai quality that were not included in the article.  I’ve also attached key points about the unique, highly specialized services provided by academic medical centers like Cedars-Sinai that are not provided at lower-cost community hospitals, but which benefit the entire region and nation.

Cedars-Sinai treats more patients with highly complex medical problems than any other medical center in California.  Much of this highly specialized care – for complex cancers, advanced heart disease and serious brain diseases, for example — is not available at community hospitals, as it requires an enormous investment in special technology and equipment, as well as superbly trained experts on staff.

We also provide care for a high volume of Medi-Cal patients and uninsured patients as part of our mission.  In most cases we are paid only a small fraction of the cost, or in some cases not paid at all.   In fact, the total amount of Cedars-Sinai’s subsidy of these programs, as well as the hundreds of programs and services we provide in the community, and our research and education programs – was more than $600 million last year.

While many people recognize the importance and value of these services we provide, others have not connected the dots about the importance of how these programs are funded, and the shared stake that everyone has in keeping these programs viable for the continued health and well-being of the community, California, and the nation.

While academic medical centers will always be more costly than community hospitals for all the reasons I’ve noted, we must also uphold our obligation to accomplish our mission in the most efficient way possible.  We must continue to look for ways to lower costs without lowering quality, and without losing sight of our unique mission. Our current work to do this, including initiatives such as Cedars-Sinai Medicine as well as the work being done in every department to ensure we are operating in the most efficient, patient-centered way possible, will  continue to be crucial to our long-term success on behalf of our patients and our community.

KEY POINTS

  • Cedars-Sinai’s quality of patient care and our clinical outcomes are significantly better than most hospitals in California and the nation:

  • Cedars-Sinai is the only hospital in California (and one of only 7 in the nation) to have a 30-day survival rate better than the national average for four consecutive years in all three of the following key diseases:  Heart Failure, Pneumonia and Acute Myocardial Infarction (Heart Attack).
  • Cedars-Sinai is significantly better than other hospitals in California and the nation in reducing the incidence of Central Line-Associated Blood Stream Infections (CLABSI).   Cedars-Sinai’s CLABSI infection rate is 80 percent lower than the state average and 91 percent lower than the national average.
  • Out of 301 hospitals in California, Cedars-Sinai is one of only 10 that is better than the national average for complications in Hip and Knee Replacement Surgery.
  • The quality of the physicians in Cedars-Sinai Medical Group and Cedars-Sinai Health Associates consistently ranks in the top among the more than 200 California medical groups participating in HMO and managed care plans.  On independent surveys, Cedars-Sinai Medical Group and Cedars-Sinai Health Associates consistently rank in the top tier (90th percentile and above) for patient satisfaction.
  • In addition to our higher quality, the many region-wide services that academic medical centers like Cedars-Sinai provide (and community hospitals do not) add to overall cost, but benefit everyone in the region:

  • Many of the highly specialized services that only academic medical centers like Cedars-Sinai provide for everyone in the region are costly to maintain.  These include:
  • Advanced heart disease treatments
    • Specialized treatments for complex (and in some cases, rare) types of cancer
    • Surgical and medical treatments for serious brain disorders, such as complex aneurysms, brain tumors and stroke
    • Advanced Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
    • Comprehensive Transplant Center
  • Having these services centralized at academic medical centers is actually much more cost-efficient for everyone than having these complex, costly services available at every hospital.
  • The added cost burden that academic medical centers like Cedars-Sinai take on to benefit the entire region includes the cost of specialized technology and equipment, as well as the costs of keeping highly trained specialists on staff.
  • For example, as one of just four Level One Trauma Centers in LA County (and the only one not operated by the government), Cedars-Sinai has  a neurosurgeon and a trauma surgeon in the hospital  24 hours a day, as well as other trauma specialists and equipment to treat the most severely injured people in automobile crashes and other traumas.

Thomas M. Priselac
President and CEO, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

Mars One Suicide Mission

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Mars One is a private sector endeavor to send human beings to Mars. The estimated cost of $6 billion will be raised by selling T-shirts and hosting reality shows. In theory, the mission will launch in 2023. In order to reduce costs, astronauts will not be returned to earth. In other words, this is a one-way trip

There are a lot of technical issues that the sponsors have failed to adequately evaluate. Although they acknowledge high radiation exposure, resulting in a much higher probability of developing cancer (without a realistic ability to treat), they have set the launch date for a period of high solar activity, which dramatically increases the risks to the astronauts during transit. In order to reduce radiation exposure on Mars, astronauts will be largely confined to living underground, which poses psychological risks.

Energy generation is proposed to come from solar panels. However, Mars receives 4-times less solar energy than earth. It is also susceptible to dust storms, which would reduce solar energy output to virtually zero. If the storms last longer than a few days, the astronauts will be toast. The solar energy available during winter months is also reduced considerably. The Mars rovers that relied upon solar panels had to shut down during the winter. Such an option is not available to astronauts, who must rely upon energy for heating, oxygen production and water production.

Supplying astronauts with enough food is also a problem. The Mars One website says astronauts will raise their own food. However, this idea is very unrealistic. Even on earth, it took a tremendous amount of land to produce enough food to feed people in the Biosphere 2, who complained that they were always hungry. The Biosphere experiment also suffered from reduced oxygen and high carbon dioxide, which killed many species within the Biosphere. Problems on Mars could not be solved as easily as pumping oxygen from the outside, which was done for the Biosphere.

If problems or illnesses arise on Mars, help is at least 7-12 months away. So, this mission truly is a suicide mission. Fortunately, the sponsors will probably never get enough money to get the mission off the ground.

Ancient Hinduism enlightens modern notions of evolution?

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Shiva

Did Hinduism predict the findings of modern cosmology?

I came across an article in the Washington Post by a Hindu believer claiming that Hinduism had predicted the findings of Big Bang cosmology. Of course, comments weren’t allowed, so I am adding them here. In order to lend credence to the distorted article, author Aseem Shukla cited the late Carl Sagan:

“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.”

Yes, Sagan was intrigued with Hinuism because it fit best with an atheistic worldview of cosmology. However, Sagan also recognized that cosmology was going to solve the question of whether Judaism/Christianity or Hinduism fit true cosmology better. In 1985, he predicted that the answer would be found within our lifetimes:

“Now, what happened before that [Big-Bang]? There are two views. One is ‘Don’t ask that question,’ which is very close to saying that God did it. And the other is that we live in an oscillating universe in which there is an infinite number of expansions and contractions. The former of these views happens, by chance, to be close to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic view, the latter, close to the standard Hindu views. And so, if you like, you can think of the varying contentions of these two major religious views being fought out in the field of contemporary satellite astronomy. Because that’s where the answer to this question will very likely be decided. This is an experimental question. And it is very likely that in our lifetime we will have the answer to it. And I stress that this is very different from the usual theological approach, where there is never an experiment that can be performed to test out any contentious issue. Here there is one. So we don’t have to make judgments now. All we have to do is maintain some tolerance for ambiguity until the data are in, which may happen in a decade or less.” (Carl Sagan, 1985 Gifford Lectures).

Unfortunately, Sagan died in 1996, two years before the definitive answer to the question was known (although it was pretty clear, even by then, that Hinduism was going to lose). In 1998 scientists discovered dark energy, which was a new force of physics that was causing the universe to accelerate at an ever increasing rate. These data showed that the universe began to exist at one point in time and would never contract to be “reborn.” So, Hinduism was wrong that the universe went through cycles of birth and death. It is clear at this point that the universe began to exist 13.7 billion years ago (not 8.6 billion years ago) and will never contract again, but will continue to expand until it undergoes heat death trillions of years in the future (if God did not intervene). Instead, it was the Bible that accurately predicted the universe was created and is expanding as a result of God’s actions.

Biased Los Angeles Times Boy Scout Series

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The Los Angeles Times hates the Boy Scouts. In their relentless attempt to drive the Boy Scouts out of existence, they have published one of the most biased articles in the history of “news” reporting. Article authors Jason Felch and Kim Christensen have broken almost every rule of news reporting in their article “Boy Scout files reveal repeat child abuse by sexual predators.”

First, the article isn’t “news” at all, since all the events occurred over two decades ago. The implication that the Boys Scouts are still allowing sexual predators to serve in their ranks is false.

Second, the emphasis of the article is on some secret Boy Scout list from the 1970′s that was supposed to keep repeat homosexual predators out of scouting. The list failed to keep some predators from repeating their perversions, probably because it was not consistently checked when new leaders signed up. However, this list has not been the primary means of screening sexual predators for decades!

Having been the adult leader of a Cub Scout Pack, I was involved in leader selection and screening from 1998 to 2007. We never checked any secret Boy Scout list to screen our leaders. We went to the police department, who ran the screening to search for registered sex offenders. Nowadays, this can be done online. However, this was not the only method the Boy Scouts used to prevent of sexual abuse. Following the abuse outlined in the LA Times article, the Boy Scouts implemented youth protection training in 1990. The training was required for all leaders, Scouts and Scouting parents. One of the key provisions of youth protection was that a leader was never allowed to be one on one with any Scout at any time. Two-deep leadership prevented all the abuse that had occurred in previous decades, which is why the LA Times article could not report abuse after 1991. The LA Times article does not mention any of this information, but just left the impression that abuse of Boy Scout youth was an ongoing problem. Shame on them!

Genetically modified 3-parent children?

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Introduction

I am a subscriber to the LifeSiteNews mailing list and have been for a number of years. The list and associated website is dedicated to reporting news about events and issues that impact the sanctity of human life. The site is run by Roman Catholic believers who take a strong stand supporting the pro-life cause. In general, it is a great website and I highly recommend subscribing to their list.

LifeSiteNews’s Article

However, there is one recent article, in particular, that is extremely deceptive and promotes a view that can only be described as evil. The article, entitled, “Genetically modified 3-parent children hitting their teens,” is designed to get people in an uproar about the creation of these “genetically-modified children.” What the article does not tell you is why these children have “three parents.” In reality, these children are neither genetically-modified nor does their nuclear DNA come from three parents.

Background

First, we need some background as to why these children are different from every other child. It turns out that there are rare genetic disorders that are caused by mutation of the DNA found in the sub-cellular organelle known as the mitochondrion. Although most of the proteins found in mitochondria are encoded by the nuclear DNA, there is a small amount of DNA found in the mitochondrion itself, known as mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). This mtDNA codes for 13 peptides that are crucial to the functioning of each mitochondrion.  Since mutations of these protein interfere with the function of the mitochondria, which are required for cellular metabolism, individuals with these mutations suffer a range of devastating diseases, usually beginning in childhood. The other important consideration is that these mutations are passed from one generation to the next only through the mother. This is because all mitochondria of the embryo come from the mother’s egg (the sperm supply only DNA). This means that a woman with a mtDNA mutation will pass that mutation on to 100% of her normally conceived children. For this reason, most women with these diseases choose not to produce biological children.

Fixing Mitochondrial Diseases

However, there is a technique that will allow these mothers to produce biological children who lack the disease. It is a modified form of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in which the nucleus from the woman’s egg is extracted and placed into an enucleated donor egg (donor’s genetic material removed). This way, the egg will have normal mitochondria along with the mother’s nuclear genetic material. The repaired egg was then fertilized with the husband’s sperm and implanted into the mother’s womb to produce normal biological children for the couple.

Genetically-modified?

The LifeSiteNews article claims that these IVF-conceived children were genetically-modified. Although many species of plants have been genetically modified by adding non-natural genes to the genome of the plants in order to make them resistant to diseases, no such alternation of genes was done to these children. In fact, the nuclear DNA of the mother was not modified at all. The LifeSiteNews claim is bogus.

3-Parent Children?

The other claim of the LifeSiteNews article is that these children have “3 parents.” Since all the nuclear DNA comes from both the biological mother and biological father, the egg donor contributes no DNA to the appearance of the children. The only contribution of the “third parent” are normal mitochondria. So, a genetic test of parentage would confirm that the biological mother and father were the only two parents. The claim that these children would have three parents is also bogus.

What is Really Evil

Roman Catholic dogma says that couples should not use any artificial form of birth control. However, when the mother has a mtDNA mutation, any natural conception would automatically condemn the child to inheriting the debilitating disease of the mother. Therefore, genetic counselors suggest that these couples use multiple forms of birth control to prevent natural conception. Although couples could adopt, many would prefer to have their own biological children. The Roman Catholic “solution” to mitochondrial diseases is to require couples to not use birth control and virtually guarantees that they produce children condemned to a life of suffering. LifeSiteNews had the audacity to claim that the IVF solution to the heartache of these couples was inferior to the Roman Catholic “solution.” LifeSiteNews would not allow my comments to be published on their website, but those comments can be viewed here. My guess is that the editors of LifeSiteNews did not understand the reality of what the author of the article had written. I would prefer to think that ignorance, rather than coverup was behind their biased and deceptive article. They are free to comment here…