Medical Corruption : The business of disease -- NY Times Report.

January 12, 2006

At four hospitals across the city, they set up centers that featured a new model of treatment. They would be boot camps for diabetics, who struggle daily to reduce the sugar levels in their blood. The centers would teach them to check those levels, count calories and exercise with discipline, while undergoing prolonged monitoring by teams of specialists. But seven years later, even as the number of New Yorkers with Type 2 diabetes has nearly doubled, three of the four centers, including Beth Israel's, have closed. They did not shut down because they had failed their patients. They closed because they had failed to make money. They were victims of the byzantine world of American health care, in which the real profit is made not by controlling chronic diseases like diabetes but by treating their many complications. Insurers, for example, will often refuse to pay $150 for a diabetic to see a podiatrist, who

can help prevent foot ailments associated with the disease. Nearly all of them, though, cover amputations, which typically cost more than $30,000. Patients have trouble securing a reimbursement for a $75 visit to the nutritionist who counsels them on controlling their diabetes. Insurers do not balk, however, at paying $315 for a single session of dialysis, which treats one of the disease's serious complications. Not surprising, as the epidemic of Type 2 diabetes has grown, more than 100 dialysis centers have opened in the city. "It's almost as though the system encourages people to get sick and then people get paid to treat them," said Dr. Matthew E. Fink, a former president of Beth Israel. Please read the entire New York Times Report at; http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/nyregion/nyregionspecial5/11diabetes.html "Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life but the conquest of life by the power of the spirit." - Aurobindo.

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