From A Madman Only:
A Rant and Modest Proposal on Health Care.
By Max G. Bernard
Smashwords Edition
http://www.smashwords.com
Copyright 2010 Max G. Bernard, all rights reserved
On the cover: "The Doctor," a drawing by Luke Fildes (1843-1927) produced in 1891, now in the public domain.
Something is very, very wrong. The emperor has no clothes. Even a child can see it. Can’t anyone tell the truth? Why aren’t more people mad? If you aren’t outraged, you really aren’t paying attention.
The "best" health care? No, it’s not. You decide: The U.S. is number 33 in infant mortality, just barely ahead of Croatia, and behind New Caledonia, Cyprus, Brunei, Channel Islands, Cuba, New Zealand, and the list goes on. Dead children, who could have lived...
Millions in the U.S. lack health insurance. Many have health insurance that, to be blunt, is lousy. Health insurance companies, if you have insurance, specialize in figuring out how to deny coverage. Pre-existing conditions. That treatment is experimental. Exclusions in the policy.
Denied preventative medical services, many only see a doctor or enter a hospital when it’s too late. The cancer has spread. The diabetes has wreaked havoc with the vascular and circular system. All that is left is drastic action carried out to try to delay the inevitable demise of the person, someone’s wife, husband, mother, father, son, daughter, aunt, or uncle for a few days, weeks, or months.
Lots of people who don’t feel well put off seeing a doctor because they can’t afford it. Even if they have health insurance, they may not afford the co-payments, or the tests the doctor wants to perform.
The insurance companies strangle the doctors’ offices and hospitals with forms and paperwork. No referral form for a specialist? No treatment. No preapproval? No surgery. Need more visits to a therapist than covered? Forget it. Decisions that should be made on a medical basis are made on the basis of arcane and non-understandable rules that are deliberately designed to be complicated, Some medical offices are literally filled with employees most of whom do nothing other than process paperwork for insurance companies.
The "best" health care? No, it’s not. On Jan. 8, 2008, Reuters news service reported that, among 19 leading industrialized nations, France, Japan and Australia rated best and the U.S. worst in terms of rankings focused on preventing deaths from treatable conditions.
The article reported on a study by Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published in the journal Health Affairs. Their method was to track deaths which they believed could have been prevented if the decedent’s had been allowed access to health care in an effective manner at an early stage, and then rank countries on what they accomplished.
The study appeared to indicate that
if the medical system in the U.S. performed as well as the top three
countries, 101,000 of the deaths that occurred each year in the U.S.
could have been prevented.
101,000 dead people a year. ONE
MILLION dead people in a decade, with another 10,000 dead left over
to spare. And they put people in prison for life for supposedly
murdering one person. The crime is usually thought of as more
egregious if it was a contract killing, a hired murder for profit.
What would be the reaction to an organized conspiracy to murder one
million people in a decade, including many children, many elderly
people, many disabled people, many poor people, many people of
minority race and ethnicity? And to do it for money, for profit?
If you put on the market a brand of soda lacked with poison, and it killed 101,000 in a year? Would that brand still get a lot of shelf space?
What do you think should be the penalty for operating a health insurance company?
Why do we need these parasitical middlemen serving as gatekeepers between doctors and their patients? Why are the lobbies of so many supposedly “non-profit” hospitals filled with expensive art work, and their offices staffed with high paid executives while some of the night shift nurses can’t even afford to eat in the overpriced cafeteria available to visitors? Why does an aspirin table that Walgreens makes a profit on selling it for 3 cents become a ten or fifteen dollar item buried in the thirty page itemized charges of a bill from a three day hospital stay? Is there any conceivable justification for the insurers, hospitals, or drug companies making even a single cent of profit from health care, that is, receiving anything from anyone over and above the actual cost of providing the care?
The current health care “reform” currently being considered (which may or may not actually have been enacted into law by the time you read these words) is far from what is needed. Even the supposedly “boldest” in government mostly call for, at best, a “public option,” the mild remedy of some sort of government run public insurance plan, into which persons would have to enroll, individually pay for, and which would “compete” with the voracious private health insurance companies in the “marketplace,” where human life and health is just another commodity to be traded in as a source of profit.
A handful of those who see farther may call for at least a “single-payer” system, as many modern countries (and even some not so modern) have, but still requiring qualification, enrollment, mounds of paperwork, and individual monthly payment of insurance premiums.
Under most of the currently supposedly “feasible” health care “reform” proposals, in an outrageous gift to the bloodsucking private insurance companies, most people would be compelled under law, to purchase medical insurance from them! While there will supposedly be some sort of partial government “subsidy” for those having trouble paying for it, the reality is that many still will not have the funds to afford it without denying themselves or their families some or all of the other necessities of life, not to mention a few simple pleasures.
Those who don’t buy the insurance companies’ botulistic banquet in the form of health care insurance will actually, with a tortured form of logic worthy of Alice in Wonderland, be subject to a monthly fine or tax for not doing so, around $100 a month per person by some accounts. This is like a restaurant, upon discovering that you are too poor to purchase a sandwich, also denying you the right to drink from a water fountain or use the public washroom. Wait, that doesn’t even capture it fully.
It is more like finding a starving man on the street, and holding a gun to his head to force him to look through his threadbare pockets for something with which to make you a sandwich, and then stealing his shoes when he fails to comply, a method of operation long favored by schoolyard bullies.