I mean, fuck... a thriving public health system is only the single most critical element within the entire concept of "health care," as distinct from "medical insurance." An affordable, bureaucracy-free single-payer, universal-access health care system is considered a basic right by virtually the entire civilized world.
Here, even though we're finally starting to get a hint as to who the screwers and screwees are (which would be "them" and "us," respectively), medical coverage is still an expensive, big-ticket consumer item; a privilege reserved for those who can pay the exorbitant monthly premiums, deductibles, co-pays, "make-good" costs on the 80-20 scam, and anything else the greedy slime creatures can invent as they go along.
Part of the problem lies in separating the concept of health care from the concept of medical insurance.
What's health care? What's medical insurance?Health care is what happens when patients and health care professionals – doctors, nurses, technicians, researchers, epidemiologists, pathology lab staff and so on -- collaborate to, in the best case, successfully diagnose, treat, alleviate and/or eliminate a patient's medical problem(s).
Insurance is the protection money you're compelled to pay the leg-breaking racketeers occupying the middle ground to enable this transaction. This isn't a health care system. It's just another corporate shake down. Premiums are protection money paid to legalized extortion syndicates, who then allow you to keep most of your stuff – house, car, pre-Columbian art, coin and stamp collections, et al -- if something serious (i.e., expensive and maybe requiring hospitalization) happens to you.
If it does, and you're without even the usual inadequate and pathetic medical coverage prevalent throughout the US, you're just about guaranteed to join the millions who file for bankruptcy each year solely because they aren't zillionaires and can't afford to pay the hospital bills.
Why would you want to give a single damn penny to some parasite who does absolutely nothing to provide health care?
Note that the two have absolutely nothing in common except in the twisted minds of Chicago School libertarian fanatics and free market pitchmen. Nobel Prize winning charlatan economist Milton Friedman comes to mind, greedy cheapskate bastard prick of the first magnitude that he was. (Keep in mind that Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, so...)
Break that nonsensical, artificial link, dump the idea of for-profit medicine entirely, replace it with a single-payer, universal-access system and spread the risk over the entire population in the form of a modest, progressive tax.
Where the money goesOf the 19 countries the UN classifies as "industrialized," "advanced" or "first-world," the US spends more than twice as much as any of the other 18 on running this for-profit scam, triaging by bank account balance rather than medical urgency. And what's that number? Well...
In 2006, for-profit medicine in the US was a $2.2 TRILLION business costing Americans about $7,333 each, of which various parasites and extortionists skimmed between 20 and 35 percent -- or between $400 billion and $700 billion.
Here's what the UN's World Health Organization (WHO) had to say about its landmark 2000 study comparing the health care system of 190 countries -- due to be updated next year.
"The position of the United States is one of the major surprises of the new rating system," says Christopher Murray, M.D., Ph.D., Director of WHO's Global Programme on Evidence for Health Policy. "Basically, you die earlier and spend more time disabled if you’re an American rather than a member of most other advanced countries.
"The United States rated 24th under this system, or an average of 70.0 years of healthy life for babies born in 1999. The WHO also breaks down life expectancy by sex for each country. Under this system, U.S. female babies could expect 72.6 years of healthy life, versus just 67.5 years for male babies."
What the hell? 67.5 years? That's nearly 10 years below what it was back in the 1970s and '80s. So we don't get much actual "health" for all this money. What then do we get?
How about exec compensation; shareholder return; obsessive paper pushing; outside investments in such things as real estate and hedge funds; motivational junkets to the Bahamas for execs and their girlfriends; salaries and perks for armies of actuaries and claims "adjusters" (whose job is to "adjust" claims down to zero $$$ via technicalities or, if they can't find any, just make shit up); and so much more...
None of this has anything whatsoever to do with performing the job their corporations are chartered for: paying medical claims to health care providers for their subscribers. That's their only job, and they still manage to fuck it up, refuse to do it and pervert it until it's unrecognizable.
Here in Dumbfuckistan......It's like the timid soul of Don Knotts fused with the brain of Homer Simpson, combined to produce a bit of primordial slime with the wimpiest and the dumbest characteristics possible, cloned itself endlessly, then slipped the clones down 300 million auditory canals, from where they slid undetected right on into the American collective consciousness. D'oh... And one result is...
The US is unique in the world in its child-like belief in corporate good citizenship and the intrinsic benevolence of a medical system even though it's based solely on making tons of money.
This is not only naive; it's clueless, since it requires expecting these soulless pigs to engage in illegal business practices. They make enough money without needing to bust a felony every day. To wit:
US corporate law and SEC regulations demand that a publicly owned, for-profit corporation must focus on achieving one single objective: maximizing shareholder equity.
In short, it's literally impossible for a US for-profit publicly held medical insurer or facility to deliver on its obligations to its subscribers and shareholders at the same time. And, as noted above, if somebody has to get screwed, by law it's going to be the peasants.
Only toddlers, nitwits and republicans (redundant?) could possibly believe this is the best way to run a local fire department, much less a system that makes critical life-and-death decisions every day.
Screw your customers and win great prizes...The Wall St. investment community -- where virtually everything that's bad for people is considered good for business and vice versa -- puts out a flurry of "buy advisories" to reward for-profit medical insurance companies for refusing to cover essential medical procedures based on the thinnest, most ridiculous pretexts.
A quick aside: About eight years ago, I was denied coverage for a CAT Scan and MRI ordered by a fairly famous Portland-based pain management doc. He was hoping to find the source of some uncommonly sharp neck pains I had been experiencing. Keep in mind that CAT Scans and MRIs are common, non-life-threatening, non-experimental procedures that even the infamous Scrooge McDuck Happy Happy Deep Pockets Predatory Slime Creatures and Amalgamated Partners in Claims Denial R Us, LLC. would cover -- as long as Huey, Dewey and Louie were the ones afflicted.
But because I forgot to include a quick trip to the ER on my application, this particular claim was denied because the trip to the ER to reset and tape a dislocated little toe -- plus write serious pain med scrips -- was classified as a "preexisting condition."
I had sustained this so-called injury about 40 years prior and somehow failed to see any relevance to the procedure in question in the early part of the 21st century. Silly me...
Thanks a lot, Daschle, you sell-out prick.Without a public health system -- such as the national/provincial/regional plans every single one of the other 18 so-called civilized, post-industrial countries uses to keep their populations far healthier, for far longer, than the US does...
Without that element, it's just same shit, same perps, same screwers and screwees, same
Another grand and noble victory for the bribocracy, and another 1,000 or so raised middle fingers from a smirking Congress to the people they pretend to represent.
Remember: It's all bullshit; and it's all about money..." (me, 2001)
If there's any lesson to be learned and internalized while watching this travesty of "health care reform" go straight to hell, it's that all campaigns -- from alderman to president -- must be publicly financed.
If not, we get the current system of federal, state and even local governments that serve corporate interests exclusively -- a government run of, by and for the exclusive benefit of the rich and powerful.
If we continue on this insane path of overt influence peddling and blatant corruption, we're willing participants and, worst of all, ignorant, self-destructive fools who accelerate our own economic/social/environmental races for the bottom by NOT funding political campaigns.
I know it's a Hobson's choice: I don't want to encourage the swine either.
But the current "Money = Speech;" "Corporate Personhood;" corporate "values" uber alles is clearly destroying this country. Put that way, I submit the choice gets considerably easier.
sf
Steven Franklin, the writer former known as War*e* P*as*
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