We Still Seek the Cure Even When the Cause Is Under Our Noses
Fluxed Up World
Showing posts with label Health Care. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Health Care. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Fluxed Up World
Sunday, December 4, 2011
When Your Health Is Less Important Than Your Bank Balance
A New York spider gave me an insight into US private healthcare
By Laurie Penny / December 4, 2011
Occupy Wall Street is right – a rash of bites showed me how private healthcare keeps Americans cowed and compliant
It started with a spider. Someone with a taste for narrative justice might call it retribution, but there's really no moral correlation between the wisdom of absconding with a relative stranger after a party and waking up the next morning in Brooklyn with a rash of poisonous bites on your arm. When the angels of sexual continence want to punish you, they send crabs not spiders.
I assumed, at first, that the maddeningly itchy marks were the work of common-or-flophouse New York bedbugs, but 12 hours later, with my right arm swollen to the width and purplish colour of a prize turnip, my friend identified the hallmarks of the brown recluse spider, and uttered words I had hoped never to hear on this side of the Atlantic: "You should really get that checked out by a doctor."
I first came to New York to write about the emerging social justice movements associated with Occupy Wall Street. Through my conversations with the protesters in Zucotti Park, I began to understand how profoundly the stranglehold of American private healthcare keeps ordinary people cowed and compliant in the land of the notionally free.
It's not just the 59 million Americans living without health insurance and unable to access treatment for everyday maladies without crippling expense. It's the millions more who dare not risk a dispute with their boss for fear of losing their medical cover, who expect to remortgage their homes in old age to meet the costs of failing health, or who live in fear of bankruptcy should they develop a chronic condition or have an accident.
The notion of a society that sanctions companies to profit from sickness feels barbaric enough, without then forcing ordinary people to choose between medical treatment and the financial future of their families. President Obama's attempt to reform the system in 2009 roundly failed to remove healthcare as a source of perennial anxiety for most American citizens, or to lighten the dead hand of the market on medical provision in the US.
Socialised healthcare is in my blood but, unfortunately last Wednesday, so was a hefty dose of spider venom and several billion extra bacteria – the unfriendly sort that make an infected limb sweat and swell like a rotten root vegetable. I had travel insurance, but no idea if it stretched to the snacking habits of urban arachnids. So I uttered the words familiar to any uninsured or precariously insured American: "I'll just wait for a little bit and see if it gets better."
Had I waited another 24 hours, I might have lost my arm. By the time I was persuaded to go to the emergency response unit at Beth Israel hospital I could no longer move the limb, which was developing worrying purple track-marks. The triage nurse sent me straight through to ER, where I was given a bunk next to a groaning man in his mid-30s who, like me, had been so worried about the cost of treatment that he had allowed an infection to spread, in this case from a rotten tooth. He was already missing several teeth. He told me he was a postal worker with no health insurance, and that he wouldn't have come for treatment had his girlfriend not driven him to hospital when he collapsed with a fever.
Compared to the accident and emergency unit at my local London hospital, the waiting period was civilised; it was a mere hour before a stern-looking registrar arrived to take my money. He explained the covering clauses of my travel insurance and showed me where to sign on several complicated forms. When I explained I was unable to do so because my arm wasn't working, he gave me a look that suggested I'd have had to find a way to sign even if I'd come in with all four limbs off. I signed with my left hand.
After that, the service was exceptional. I was whisked off to intensive care for intravenous antibiotics. I was put in a quiet bed near a window, with no cracks or mildew in the walls, and brought cool water and a clean towel. And when, in the middle of the night, I went into near-fatal anaphylactic shock, the staff's reaction was swift and efficient. I felt, in other words like a valued customer. But it also meant that, at 2am and thousands of miles from home, I was already wondering how I would afford the prescription for all the antibiotics I needed.
This is the difference that social medicine makes to the fabric and quality of life in a civilised country. When I finally wobbled out of the shiny lobby of the Beth Israel, clutching a bag of drugs, follow-up advice and complimentary hospital toiletries, I understood what it really means to be without means in America. Those who are wealthy enough to afford decent healthcare have their needs met in relative luxury, while those who are poor live in fear of getting ill, worrying that one misadventure might leave you with yet more debts to pay off.
No amount of fresh towels and edible breakfasts can make up for the feeling that your health is less important than the capacity of your chequebook. Which is why children and pensioners are still standing in Manhattan's financial district with placards telling the world they cannot afford healthcare, as police patrol the perimeter. And why, when I got out of hospital, I went straight back down to Liberty Plaza to stand with them.
Source / The Guardian
Fluxed Up World
Sunday, July 17, 2011
The American Diet: The Worst Form of Corporatism
Toward a New Politics of Food
By David Sirota / July 15, 2011
As with most issues in this new Gilded Age, the tale of the American diet is a story of the worst form of corporatism.
The easiest way to explain Gallup’s discovery that millions of Americans are eating fewer fruits and vegetables than they ate last year is to simply crack a snarky joke about Whole Foods really being “Whole Paycheck.” Rooted in the old limousine liberal iconography, the quip conjures the notion that only Birkenstock-wearing trust-funders can afford to eat right in tough times.
It seems a tidy explanation for a disturbing trend, implying that healthy food is inherently more expensive, and thus can only be for wealthy Endive Elitists when the economy falters. But if the talking point’s carefully crafted mix of faux populism and oversimplification seems a bit facile—if the glib explanation seems almost too perfectly sculpted for your local right-wing radio blowhard — that’s because it dishonestly omits the most important part of the story. The part about how healthy food could easily be more affordable for everyone right now, if not for those ultimate elitists: agribusiness CEOs, their lobbyists and the politicians they own.
As with most issues in this new Gilded Age, the tale of the American diet is a story of the worst form of corporatism—the kind whereby the government uses public monies to protect private profit.
In this chapter of that larger tragicomedy, lawmakers whose campaigns are underwritten by agribusinesses have used billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize those agribusinesses’ specific commodities (corn, soybeans, wheat, etc.) that are the key ingredients of unhealthy food. Not surprisingly, the subsidies have manufactured a price inequality that helps junk food undersell nutritious-but-unsubsidized foodstuffs like fruits and vegetables. The end result is that recession-battered consumers are increasingly forced by economic circumstance to “choose” the lower-priced junk food that their taxes support.
Corn—which is processed into the junk-food staple corn syrup and which feeds the livestock that produce meat — exemplifies the scheme.
“Over the past decade, the federal government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop … artificially low,” reports Time magazine. “That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 — a bargain.”
Yes, it is a bargain, but one created by deliberate government policy that serves the corn industry titans, not by any genetic advantage that makes corn derivatives automatically more affordable for the budget-strapped commoner.
The aggregate effect of such market manipulation across the agriculture industry, notes Time, is “that a dollar (can) buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit.”
So while it may be amusing to use Americans’ worsening recession-era diet as another excuse to promote cultural stereotypes, the nutrition crisis costing us billions in unnecessary health care costs is more about public policy and powerful special interests than it is about epicurean snobs and affluent tastes. Indeed, this is a problem not of individual proclivities or of agricultural biology that supposedly makes nutrition naturally unaffordable — it is a problem of rigged economics and corrupt policymaking.
Solving the crisis, then, requires everything from recalibrating our subsidies to halting the low-income school lunch program’s support for the pizza and French fry lobby (yes, they have a powerful lobby). It requires, in other words, a new level of maturity, a better appreciation for the nuanced politics of food and a commitment to changing those politics for the future.
Impossible? Hardly. A country that can engineer the seemingly unattainable economics of a $5 McDonald’s feast certainly has the capacity to produce a healthy meal for the same price. It’s just a matter of will — or won’t.
[David Sirota, an In These Times senior editor and syndicated columnist, is a bestselling author whose book Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now—Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything was released in March of 2011. Sirota, whose previous books include The Uprising and Hostile Takeover, hosts the morning show on AM760 in Denver. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.]
Source / In These Times
Thanks to Janet Gilles / Fluxed Up World
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Health Care in Amerikkka: We're Just Not Paying Attention
Health Care Debate: It's Time to Get Outraged
By Wendell Potter / July 5, 2011
One of my favorite bumper stickers reads, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."
That's sort of how I feel about the health care debate. If more Americans paid attention to the fate of neighbors and loved ones who have fallen victim to the cruel dysfunction of our health care system, they would see through the onslaught of lies and propaganda perpetrated by special interests profiting from the status quo.
Since I started speaking out against the abuses of the insurance industry, I have heard from hundreds of people with maddening and heartbreaking stories about being mistreated and victimized by the greed that characterizes so much of the profit-driven American health care system.
Many other people send me links to articles or broadcasts they have seen. When I worked in the insurance industry, we called them "horror stories," and for good reason. The circumstances people often found themselves in were nightmarishly horrible. As an industry PR guy, my mission was to keep as many of those horror stories out of the media as possible. We didn't want the public to know.
It occurred to me recently that Americans are not sufficiently outraged because they either don't hear these stories or, if they do, don't believe how commonplace they are or that anyone they know could experience the same misfortune. Or they might hear that more than 50 million Americans don't have insurance because they can't afford it or, in many cases, can't buy it even if they can afford it, but they don't stop to think that real human beings make up that abstract 50 million figure.
The reality is that these stories are indeed commonplace. Almost all of us -- regardless of our age, income, job or political affiliation -- are just a layoff or plant closure away from being uninsured, or a business decision beyond our control from being underinsured, or an illness away from being forced into bankruptcy and homelessness.
My life changed when I really started paying attention a few years ago. I now have a new mission -- to help people become aware of and understand what is going on around them. So, starting today, I will be sharing on an occasional basis some of the horror stories like the ones I used to work so hard to keep out of the press. My hope is that people will begin to remember why reform is so necessary and why repealing "ObamaCare," despite its shortcomings, is not a real option.
You might have heard about this first one. Even if you have it bears retelling. A few weeks ago, a man in North Carolina was arrested for robbing a bank for $1 so he could get government-provided health care in prison.
Fifty-nine-year-old Richard James Verone has a tumor in his chest and two ruptured disks, but no job or health insurance. He is one of those 50 million Americans I mentioned earlier. Verone told reporters he asked for only a dollar to show that his motives were medical, not monetary. Because of his "preexisting" medical conditions, no private insurer will have anything to do with him. He wasn't destitute enough to qualify for Medicaid, the government program for low-income Americans, or old enough to qualify for Medicare, the government program for people 65 and older.
Verone and millions of other Americans who have a history of illness are considered by private insurers to be "uninsurable." Insurance company underwriters consider them an excessive risk to profits. Even insurers that operate as nonprofits, like many Blue Cross plans, refuse to sell coverage to a third or more of Americans who apply because they've been sick in the past. Many of the people they turn down are children who were born with birth defects.
Shortly after Verone staged his robbery, one of the contestants in the Miss USA pageant revealed during a nationally broadcast interview that she is homeless. Why? Her sick mother could not pay both the rent and her mounting medical bills. Twenty-three-year-old Blair Griffith was evicted along with her mother and brother just weeks after she won the title of Miss Colorado.
"I didn't know what to think" when sheriff's deputies starting putting the family's belongings in garbage bags, she said. "It was shocking. And then I saw my mom on her knees crying and begging them, 'Please don't do this to me' and then looking up at me and saying, 'I'm so sorry.'"
Blair's mother, a widow, lost her health insurance soon after suffering a severe heart attack. She was unable to get another policy. She and her children eventually had no choice but to join an untold number of other Americans who are homeless because they can't pay their medical bills. Many are bankrupt as well as homeless. Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States.
The third story I want to share with you hasn't made headlines. Most such stories never do. A few days ago a young woman who said she'd been raped sent me an e-mail to ask if I might be able to help her find insurance.
"I am in the process of hiring a broker to help me find insurance, but it is just very overwhelming and sad," she wrote. "I have been denied by three major companies or had riders attached that will not cover anything related to HPV, cervical cancer, medications, or treatments. Basically, they will do nothing for me."
She wrote, essentially, to beg for help.
"I have never talked about what happened (to me), but I am learning that this is too big to handle on my own. There are so many barriers, and while I consider myself an intelligent person, I am by no means an expert when it comes to dealing with insurance agencies. I will take and am grateful for all the help that I can get."
I hope I can help her, but there is no assurance that either I or a broker or anyone else for that matter can help her get the coverage and access to care she needs. She is an apparent victim not just of rape but also of an unjust system that has devolved into seemingly intractable dysfunction while we were not paying close enough attention.
These are just three people whose lives have taken a tragic turn because of America's profit-driven private health care system. There are literally millions of other stories, many of which are even more maddening and heartbreaking.
When the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) is fully implemented in 2014, the number of uninsured Americans will be reduced by 30 million, and many of the insurance industry's most egregious practices -- including refusing to sell coverage to people with preexisting conditions -- will be outlawed.
Let's hope that there will be far fewer horror stories after 2014. But the new law is just the beginning. We still will have a long way to go before we have universal coverage, like every other developed country in the world.
Universal coverage, in my view, is the ultimate goal we all should share. Remember this if nothing else: Until we achieve it, you and your loved ones could easily be facing your own horror stories.
Wendell Potter
[Wendell Potter is former Vice President of corporate communications at CIGNA, one of the United States' largest health insurance companies. In June 2009, he testified against the HMO industry in the U.S. Senate as a whistleblower. He is now the Senior Fellow on Health Care for the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin.]
Source / Common Dreams
Fluxed Up World
Saturday, February 5, 2011
The Sport of Health Care in Amerikkka
Super Bowl Commercial for the Dead Patients
By Donna Smith February 5, 2011
I'd love to see a Super Bowl commercial Sunday that stated the facts about how many Americans will die on Super Bowl Sunday this year because they didn't have access to the healthcare they needed. 123 will die on Sunday, and perhaps a photo of one of the dead every 12 minutes or so during a commercial break would be instructive. That's how often someone dies in the country because he or she couldn't get care.
The Dead Patient's Society grows larger by 123 every single day in America. There is no time off for major sporting events.
Every 12 minutes while we jam in nachos and giggle about the most creative Super Bowl ads, someone will die who could have -- should have -- been saved. That dead person didn't have the cash or the credit or the insurance approval to get the care he or she might have accessed in order to survive to see the Packers and the Steelers play.
The patients die while doctors and hospitals hold at arm's length the treatments that could have saved lives. I don't understand how they do it. I have never understood how the people or provider organizations that take oaths to care for the sick and relieve suffering can get a phone call from an insurance company and then turn their backs when payment is denied. Or how they see a shivering, hurting person and turn them away when care is so easily available. Too bad we cannot run the sick to the field on Super Bowl Sunday and have teams of medical experts rush to treat them. But then they are not star football players, are they?
Oh, I understand the evil empire of the for-profit insurance giants and that providers cannot give away healthcare lest they go broke. I do get that. But, still, I do not know how neighbors turn their backs on neighbors and doctors turn their backs on patients. I couldn't do it. Maybe I am weak in that regard. I always wonder why we don't see and hear more about the dear doctors and providers who defy the financial death warrants and treat people in spite of the financial risk. I know there are some. We just don't hear about them too much. Some doctors say they have to be careful lest their hospitals and other doctors punish them for speaking or acting outside the profit-making fold.
The death every 12 minutes of a sick or injured American won't make the news on Super Bowl Sunday. It didn't make the news today, and it won't make the news tomorrow. We care an awful lot more about the big game than the end game for patients in America.
The membership ranks grow daily from all walks of life, all ages and from all across the nation. While a people's revolution unfolds in Egypt -- and perhaps beyond -- American patients are staging their own silent and deadly revolt. Slow, wasting, preventable deaths don't make the evening news in America or elsewhere.
The 123 Americans who died today without access to life-saving treatment are part of the acceptable cost of doing business for the American healthcare industry -- and they are part of the acceptable political casualties for those elected to govern for the common good who just don't quite do that.
Even our loved ones and neighbors are sometimes immune to the ravages of patients' realities. Obedient up until the very brutal end, patients and families often don't know how to fight back against the hospitals and providers who won't supply the care -- or they are mislead into thinking there is nothing that can be done, and the insurance companies that deny the treatment suffer only minimal challenges to their control over life and death decisions for thousands and thousands of people every month.
Monday morning, the big game will be over. Either the Steelers or the Packers will be the champions, and we'll look forward to next year's football season and the chance that our favorite team might make it to the big game. For me, it's the Broncos, so chances aren't so great.
But for hundreds of Americans, there will be no new season. The rest of us will have been very distracted by all the energy surrounding the game and the hype.
If we had a progressively financed, single-standard of high quality care for all in America, more Americans could enjoy life more fully and be more a part of the communities in which they live. I'm betting many of those who will die this Super Bowl weekend would rather have been cheese-heads than deadheads. But I am also betting most Americans will not be thinking too much about that while such a large and showy distraction allows so many of us to look away.
But if there were a face every 12 minutes on one of those super important, Super Bowl commercial breaks, and a brief line or two about why that person just died and how simple it might have been to save that life, maybe we'd be forced to face our super bowl of suffering. And maybe if we posted a price tag for that live-saving treatment denied, we'd be able to compare the cost for advertising time during the Super Bowl compared to cost to save a life. At least we ought to know honestly what our values really are -- saving human life just really isn't one of our super-priorities.
[Donna Smith is a community organizer for National Nurses United (the new national arm of the California Nurses Association) and National Co-Chair for the Progressive Democrats of America Healthcare Not Warfare campaign.]
Source / Common Dreams
Fluxed Up World
Saturday, December 18, 2010
What Makes Americans So Fearful?
¡Viva WikiLeaks! SiCKO Was Not Banned in Cuba
By Michael Moore / December 18, 2010
Yesterday WikiLeaks did an amazing thing and released a classified State Department cable that dealt, in part, with me and my film, 'Sicko.'
It is a stunning look at the Orwellian nature of how bureaucrats for the State spin their lies and try to recreate reality (I assume to placate their bosses and tell them what they want to hear).
The date is January 31, 2008. It is just days after 'Sicko' has been nominated for an Oscar as Best Documentary. This must have sent someone reeling in Bush's State Department (his Treasury Department had already notified me they were investigating what laws I might have broken in taking three 9/11 first responders to Cuba to get them the health care they had been denied in the United States).
Former health insurance executive Wendell Potter recently revealed that the insurance industry -- which had decided to spend millions to go after me and, if necessary, "push Michael Moore off a cliff" -- had begun working with anti-Castro Cubans in Miami in order to have them speak out and smear my film.
So, on January 31, 2008, a State Department official stationed in Havana took a made up story and sent it back to his HQ in Washington. Here's what they came up with:XXXXXXXXXXXX stated that Cuban authorities have banned Michael Moore's documentary, "Sicko," as being subversive. Although the film's intent is to discredit the U.S. healthcare system by highlighting the excellence of the Cuban system, he said the regime knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them.
Sounds convincing, eh?! There's only one problem -- the entire nation of Cuba was shown the film on national television on April 25, 2008! The Cubans embraced the film so much so it became one of those rare American movies that received a theatrical distribution in Cuba. I personally ensured that a 35mm print got to the Film Institute in Havana. Screenings of Sicko were set up in towns all across the country.
But the secret cable said Cubans were banned from seeing my movie. Hmmm.
We also know from another secret U.S. document that "the disenchantment of the masses [in Cuba] has spread through all the provinces," and that "all of Oriente Province is seething with hate" for the Castro regime. There's a huge active underground rebellion, and "workers there readily give all the support they can," with everyone involved in "subtle sabotage" against the government. Morale is terrible throughout all the branches of the armed forces, and in the event of war the army "will not fight." Wow -- this cable is hot!
Of course, this secret U.S. cable is from March 31, 1961, three weeks before Cuba kicked our asses at the Bay of Pigs.
The U.S. government has been passing around these "secret" documents to itself for the past fifty years, explaining in painstaking detail how horrible things are in Cuba and how Cubans are quietly aching for us to come back and take over. I don't know why we write these cables, I guess it just makes us feel better about ourselves. (Anyone curious can find an entire museum of U.S. wish fulfillment cables on the website of the National Security Archive.)
So what do you do with about a false "secret" cable, especially one that involves you and your movie? Well, you wait for a responsible newspaper to investigate and shout what it discovers from the rooftops.
But yesterday WikiLeaks gave the 'Sicko' Cuba cable to the media -- and what did they do with it? They ran the it as if it were true! Here's the headline in the Guardian:WikiLeaks: Cuba banned Sicko for depicting 'mythical' healthcare system
Authorities feared footage of gleaming hospital in Michael Moore's Oscar-nominated film would provoke a popular backlash
And not one scintilla of digging to see if Cuba had actually banned the movie! In fact, just the opposite. The right wing press started to have a field day reporting a lie (Andy Levy of Fox -- twice -- Reason Magazine and Hot Air, plus a slew of blogs). Sadly, even BoingBoing and my friends at the Nation wrote about it without skepticism. So here you have WikiLeaks, who have put themselves on the line to find and release these cables to the press -- and traditional journalists are once again just too lazy to lift a finger, point and click their mouse to log into Nexis or search via Google, and look to see if Cuba really did "ban the film." Had just ONE reporter done that, here's they would have found:June 16, 2007 Saturday 1:41 AM GMT [that's 7 months before the false cable]
HEADLINE: Cuban health minister says Moore's 'Sicko' shows 'human values' of communist system
BYLINE: By ANDREA RODRIGUEZ, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: HAVANA
Cuba's health minister Jose Ramon Balaguer said Friday that American filmmaker Michael Moore's documentary 'Sicko' highlights the human values of the island's communist-run government... "There can be no doubt this documentary by a personality like Mr. Michael Moore helps promote the profoundly human principles of Cuban society."
Or, how 'bout this little April 25, 2008 notice from CubaSi.Cu (translation by Google):Sicko premiere in Cuba
25/04/2008
The documentary Sicko, the U.S. filmmaker Michael Moore, which deals about the deplorable state of American health care system will be released today at 5:50 pm, for the space Cubavision Roundtable and the Education Channel.
Then there's this from Juventudrebelde.cu (translation by Google). Or this Cuban editorial (translation by Google). There's even a long clip of the Cuba section of 'Sicko' on the homepage of Media Roundtable on the CubaSi.cu website!
OK, so we know the media is lazy and sucks most of the time. But the bigger issue here is how our government seemed to be colluding with the health insurance industry to destroy a film that might have a hand in bringing about what the Cubans already have in their poverty-ridden third world country: free, universal health care. And because they have it and we don't, Cuba has a better infant mortality rate than we do, their life expectancy is just 7 months shorter than ours, and, according to the WHO, they rank just two places behind the richest country on earth in terms of the quality of their health care.
That's the story, mainstream media and right-wing haters.
Now that you've been presented with the facts, what are you going to do about it? Are you gonna attack me for having my movie played on Cuban state television? Or are you gonna attack me for not having my movie played on Cuban state television?
You have to choose one, it can't be both.
And since the facts show that the movie played on state TV and in theaters, I think you're better off attacking me for having my films played in Cuba.
¡Viva WikiLeaks!
[Michael Moore is an activist, author, and filmmaker. See more of his work at his website MichaelMoore.com.]
Source / Common Dreams
Fluxed Up World
Friday, January 22, 2010
Marx's Criticisms of Capitalism Are Understated
How Wall St Destroyed Private Medicine
By Paul Craig Roberts / January 22, 2010
At my annual check-up, my doctor handed me a sheet explaining the reasons for office fee increases for Medicare Patients. It is worth reporting at length.
Medicare fixes the prices for Medicare patients’ health care. All office charges for Medicare, including office visit charges, have been set by the Federal government since 1984. In real terms (adjusted for inflation), these fixed prices are less today than they were three decades ago.
During the last four years, there have been large decreases in Medicare reimbursements for laboratory services provided in-house by private physicians. Payments for in-office blood work, for example, have been cut 35 to 47 percent. Yet, a physician’s overhead continues to increase as a result of uncontrollable costs, such as property taxes, building insurance, electricity, maintenance, malpractice and workers compensation insurance.
As one result, my doctor had to close both the x-ray unit and the state and federally licensed medical laboratory on his premises. Now patients are inconvenienced by having to go to other locations for services that formerly were provided by the doctor at lower cost. A one day medical check-up is now a multiple day event and more expensive.
While Medicare payments to doctors have been cut, regulations have been increasing: “Almost every outside diagnostic procedure (CT, MRI scan, sonogram) ordered by this office now has to be pre-approved by some outside agency. Many medications are now requiring pre-approval or step therapy. Each requires filling out 1-2 pages of forms and/or two or more phone calls. This requires personnel time and therefore more cost. Consultant referrals are requiring more paperwork and time to schedule.”
My doctor has more people employed doing paperwork than he does delivering health care.
While Medicare payments for in-office services to private doctors, including those for blood work and x-ray units, were drastically cut, payments to outside corporate facilities for the same services were increased. It is obvious what is afoot. Corporate lobbies are using their whores in Congress to shift income from physician offices to corporate labs, corporate medical service providers, and hospitals that are owned by national corporations.
Legislation that cuts payments to private physicians and increases the payments to large corporate entities is intended to destroy private practice and to create in its place corporate bureaucracies in which doctors are wage slaves. The physician’s income is diverted to shareholders, CEO bonuses, and Wall Street. Health care is being replaced with health business.
As a result of the way American medicine is being reconstructed, patients will cease to have a doctor whom they know and who knows them. Important information is lost in a system of bureaucratized “health care” in which a patient sees whatever face happens to be on duty at the corporate provider. Impersonal health care thus brings a cost of its own, and its quality can be low compared to private practice. Indeed, the U.S. is creating a “health care” system that is more costly and less efficient than single-payer national health systems. But it will enrich corporations and provide play for Wall Street.
It turns one’s stomach to watch libertarians and “free market economists” defend bureaucratized impersonal health care as “free market medicine.” There is no free market present. Corporate lobbies and campaign contributions use government power to create bureaucratized monopolies that destroy medicine for the practitioner and the patient. Wall Street pushes for greater shareholder earnings, which are achieved by denying care.
Just as independent businesses have been destroyed by corporate chains from Wal-Mart to auto parts to fast food, medicine is being destroyed by monopoly capital. The risks of starting a private business today are many times higher than they were a half century ago. Chains have turned Americans who once were independent business men and women into employees.
The fate of the health care bill demonstrates the power of private lobbies. What was to be health care for Americans was instantly transformed into 30 million new patients for the private health insurance industry. The “solution” to tens of millions of Americans being unable to afford health care is a law that requires them to purchase a private health care policy or be annually fined. As most of these uninsured Americans cannot afford to purchase a private policy, the plan is for the federal government to use taxpayers’ money to subsidize their purchase of a policy from private companies.
In other words, tax money is being diverted to the pockets of private businesses. This is par for the course in “capitalist” America.
In today’s America, Karl Marx’s criticisms of capitalism are understated. Wherever one looks, the scene is one of the government using taxpayers’ money to enrich private interests. Taxes are collected from people who can barely make it, and the revenues are transferred to multi-millionaires and billionaires. The federal government piles debt on the backs of heavily-burdened and dispossessed Americans in order that investment banksters can pay annual bonuses that exceed the lifetime earnings of most Americans.
Every aspect of the US military has been mined for private profit. Supply and other functions for the military, such as those provided by Halliburton and Blackwater, services once provided by the military itself at low cost, have been privatized. These services now cost many multiples of the cost to taxpayers of in-house military provision.
The “war on terror” enriches the armaments/security industry and enables Israeli territorial expansion. The Israel Lobby and the munitions industry are major sources of funding for U.S. political campaigns.
Prisons have been privatized in order to create profits for private corporations. The prisons require high incarceration rates in order to be profitable. Consequently, “freedom and democracy” America not only has the highest incarceration rate and the highest absolute number of prisoners in the world, but also a prison population comparable in size to the prison population of Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago.
Congress allows private companies run by hardline Republicans to count electronically without paper trails the votes in elections. It has been proved over and over that the electronic voting machines, with proprietary undisclosed codes, can rig any election, especially if there are no exit polls or the captured media can find a way to discredit the exit polls.
And now we have private health care destroyed by the greed for profit. There are many reports of health care corporations, but not private doctors, rationing and even denying health care to policy holders in order to maximize profits. There are reports of people with treatable forms of cancer who were not told by their corporate health care providers in order to avoid the cost of their treatment. These reports are in compliance with capitalist America’s emphasis on profits uber alles, to hell with people, the environment, honor and integrity.
Wall Street is romanticized by libertarians and “free market economists.” They believe, entirely on the basis of their ideology, that Wall Street finances venture capitalists who bring economic progress and higher living standards. Wall Street does no such thing, especially since financial deregulation turned Wall Street into a speculative hedge fund.
Wall Street is concerned with annual bonuses. It will do anything to get them.
Today the interests of American capitalists are as far removed from the interests of the population as the bureaucrats of state owned firms under socialism. Neither can fail, no matter how incompetent or inefficient, as they have the public purse as their backup.
The Wall Street investment banks, which created with the compliance of the regulatory authorities and the credit rating agencies, “toxic” instruments that were sold world wide, thus destroying the prospects of people in many countries, are devoid of integrity and honor. Their only god is greed. And they control the US government, which is too dependent on campaign contributions to restore regulation.
The lobbies of greed rule America. The White House, Congress, even the federal judiciary are impotent in the face of capitalist greed. The recent Supreme Court decision permitting corporations to use shareholders’ money in corporate treasuries to influence elections increases the control that corporations have over the outcome of elections and the decisions of the government of the United States. www.counterpunch.org/feingold01222010.html
There is no government of the people, for the people, by the people, only the rule of private interests.
[Dr. Roberts was assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Reagan administration, associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Senior Research Fellow in the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University.]
Source / Information Clearing House
Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / Fluxed Up World
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