Senate Finance Committee Chooses Moral Bankruptcy

The Senate Finance Committee has voted to kill the public option in the health care bill it is writing. At least if they ban insurance companies from rejecting people with “pre-existing conditions”, I and people like me who can afford coverage but can’t buy it, might have a shot at getting coverage. But how they can force insurers to insure millions of people like me without massive rate increases will be something to see.

There’s no way around the fact that the US overpays medical service industry providers by 70%. That’s simple arithmetic, comparing costs in the US versus major industrialized countries. It’s like a hidden tax on every American, and it costs the US even more than that in terms of its impact on competitiveness. It’s what’s wrong with the US system, and if they don’t junk the for-profit system entirely, that tax will not go away, and nothing will be gained from any “reform.” This system can’t be reformed.

With any bill that simply applies a few tweaks, we will continue to head straight for catastrophic failure in delivery of medical services, and worsening economic problems. The fact that the medical services delivery industry lobbies have control of Congress assures that. No economy can be competitive with the rest of the world if it is burdened by a 70% medical services cost penalty. Our failure will impact not just whether Americans can get medical services. It will impact whether they have a job at all.

The basic problem that no one in the US will admit to is that we just pay the medical services delivery system too damn much. We allow ourselves to be held hostage, not only by the insurance companies, but also by the drug companies, and finally, they who shall not be named–the d-ct-rs.

We have to ask why d-ct-rs should make twice as much in the US as d-ct-rs make in any other developed country in the world. But none dare speak of it. D-ct-rs are heroes. They are our saviors, our gods. Hospitals are their temples. We are happy to overpay the d-ct-rs and the hospitals because the majority of supplicants, which has insurance, never sees the cost directly. That cost is diverted before it ever makes its way into their paychecks. People don’t miss what they never had, or even realized they could have had.

Funny thing is that most of the single payer system problems in Western democracies are due to the US system, not defects in the single payer system. The US system is a giant tumor on the world body. It makes us deathly ill as a society, not just physically, but morally and spiritually, and it makes other nations less healthy as well.

Medical service shortages in other countries, Canada especially, happen because so many d-ct-rs move to the US so that they can double or triple the money they make in their native countries. They get a cheap government subsidized education in their home country, but rather than stay there and work for $250k as a primary care physician or $400-500k as a specialist, they come to the US where they can make $500k to a million.

Without a level playing field throughout the developed world, no system can be fair. Too many people will opt to go for the money; not just d-ct-rs, but a wide range of medical professional profiteers. That’s why there are shortages of some services in other countries. It puts so much pressure on those who remain in their home countries that many of them finally decide to flee as well. Just as it weakens the US, the money gobbling, cancerous US system drains the lifeblood from other nations’ health care systems.

Of course, there are shortages of services in the US too because the cartel has jacked up prices, earned massive, obscene profits, co-opted and corrupted the Government, and limited the availability of services so that some simply won’t be served at all when their need is greatest and costliest. This is done strictly in the name of profit maximization. People are denied coverage simply because it is more profitable to deny than to serve.

Sadly, Americans are willing to allow 47 million of their countrymen to be at risk of an early death as long as they got theirs. The Senate bill reflects that. The medical services industry has used its obscene profits to buy the entire Republican Party and enough of the Democrats to insure that they can still impose their 70% tax on the American people. They have been slick enough to hide that fact from the people, all of whom pay that tax, one way or another.

In the end it doesn’t matter. We all die. Those of us who get sick and don’t have insurance will just die sooner.

For most of us, it’s no big deal. It’s just not our problem. This is what the medical services industry has done to us. It has bankrupted us financially and it has bankrupted us morally.

We, the people, have lost our ability to care, our ability to see the difference between right and wrong.

We have lost our souls.

Tags: Being Held Hostage, Catastrophic Failure, Competitiveness, Delivery Industry, Delivery System, Developed Country, Economic Problems, Health Care Bill, Industrialized Countries, Industry Lobbies, Industry Providers, Insurance Companies, Lobbies, Medical Service, Medical Services, Moral Bankruptcy, Pre Existing Conditions, Profit System, Rate Increases, Senate Finance Committee, Services Delivery, Simple Arithmetic

This entry was posted on September 30, 2009 at 12:23 am and is filed under Economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.