The United States has the most expensive second rate health care system in the world. We pay twice as much per person as the second most spendthrift nation—Switzerland---for care that puts us right at the bottom of industrialized nations on a whole host of health indicators like infant mortality and life expectancy. That means we are getting ripped off by our Medical Industrial Complex (MeIC), the system of pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, durable medical goods manufacturers, doctors, health insurers, nursing homes, health system consulting companies, health equipment manufacturers and suppliers and everyone who feeds at the trough. Health care spending makes up 16% of the GDP. That is 4 times what we spend on defense.
http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtmlCountries with nationalized health insurance spend a much smaller portion of their GDP on health care. Or, put it another way, they spend much less per person per year—a quarter or less of what we spend—and yet have much better health. How? They spend their money more wisely and get better quality care, because their money goes for actual care, especially preventive services, which start the minute each person is born.
The health care system in the United States is not designed to keep anyone (except maybe a few CEOs) healthy. It is designed to breed disease and illness which can then be treated with very expensive patented band-aids. At every step of the way, some businessman is there to collect his cut. Your suffering is the MeIC's profit. Amplify your suffering, and you increase the MeIC's earnings.
Here is how it works. Many millions of Americans, especially children who tend to live in poverty in this country, have no preventive health care at all. Or, they are underinsured and get their care from the emergency room. They develop a host of diseases, like diabetes, high blood pressure, back and joint disease and obesity as well as smoking addiction by young adulthood. Once they begin working, some will become insured, and for ten to twelve thousand dollars a year, they will be able to see a doctor and get medications that will earn a pharmaceutical company thousands a year to treat problems that could have been prevented through childhood medical intervention. Others will remain uninsured, until they go on dialysis or have heart attacks or strokes and go on disability and federal Medicare or Medicaid, at which point they are
fully insured forever, and they will make the Medical Industrial Complex tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year
for the rest of their lives---at tax payers expense---for diseases that could have been prevented if these people lived in a country where preventive health care for children and young adults was the norm.
Since everyone eventually goes on Medicare, the MeIC knows that sooner or later the federal government will fully ensure everyone, even those who problems are not severe enough to warrant disability. By forcing a large portion of the population to spend a majority of its life uninsured or underinsured, the MeIC knows that once the geriatric set becomes fully insured, there will be a lot of very profitable disease for it to treat. A lot of profitable
preventable disease that they do not have in western Europe.
The trick, for the Medical Industrial Complex, is to keep that socialized medical care available only at the end of life and to make sure that there are plenty of years for disease to develop. Think of chronic disease as a crop that the MIC is nurturing. It does not want to harvest it until the time it right. Since no one wants to see people dying on the streets(that would make the flaws in the system all too obvious), hospital emergency rooms provide stop gap care, which we all pay for in higher bills.
Now, any attempt to provide increased health care to children would spoil the MeIC’s game. Preventive care early in life might make us a healthier country---and that might cut into the profits of the drug companies that want to see a bunch of us develop high blood pressure and diabetes. It might keep us from having premature strokes which would keep us out of nursing homes. It might keep us from getting fat, and then who would need all those artificial joints? How would the orthopedic surgeons pay for their Jags?
So, when W. vetoes SCHIP, he isn’t doing it just to protect 4 million private health insurance policies. He is making sure that the MeIC has 4 million lifelong customers in the future, people who will suffer from debilitating chronic disease that will require them to use treatments and surgeries and oxygen and other therapies that will deplete their savings and destroy their quality of life.
More importantly, he is making sure that no one has the bright idea of expanding the expansion of SCHIP. Because if those extra 4 million children were shown to grow up healthier, with fewer chronic diseases and less need for expensive medical care later in life, some smart government bureaucrat would notice and say “Hey, this is how we can solve our Medicare crisis! Let’s start taking care of people when they are young! That way, when they reach Medicare age, they won’t be so sick, and we won’t have to spend so much money on them.”
The Medical Industrial Complex is not going to find many more Dumbyas. He is the last of a dying breed. The rest of the Republican Party seems to have noticed which way the mood of the country is blowing. That is why I think that this veto of the SCHIP expansion may be the equivalent of the second battle of Manassas, the MeIC's last victory in a war which they are going to lose only they do not know it yet. Cradle to grave insurance makes too much sense. It solves the nation's uninsured crisis, and it can help make people healthier so that when they reach Medicare age, they do not bankrupt the system.
And if the Medical Industrial Complex is really about health care, they can not argue with a plan to make the nation healthier, right?
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