When was the last time you thought about your serum albumin? You might have glanced at it the last time you got a lab panel at your doctor’s office, and as long as it was within the normal lab limits, you probably didn’t give it much thought. You should look at it a little more closely the next time you get a lab done because your serum albumin is a pretty good barometer of your overall health.

Albumin is the most abundant protein in blood plasma.

(Let’s take a brief digression to define a few terms so that we’re all on the same page. Blood is blood. Blood is what you get if you cut yourself. When you get your blood drawn, that dark red stuff is the blood, which includes the red blood cells, white blood cells, and other cellular components. Plasma is what’s left over when all the cells are removed. Typically, when blood is drawn it is put into a tube, and the tube is put into a centrifuge. The whirring of the centrifuge drives all the cells to the bottom of the tube; the yellowish fluid left on top is the plasma. If you put the whole blood in a tube and let it sit, the blood clots into a big glob and drops to the bottom, the clear yellowish fluid left on top is the serum. Basically serum is plasma that has had all the clotting factors removed. For our discussion of albumin, it doesn’t really matter. Albumin is measured in the serum, and so is called serum albumin. But it is the most abundant protein in the blood other than the proteins making up all the cells.)

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About a month ago I posted on the giant feral hog that an 11-year old kid shot in Alabama. So the story went, this kid was out hunting, came across this monster, and shot it. It was supposedly the largest wild hog on record. The kid’s dad put up a website the same day and the kid was on his way to his 15 minutes of fame on all the national TV talk shows when it came out that the whole thing wasn’t quite as described.

Apparently the giant hog was raised as a pet and hand fed by an elderly couple. When the animal got too large for them to deal with, they sold it to a game farm. The father paid for the kid to ‘hunt’ the hog in a fenced field, where he shot it a number of times before killing it. Dear old dad had the website all ready to go, but didn’t quit there.

As you can see from this website, there was a fair amount of Photoshop diddling with the pictures to make the hog look even larger than it was.

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Jackie Danicki is a young woman who writes a blog that I read from time to time. She moved from Ohio to London about ten years ago and has recently moved back to Cincinnati. Due to her work situation, she now travels back and forth between Cincinnati and London, spending a few weeks at a time in each place. She has had considerable experience with the British National Health Service as compared to that in the U.S. Here is one of her recent posts on the subject, inspired by Michael Moore’s new movie.

Earlier this week Helen Evans, a veteran senior nurse in the National Health Service (the nationalized health service in the UK) and a director of Nurses for Reform, a pan-European network of nurses dedicated to consumer-oriented reform of European health-care systems, wrote an editorial piece in the Chicago Tribune that is worth reading.

This could be coming soon to a city near you.

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TV news as it should be with Mika Brzezinski.

Here is a little YouTube clip of a Michael Moore like exposé of the Canadian healthcare system. Based on conversations with my colleagues and just being in the profession, I can tell you that this is an all too common situation. Many, many people in Canada needing rapid specialized care head south of the border and – horror of horrors – pay for it. This video makes the case that liberal Democrats in this country are trying to turn the U.S. healthcare system into a mirror of the Canadian one. I suspect that there are more than just liberal Democrats working to make it a reality. It will require help from the voters, who, unfortunately, are often driven by demagoguery. They will be told it’s free, and who wouldn’t want free anything, especially free health care. Problem is it’s not free. It has to be paid for. Instead of insurance and self-pay, the healthcare system will be funded by taxes. And instead of the taxes simply going to straight into healthcare, there will be a giant layer of bureaucracy that has to be funded before a penny gets to the actual hands-on, patient-treatment part of the system.

Once health care is ‘free’ it becomes an entitlement. Think about it. If you got anything free, then suddenly had to start paying for it, you would feel ill used. Here is an interview with a young woman who has apparently moved from Canada to the United States and has been confronted with paying for her health care. She is the definition of entitlement. You can almost see the sense of entitlement oozing from her every pore. She just can’t come to grip with the idea that she has to pay for medical treatment.

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