What's really in your shampoo, Death Panels Are Already Here

Hi. The personal = the profitable.
Here's the first paragraph of a detailed dissection; #1 on
the subject line. Hit the url for the full article. Priceless.

http://www.salon.com/env/good_life/2009/08/13/shampoo/

What's really in your shampoo

Sure, a couple ingredients clean your hair. But the rest are a veritable
toxic dump on your head

By Bill Bunn
Salon.com: Aug. 13, 2009

There are two types of ingredients in shampoo. One type cleans your hair.
The other type strokes your emotions. I'm holding a bottle of Pantene Pro V,
one of the world's most popular shampoos. Of the 22 ingredients in this
bottle of shampoo, three clean hair. The rest are in the bottle not for the
hair, but for the psychology of the person using the shampoo. At least
two-thirds of this bottle, by volume, was put there just to make me feel
good. The world spends around $230 billion on beauty products every year. Of
this figure, $40 billion go to shampoo purchases. North Americans blow
almost $11 billion on shampoo and conditioner each year. So most soap
manufacturers aren't willing to rely on a product that merely works. The
bigger job is convincing the consumer that their soap is adding value to the
consumer's life. So shampoo bottles include extra concoctions aimed at
convincing the man or woman in the shower that the soap is more "luxurious"
or "effective." Because beautiful hair doesn't just happen.

About the writer
Bill Bunn lives in Calgary, Alberta.

***

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090812_the_real_death_panels/

The Real Death Panels

By Joe Conason
Truthdig: August 13, 2009

When Republican politicians and right-wing talking heads bemoan the
fictitious "death panels" that they claim would arise from health care
reform, they are concealing a sinister reality from their followers. The
ugly fact is that every year we fail to reform the existing system, that
failure condemns tens of thousands of people to die-either because they have
no insurance or because their insurance companies deny coverage or benefits
when they become ill.

The best estimate of the annual death toll among Americans of working age
due to lack of insurance or under-insurance is at least 20,000, according to
studies conducted over the past decade by medical researchers, and the
number is almost certainly rising as more and more people lose their
coverage as costs continue to go up.

They die primarily because they didn't have the coverage or the money to pay
doctors and thus delayed seeking treatment until it was too late. They don't
get checkups, screenings and other preventive care. That is why uninsured
adults are far more likely to be diagnosed with a disease, such as cancer or
heart disease, at an advanced stage, which severely reduces their chances of
survival.

This isn't news. Seven years ago, the Institute of Medicine found that
approximately 18,000 Americans had died in 2000 because they had no
insurance. Using the same methodology combined with Census Bureau estimates
of health coverage, the Urban Institute concluded that the incidence of
death among the uninsured was enormous. Between 2000 and 2006, the last year
of that study, the total number of dead was estimated to have reached
137,000-a body count more than double the number of casualties in the
Vietnam War.

The Institute of Medicine also found that uninsured adults are 25 percent
more likely to die prematurely than adults with private health insurance,
and other studies have warned that uninsured adults between the ages of 55
and 64 are even more prone to die prematurely. A lack of health insurance is
the third-leading cause of death for that age cohort, following heart
disease and cancer.

All those appalling figures, which are real rather than mythical, do not
include the casualties of insurance company profiteering-namely, all the
people, including small children, who perish because of the anonymous "death
panels" that deny or delay coverage to consumers.

Perhaps the most notorious case in recent years was that of Nataline
Sarkisyan, the 17-year-old leukemia patient whose liver transplant was held
up by insurance giant Cigna HealthCare. She died for no reason except to
protect Cigna's profit margin, but her unnecessary and cruel demise was
hardly unique.

Research by the American Medical Association found that the nation's largest
insurance companies deny somewhere between 2 percent and 5 percent of all
the claims submitted by doctors. That rough estimate is the best available
because private insurers are not required to reveal such statistics
(although they certainly maintain them), and the government does not collect
them.

But in June, a House Energy and Commerce Committee investigation found that
three major insurance companies-Golden Rule, Assurant and
WellPoint-rescinded the coverage of at least 20,000 people between 2003 and
2007 for minor errors, including typos, on their paperwork; a pre-existing
condition; or a family member's medical history.

"They try to find something-anything-so they can say that this individual
was not truthful," said Rep. Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who
oversaw the committee probe. He warned that insurance companies launch these
nitpicking inquisitions whenever a policyholder becomes ill with a certain
kind of condition-usually a costly and deadly one, such as ovarian cancer or
leukemia. The result is denial and loss of coverage-and we now know that
means increased mortality for innocent people.

So, who are the members of the death panels?

You can find them among the corporate bureaucrats who concoct excuses to
deny coverage and throw the sick off their rolls. You can find them among
the politicians and lobbyists who have stalled reform for years while people
died. You can find them among the morons who show up to shout slogans at
town halls rather than seek solutions. And you can find them among the cable
and radio blabbers, who invent scary stories about reform to conceal the
sickening truth.

Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer.

© 2009 Creators.com