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Health Care

You’ve surely heard about the scandals at the Department of Veterans Affairs. A number of veterans found themselves waiting a long time for care, some of them died before they were seen, and some of the agency’s employees falsified records to cover up the extent of the problem. 

It’s a real scandal; some heads have already rolled, but there’s surely more to clean up. But the goings-on at Veterans Affairs shouldn’t cause us to lose sight of a much bigger scandal: the almost surreal inefficiency and injustice of the American health care system as a whole. And it’s important to understand that the Veterans Affairs scandal, while real, is being hyped out of proportion by people whose real goal is to block reform of the larger system.

The essential, undeniable fact about American health care is how incredibly expensive it is — twice as costly per capita as the French system, two-and-a-half times as expensive as the British system. You might expect all that money to buy results, but the United States actually ranks low on basic measures of performance and high infant mortality, and despite all that spending many people can’t get health care when they need it. What’s more, Americans seem to realize that they’re getting a bad deal: Surveys show a much smaller percentage of the population than in other countries.

And, in America, medical costs often cause financial distress to an extent that doesn’t happen in any other advanced nation.

How and why does health care in the United States manage to perform so badly? There have been many studies of the issue, identifying factors that range from high administrative costs, to high drug prices, to excessive testing. The details are fairly complicated, but if you had to identify a common theme behind America’s poor performance, it would be that we suffer from an excess of money-driven medicine. Vast amounts of costly paperwork are generated by for-profit insurers always looking for ways to deny payment; high spending on procedures of dubious medical efficacy is driven by the efforts of for-profit hospitals and providers to generate more revenue; high drug costs are driven by pharmaceutical companies who spend more on advertising and marketing than they do on research.

Other advanced countries don’t suffer from comparable problems because private gain is less of an issue. Outside the U.S., the government generally provides health insurance directly, or ensures that it’s available from tightly regulated nonprofit insurers; often, many hospitals are publicly owned, and many doctors are public employees.

As you might guess, conservatives don’t like the observation that American health care performs worse than other countries’ systems because it relies too much on the private sector and the profit motive. So whenever someone points out the obvious, there is a chorus of denial, of attempts to claim that America does, too, offer better care. It turns out, however, that such claims invariably end up. that is, arguments that have been proved wrong, should be dead, but keep shambling along because they serve a political purpose. Which brings us to veterans’ care. The system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs is not like the rest of American health care. It is, if you like, an island of socialized medicine, a miniature version of Britain’s National Health Service, in a privatized sea. And until the scandal broke, all indications were that it worked very well, providing high-quality care at low cost.  -Paul Krugman, NY times newspaper-

Ebola Virus, Conakry (AFP)

A second spike in Ebola virus cases has panicked residents and health officials in Guinea, who fear a west African outbreak of the killer disease may now be out of control.

"Ebola cases are worrying. We do not know what to expect," Mamady Traore, a trader in the suburbs of the capital Conakry, told AFP on Thursday. "Sometimes you are told it has been (contained) and sometimes you hear it has reappeared in other towns and villages."

According to figures released by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday, a total of 398 cases of haemorrhagic fever -- causing 264 deaths -- have been reported in Guinea since the start of 2014. Of these, 254 were caused by Ebola.

The incurable disease is spread by contact with bodily fluids including sweat, meaning just touching an infected person is enough to spread the virus.

"The government can't do anything to fight the disease," taxi driver Abdoulaye Barry said of Ebola, one of the deadliest known viruses, which kills its victims by inducing unstoppable internal bleeding.

The latest outbreak began in southeast Guinea and spread rapidly through neighbouring Liberia and Sierra Leone. Cases have recently surfaced in Guinea's west and southeast -- areas previously thought to be free of the disease.

"We're faced with a second spike in the epidemic," Marie-Christine Ferir, a worker for aid agency Doctors Without Borders, told AFP. "What is unusual is the spreading of outbreak locations. It complicates things."

In Thursday in Conakry, there was no discernable presence of medical staff around key buildings. An AFP correspondent said however that sanitising hand gels were offered to customers at the entrances of banks and insurance companies.

A total of 528 haemorrhagic fever cases have been reported throughout west Africa in 2014, inflicting 337 deaths. Almost 70 percent were caused by Ebola, which can induce severe fever and muscle pain, as well as vomiting, diarrhoea and organ failure.

Bloomberg Market Insiders

In September 2007, almost a year after New Zealand–born billionaire Richard Chandler founded investment firm Orient Global in Singapore, he made a rare appearance at a forum on social responsibility. Abandoning his penchant for privacy, Chandler outlined the link between giving and investing. “We start to ask the question, where would the incremental dollar achieve the greatest return?” said Chandler. “Charity is good, performance philanthropy is better, and social investment is best.”

Chandler attended the global executive summit in Singapore again the following year -- and then dropped back out of public view, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its July/August issue. He doesn’t speak to the press. Current and former employees of his firm, now called Chandler Corp., don’t talk about him, citing nondisclosure agreements. Executives of most companies in which Chandler invests deal only with his staff.

 “I never met him and I don’t know him,” says Indian billionaire whose Fortis Healthcare Ltd. sold its entire stake in Vietnamese hospital company Hoan My Medical Corp. to Chandler Corp. for $80 million in August 2013, according to Fortis’s statement.

Richard Chandler, a philanthropist and founder of Singapore-based investment firm. Behind the silence, Chandler, 55, is amassing a fortune that the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated at $3.7 billion on June 18. Energy-related companies account for at least $1.2 billion of his wealth.

Chandler is betting on gas and oil in far-flung locales from Papua New Guinea to Kenya and Ethiopia, banking on demand from Asia’s growing middle class.

The firm invested in InterOil Corp., which has offices in Singapore and Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. InterOil controls 35.5 percent of the exploration license that contains Papua New Guinea’s Elk and Antelope fields -- the island nation’s biggest undeveloped gas plays, according to InterOil. Chandler Corp.’s 19.6 percent InterOil stake was valued at $639 million on May 30.

Chandler Corp.’s investments in Southeast Asia extend beyond energy to consumer goods and financial services. The firm holds a $366 million stake in Vietnam’s Masan Group Corp. The company makes foods and beverages, offers banking services and mines tungsten and bismuth. In health care, Chandler Corp. owns a minority share of Medical City, a network of three hospitals and 23 outpatient clinics in the Philippines.

Chandler Corp. says its companies deliver health-care services to more than 2.5 million people in Vietnam and the Philippines each year.

This story appears in the July/August 2014 issue of Bloomberg Markets.

Chandler is building on a fascination with emerging markets that began with Hong Kong in the 1980s and extended to Brazil, Russia and India. He remains famous for his. Chandler and his younger brother, Christopher, bought 14.99 percent of SK from March 26 to April 11, 2003. The shares had plunged 63 percent in five days earlier that March after SK reported it had misstated 2001 earnings at its trading arm by about $1.5 billion.

By the time Chey defeated the Chandlers’ bid to remove him, in 2005, the stock had soared more than fivefold from the average 9,293 won per share the brothers paid. They walked away with more than $700 million in gains, calculations based on regulatory filings show. Taxes payable by a government in fund cash a annual review of the yearly regional calculation indeed table corporation software and healthcare programming tools advance knowledge race to its.

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