Kirsch Gelband & Stone, The Peoples Lawyer

Web Site for the Preeminent Legal Firm in New Jersey for Major Bodily Injuries, Work Accidents, Auto  Accidents, Defective Products, and Medical Malpractice.  All our Lawyers are Certified by the NJ Supreme Court, a distinction shared by only 5% of NJ Attorneys.   We bring 30 years of expertise, trial experience, ethics and compassion to your case.  Personal service is our goal, with guaranteed full access to our legal staff.   Visit our Website.http://www.tellmeaboutyourcase.com/index.html

Can the Government Force you to purchase Health Care? Constitutionality Reviewed in the NY Times.

Can we be forced to purchase health care under the "necessary and proper" clause of the US Constitution?

To spread the risk and ensure no one is left behind, I believe the Government has the Constitutional Authority to enforce this mandate, ensuring universal coverage.  After all, the State forces all drivers to purchase comprehensive auto insurance, for the common good!  Click on the above title for a detailed analysis of the issue in the December NY Times.


Check our our Website: http://www.tellmeaboutyourcase.com/index.html

New York Times: Does old age and frailty preclude surgery?

"But thanks to a rather elegant piece of research by a Johns Hopkins team, recently published in The Journal of the American College of Surgeons, surgeons can give more informative answers when elderly patients in this situation, or their families, wonder what to do.

...frailty is a specific medical syndrome with measurable criteria.
They look for a series of declines that include weight loss (specifically, an unintentional loss of 10 pounds or more in the past year), a weaker grip, exhaustion and lack of physical activity, and a slower gait. The assessment takes perhaps 15 minutes to conduct in an office. Then the doctors assign a score: 0 to 1 for those who aren’t frail, 2 to 3 for the intermediately frail.
Patients who score 4 to 5 are frail. “They tend to have much less reserve, a decreased ability to bounce back” from physiological stress, said Dr. Fried, who previously taught at Johns Hopkins.
Might frailty scores be better at predicting how patients fare after surgery than the existing methods?
“The data are quite persuasive,” Dr. Fried said. “People who are frail before surgery are at higher risk for poor outcomes afterwards.”...
“If the risks are likely to be higher, it changes the equation as to whether the surgery has benefit,” Dr. Fried said.
That 89-year-old patient, for example, turned out to be intermediately frail when Dr. Makary evaluated him using the frailty index. “I thought he was stronger,” he acknowledged. After considerable discussion, doctor and patient agreed not to remove the tumor, but to track it with annual scans.
Surgeons at Johns Hopkins have widely adopted the index to help make such pre-op decisions, and Dr. Makary says he has heard from surgeons at about a dozen other major medical centers who are also using it. In some cases, patients may decline surgery. In many, they and their families will have a more realistic idea of how long recovery may take and how much help they will need.
This is a question, Dr. Makary suggested, that older patients and their families ought to routinely ask their surgeons in fairly blunt terms: You want to operate on my father? You think he’s too old for surgery? What’s his frailty score?"  (Click on above title for complete article in December 2010 NY Times).   (source: NY Times December 2010).

Go to our website:   http://www.tellmeaboutyourcase.com/index.html