Or, 'Why corporate control of the media may be hazardous to your health'

[Joanne98]

Guest Editorial by Ernest A. Canning

"Americans think that it’s healthcare that produces health, when there really is very little evidence for that. What turns out to be really important is the nature of caring and sharing in society….Where societies are more equal --- and economic equality is the thing that is most important in this --- people look after each other…and pretty well everyone does better. There’s almost nothing that is better in a society that tolerates the extreme levels of inequality in the United States. And so, we end up dying younger than people in all the other rich countries, despite spending half the world’s healthcare bill." - Dr. Stephen Bezruchka, March 30, 2009

"Who are we? Is this what we have become --- a nation that dumps people off like garbage who can't pay their hospital bills?" - Michael Moore, following a segment in which a confused elderly woman in a flimsy hospital gown is dumped curbside near a Skid Row rescue mission, in his documentary Sicko!*

In Failed States (2006), Prof. Noam Chomsky, a preeminent linguist and one of this nation’s most prolific political writers, concludes that the U.S. suffers from a “democracy deficit” --- the significant gap between the policy positions of the electorate and their elected representatives --- which he attributes to the manner in which “elections are skillfully managed to avoid issues and marginalize the underlying population…freeing the elected leadership to serve the substantial people.”

The deficit is especially acute in what Chomsky describes as “the most dysfunctional healthcare system in the industrial world.” Chomsky notes that a single-payer system --- that is a system in which all medical providers would be paid by a government entity as now occurs with Medicare --- has long been overwhelmingly favored by “a considerable majority” of the American people, but routinely dismissed by both the corporate media and the leaders of both political parties as “lacking political support” and not being “politically possible.”

The issue touches on the core contradictions which arise because we have allowed private authoritarian entities, corporations, to subvert democracy by controlling our economy, our mass media and the manner in which we conduct elections.

This piece will focus on the irrationality of a privatized health care system which values the wealth of a handful of CEOs of the parasitic and entirely unnecessary middle-men --- for-profit carriers and HMOs --- over the health and very lives of our people. It will explain what corporate America and their bought-and-paid-for politicians do not want you to hear...


Still 'Sicko' in the U.S.A.

The importance of Michael Moore's Sicko lies in its ability to transcend the abstraction of statistics. Moore recites the all too familiar numbers --- 47 million Americans have no health insurance; 18,000 die each year (according to the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine) simply because they cannot afford to pay for health care insurance.

Sicko begins with an uninsured man who is sewing up a gash in his leg; another who was forced to choose which of two lopped off fingers to save. Moore then tells us that Sicko is not about them. It's about the 250 million who are insured, like Larry Smith, a former machinist, and his wife Donna, a former newspaper editor --- Americans who'd worked hard all their lives only to be forced to move into their daughter's tiny storage room after the co-pays for Larry's multiple heart attacks and Donna's cancer ate up their life savings and cost them their home. It's about the 9/11 rescue workers who travel to Cuba, receiving, free-of-charge, medical care their own ungrateful nation failed to provide at a price they could afford.

Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) reports "medical bills contribute to half of all personal bankruptcies. Three-fourths of those bankrupted had health insurance at the time they got sick or injured."

Sicko exposes the fundamental conflict that arises when for-profit carriers and HMOs resort to utilization review (UR) (a system in which insurance industry physicians who never see the patients are paid to second-guess the judgment of the physicians who directly provide health care) and a myriad of other devices to avoid authorizing or paying for necessary procedures --- a point underscored by the tearful Congressional testimony of former UR physician, Linda Pino, M.D., who noted that the UR physicians with the highest number of denials receive the largest bonuses and that she was promoted because she denied "an essential procedure" which "cost a man his life."

continued>>>
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7186

[kimmerspixelated]

1. Great Post Joanne!

It's not just the system. People are led to believe by the media, as well, that their only hope for health is to always, always follow doctors orders. If they could educate themselves about dietary choices and supplements(which could be their main insurance, they would feel empowered to change the general outlook of their own aging health. Prescriptions alone are such a profit pig and it will never change unless people educate themselves.