Say it ain't so.

not just how many visits to the doctor and hospital.

Diana

Anything that helps the patient is always best, even if someone else in healthcare industry suffers.

It's the same paradoxical situation between crime and the "justice" system. For the system to exist and those in it to keep their jobs or expand their powers, obviously crime must not be eradicated, or greatly reduced, but carefully controlled, so crime still exists at an "acceptable" level, but one that will still allow those in the legal industry to continue their own existence therein.

There must be sick and ill people for hospitals and doctors and nurses to have a reason to exist. There must be increasing number of sick for those institutions and jobs to grow.

As for those asthmatics, there are a lot of things that can be done to alleviate the conditions that lead to attacks. One of the best is instead of just giving them vacuums, which implies floor carpets, is instead to have all carpeting ripped out and other flooring installed which can be wet or dust mopped regularly. Carpets are vile repositories of every sort of allergy inducing and asthmatic triggering pollen, dander, and other such garbage. Not even a vacuum can compete with a carpet's power to absorb and later release such filth. Now we have wall to wall carpets, but used to be carpets were just in center area of rooms and able to be taken up and out for a good beating to remove more contaminants than even modern vacuums do. If someone suffers from asthma, and can reasonably do so, either replace carpets with vinyl, tile, stone, wood, etc, or move to a place that was built entirely carpet free.

It took a few minutes to find the interview that was the basis of that article, but I found it. It was an interview with bigthink.com., Recorded on January 4, 2010. The entire interview is here:
http://bigthink.com/ideas/18213

The part of the interview specifically were the words:

But there are components in the health reform package that include innovations both at that front end, trying to design, say, the checklists for the right kind of care, and also on the incentives end. That is, one of the reasons we don't come up with these kinds of checklists is that hospitals and doctors don't do better financially when they put in these kinds of tools. For example, Children's Hospital in Boston came up with a checklist for asthma patients, children who are severely asthmatic enough to end up admitted to the hospital. And they recognized that a couple of components were key: making phone calls to the families to make sure the children were taking their inhalers, and having a look at their apartments to make sure that -- or homes -- to make sure that dust and mites were not a problem in the homes. By tackling just those two things, they reduced admissions for kids with asthma by 87 percent. But asthma was their number one admission to Children's Hospital. And the found this experiment lost them millions of dollars. And so they suddenly were face to face with, well, maybe we need to shut down this program in order to survive as a hospital. That's when you know there's just something wrong with the way we are designing our system.

It does not seem to say that the hospital is shutting down the program. You could go to the web page of that hospital and under "My child has:" at the upper right look at asthma. Their site is:
http://www.childrenshospital.org/

After looking at the results you may have noticed that they have given study grants to examine the situation and among other things, come up with a better checklist. The results are due this fall. To me, that doesn't look like they are against having such a checklist. Already, they have pages about asthma. One of them says:

What causes childhood asthma?
The majority of children with asthma have allergies. Even exposure to low-grade allergens (those that do not cause significant allergic reactions) may increase the severity of the asthma. In addition, allergies may play a role in undiagnosed asthma cases. Other triggers of childhood asthma may include the following:

* upper respiratory infections (i.e., colds)
* inhaled irritants, such as secondhand smoke
* certain weather conditions, such as cold air
* physical expressions of emotion, such as crying, laughing, or yelling

However, with proper management of the asthma, such as avoiding triggers, taking prescribed medications, monitoring for warning signs, and knowing what to do during an asthma attack, an individual with asthma can conduct a healthy and active lifestyle.

That hospital also has a page on asthma triggers, and I guess you could say that going there and looking at it would give you a "checklist". The trigger page is:
http://www.childrenshospital.org/az/Site617/mainpageS617P0.html

I could hardly have come from a cleaner home, but I had asthma nevertheless. So did my father. Medication, and its regularity and proper administration is crucial. I suppose, having heard angel's wings fluttering a couple of times due to asthma, that people before my father's generation, just died of "weak chests", pneumonia and heart strain. Just read the life of Theodore Roosevelt, as I was encouraged to read in my youth. Indomitable will can carry you a long way, but they can't reverse the damage done.

If I had a wish, I'd rather have been born 25 years later, into a time when treatment had become so much better that one could almost pretend one doesn't have the condition. I'm certainly glad that my symptoms are so well controlled now. In the early 1980's here, I had to be very careful going out of doors in the winter, because my bronchi reacted so violently to cold weather. Eventuallly it resulted in a week long hospitalization with really bad blood gases and either Grade 3 or Grade 4 pulsus paradoxus caused by high intra-thoracic pressures. I was on Steroids Intravenously for much of that time, and Inhalation Treatments every 3 hours at first. I worship at the feet of my Respirologist, a gifted and patient man.

Rob