Reply #30: Not much difference between for-profit medicine and murder incorporated from where I'm sitting...

[warren pease]

I've been furious in the abstract about this so-called health care system for decades, but I've generally had good jobs with full benefits for a long time so my fury remained theoretical until I got my own personal education in the American way of medicine, watching helplessly as a friend was victimized by soulless parasites for whom the bottom line is the only thing that matters.

About 10 years ago, a friend of mine in Santa Cruz, Calif. started having cramps and sharp pains that became increasingly severe over the next couple of months. She was a part-time music teacher in the SC school system and local performing musician, so no benefits.

Her family doc was one of those old-school, pre-managed care saints who aren't in medicine for the money. He had a pretty good idea what was going on, but to be sure he set her up with a gastroenterologist friend who had the same ideas about the relationship between money and medicine. This high-dollar specialist saw her the same day for free and diagnosed her as probably having stage one colon cancer.

He was 95 percent certain, but needed her to have a couple of routine tests to confirm it -- some blood work, a urinalysis, stool sample. Of course, she would have had to pay for these out-of-pocket with money she didn't have, but this specialist snuck her into the lab at a local hospital, drew her blood himself, gave her a cup to pee into, gave her the stool sample kit to take with her, gave the blood and urine to a tech who also happened to be his daughter in law, and got the results in a day which, unfortunately, confirmed his preliminary diagnosis and which was then re-confirmed by the stool sample test results.

Which is when the American way of medical murder kicked in. Even though the specialist would have been fine continuing to treat her for nothing or close to it, she needed an MRI to get a fix on location, size, presence of secondary tumors, and so forth. This would have helped determine the course of treatment. However, the MRI would have cost more than $1,000 that she also didn't have.

And that was just the beginning. Depending on what the MRI showed, it was almost guaranteed that surgery to remove the cancerous mass would be required, followed by radiation and maybe chemo to keep the cancer from returning; things that are only possible in a hospital and cost a fortune. No insurance, no way to pay; no way to pay; no hospital; no hospital, no treatment. And no more social safety net, thanks to years of GOP "reforms."

Cruelest of all, no way to qualify for even the miserable pittance still available through state or local govt. assistance programs like MediCal unless she, her husband, both their families and every single relative the govt. snoops could possibly find were all so completely broke that even pooling all their pocket change, they still couldn't come up with a lousy buck for a cup of coffee.

So she tried to get individual coverage on the open market, but that's nearly impossible unless you're young, healthy and preferably rich, because the premiums are insane. And since she was neither young nor healthy -- with the added gotcha that now she had an expensive pre-existing condition -- it didn't matter how much money she did or didn't have, since she was now uninsurable at any price.

By the time she finally found a county government program that would cover most of her medical expenses, she had gone from stage one -- the point at which she first experienced pain -- to stage three. Stage one is no big deal these days; most people recover just fine with proper care. The higher the number, the more damage it's doing and the more difficult it is to get rid of. And the more painful, particularly when the meds are so expensive that she could only afford to take half the prescribed dose so they'd last twice as long.

So... thus far, the American way of medicine had refused to insure her, which meant she was denied access to hospitals, which made effective treatment impossible. The two docs who took their Hippocratic oaths seriously could only do so much until they ran up against the accountants and the cheesy remains of the so-called safety net, which though never even close to what's available to everyone in civilized countries, at least had provisions to help the non-rich deal with the lunacy of for-profit medicine.

But timing is everything and, even though the local program finally gave her access to quality care in a good hospital, stage three had become stage four. There is no stage five. So she died after another couple of months, leaving a husband and two kids, a bunch of friends and a few seriously pissed off activists who have made it their second job to bring this truly shitty system down once and for all.

It's gratifying to see -- at last -- that the American people are finally starting to understand how badly they've been conned, lied to, manipulated and in many cases bankrupted by this national tragedy and international joke. But you saw what happened to Kucinich, the only candidate talking about single-payer.

Mass media and the DLC essentially cut him out of the picture -- literally at times -- leaving the field to people who are talking about universal "coverage," which is a hell of a lot different than universal access. "Coverage" is just code for insurance, which means keeping the same parasitic sons of bitches in the game so they can continue to profit from misery and death. Such is the grand plan floated by Ms. Clinton, the altruist and the peoples' pal.

I think Obama's plan isn't much different, but I'm not completely sure. I sincerely hope not, but he's getting an awful lot of campaign money from the for-profit medical swine -- second only to Ms. Clinton so far, with the old uninsurable bastard himself and his pre-existing everything running a distant third.

Fortunately for him, the other two, every single member of congress, and higher-ups throughout the judiciary and the executive branches, taxpayers will provide care for them and their immediate families -- for life. And this is the plan they say we can't have because, I suppose, we're just not important enough.

Rat fuckers and thieves, the whole lot.


wp