Fw: A Society That Throws the Sick Away (Good read)

[Guest guest]

A Society That Throws the Sick Away

by Barbara Ehrenreich

 

Published on Thursday, April 28, 2005 by the Los

Angeles Times

 

Source >

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0428-26.htm

 

 

Most countries are proud to have a healthcare system.

It's an organized way of helping the sick and infirm —

a mark of genuine civilization. Not so here, alas,

where the health system is rapidly becoming a health

hazard. After decades of privatizing, profiteering and

insurance company-driven bureaucratization, Florence

Nightingale has morphed into Vampira.

 

Healthcare costs are sucking the blood out of the

economy, for one thing. Consider poor General Motors,

once the nation's flagship corporation and now sinking

under the weight of its employee health benefits —

which account for $1,500 of the sticker price of each

new vehicle. As GM contemplates bankruptcy, other

companies thrash around frantically trying to shed

their insurance-needy American employees. They

downsize and outsource — anything to escape the burden

of health costs. The result? Our " jobless recovery " :

Companies don't want to assume responsibility for

their workers' medical bills and — this being the

global temple of free enterprise — neither does the

government.

 

Then there are the U.S. health system's toxic effects

on individuals, and I'm not referring to Vioxx or the

approximately 200,000 people who die each year as a

result of " medical mistakes, " but to its financial

effects. Harvard's Elizabeth Warren recently co-wrote

a study showing that more than half of all personal

bankruptcies are triggered by medical costs, and it's

easy enough to see how. If you lose your job —

through, say, downsizing or outsourcing — you lose

your health insurance, and the uninsured are routinely

charged up to three times more than those who have an

insurance company to negotiate their hospital bills.

As for emergency rooms, which the hardhearted or

incurious imagine absorbing all the poor and uninsured

— well, the average visit to an ER now costs a little

over $1,000, which is a high price to pay for an

asthma attack or an infant's fever.

 

Certainly the health system makes plenty of people

rich — Big Pharma's overlords, for example, and CEOs

like HealthSouth's Richard Scrushy (who received about

$267 million in compensation from his company between

1996 and 2002) — but it makes a lot more people poor:

indirectly, by inhibiting job growth, and directly, by

grinding individuals down to bankruptcy (which, thanks

to the new federal bankruptcy law, offers no fresh

start to the debt-ridden). Add to this the well-known

fact that poverty is a risk factor for dozens of

diseases — from asthma to AIDS, from depression to

diabetes — and, well, I rest my case.

 

When doctors notice a tissue growing nonstop — as U.S.

medical costs are doing — and in the process draining

nutrients from the body as a whole, they insist on

prompt excision, i.e., cut the thing out before it

kills. So too, one might think, economists should be

calling for the immediate destruction of the American

healthcare system: Stamp it out and drive a stake

through its heart. Because Americans will still need

healthcare, the solution is obvious: If we can't

outsource our illnesses — and there is so far no

technology for transferring one's cancer or atrial

fibrillation to a starving African or Asian — we can

at least outsource our healthcare.

 

It's already happening, in fact, though only in a

helter-skelter way.

 

An estimated 2 million Americans cross the borders

every year to purchase their prescription meds in

Mexico or Canada. U.S. X-rays are increasingly

interpreted by radiologists in India.

 

Patients are being globalized too, as hundreds of

thousands of them from all parts of the world flock to

Manila, Singapore, Bangalore and other centers of

low-cost, high-quality care. Some hospitals in India

lure the rich with airport-to-hospital bed-car service

and post-surgical yoga holidays, and I can foresee

cheap, Motel 6-style hospitals springing up in Tijuana

for the American working class.

 

All right, it's painful to admit that the nation that

produced Osler and Salk, pacemakers and MRIs can't do

healthcare anymore. But there are other things we

don't do here much anymore, like manufacturing.

According to Business Week, companies are increasingly

outsourcing their R & D too.

 

In the case of healthcare, it wasn't the science that

foiled us (though, with more schools teaching only

biblically approved versions of biology, that may soon

be a problem too). No, we Americans just couldn't

figure out the technology of distributing healthcare

to the people who need it. We left the whole business

to business — both of the profit-making and private

" nonprofit " variety — and business screwed it up.

 

The abolition of the American healthcare system will

lead to some difficult readjustments, of course. Our

doctors, nurses and technicians, who are among the

best-trained in the world, will have to seek work in

the emerging Asian centers of medical tourism. As for

the estimated 2 million to 3 million insurance company

functionaries whose sole business it is to turn down

your claims, these folks may be a bit harder to

reemploy because they have no counterpart in any

civilized, health-providing nation.

 

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of

" Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America "

(Owl Books, 2002).

 

© 2005 LA Times

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

A Society That Throws the Sick Away

by Barbara Ehrenreich

 

Published on Thursday, April 28, 2005 by the Los

Angeles Times

 

Source >

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0428-26.htm

 

 

Most countries are proud to have a healthcare system.

It's an organized way of helping the sick and infirm —

a mark of genuine civilization. Not so here, alas,

where the health system is rapidly becoming a health

hazard. After decades of privatizing, profiteering and

insurance company-driven bureaucratization, Florence

Nightingale has morphed into Vampira.

 

Healthcare costs are sucking the blood out of the

economy, for one thing. Consider poor General Motors,

once the nation's flagship corporation and now sinking

under the weight of its employee health benefits —

which account for $1,500 of the sticker price of each

new vehicle. As GM contemplates bankruptcy, other

companies thrash around frantically trying to shed

their insurance-needy American employees. They

downsize and outsource — anything to escape the burden

of health costs. The result? Our " jobless recovery " :

Companies don't want to assume responsibility for

their workers' medical bills and — this being the

global temple of free enterprise — neither does the

government.

 

Then there are the U.S. health system's toxic effects

on individuals, and I'm not referring to Vioxx or the

approximately 200,000 people who die each year as a

result of " medical mistakes, " but to its financial

effects. Harvard's Elizabeth Warren recently co-wrote

a study showing that more than half of all personal

bankruptcies are triggered by medical costs, and it's

easy enough to see how. If you lose your job —

through, say, downsizing or outsourcing — you lose

your health insurance, and the uninsured are routinely

charged up to three times more than those who have an

insurance company to negotiate their hospital bills.

As for emergency rooms, which the hardhearted or

incurious imagine absorbing all the poor and uninsured

— well, the average visit to an ER now costs a little

over $1,000, which is a high price to pay for an

asthma attack or an infant's fever.

 

Certainly the health system makes plenty of people

rich — Big Pharma's overlords, for example, and CEOs

like HealthSouth's Richard Scrushy (who received about

$267 million in compensation from his company between

1996 and 2002) — but it makes a lot more people poor:

indirectly, by inhibiting job growth, and directly, by

grinding individuals down to bankruptcy (which, thanks

to the new federal bankruptcy law, offers no fresh

start to the debt-ridden). Add to this the well-known

fact that poverty is a risk factor for dozens of

diseases — from asthma to AIDS, from depression to

diabetes — and, well, I rest my case.

 

When doctors notice a tissue growing nonstop — as U.S.

medical costs are doing — and in the process draining

nutrients from the body as a whole, they insist on

prompt excision, i.e., cut the thing out before it

kills. So too, one might think, economists should be

calling for the immediate destruction of the American

healthcare system: Stamp it out and drive a stake

through its heart. Because Americans will still need

healthcare, the solution is obvious: If we can't

outsource our illnesses — and there is so far no

technology for transferring one's cancer or atrial

fibrillation to a starving African or Asian — we can

at least outsource our healthcare.

 

It's already happening, in fact, though only in a

helter-skelter way.

 

An estimated 2 million Americans cross the borders

every year to purchase their prescription meds in

Mexico or Canada. U.S. X-rays are increasingly

interpreted by radiologists in India.

 

Patients are being globalized too, as hundreds of

thousands of them from all parts of the world flock to

Manila, Singapore, Bangalore and other centers of

low-cost, high-quality care. Some hospitals in India

lure the rich with airport-to-hospital bed-car service

and post-surgical yoga holidays, and I can foresee

cheap, Motel 6-style hospitals springing up in Tijuana

for the American working class.

 

All right, it's painful to admit that the nation that

produced Osler and Salk, pacemakers and MRIs can't do

healthcare anymore. But there are other things we

don't do here much anymore, like manufacturing.

According to Business Week, companies are increasingly

outsourcing their R & D too.

 

In the case of healthcare, it wasn't the science that

foiled us (though, with more schools teaching only

biblically approved versions of biology, that may soon

be a problem too). No, we Americans just couldn't

figure out the technology of distributing healthcare

to the people who need it. We left the whole business

to business — both of the profit-making and private

" nonprofit " variety — and business screwed it up.

 

The abolition of the American healthcare system will

lead to some difficult readjustments, of course. Our

doctors, nurses and technicians, who are among the

best-trained in the world, will have to seek work in

the emerging Asian centers of medical tourism. As for

the estimated 2 million to 3 million insurance company

functionaries whose sole business it is to turn down

your claims, these folks may be a bit harder to

reemploy because they have no counterpart in any

civilized, health-providing nation.

 

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of

" Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America "

(Owl Books, 2002).

 

© 2005 LA Times