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How The Corporate System Perpetuates The Current Health Care Crisis
By www.menhealthonline.biz
Americans have spent an ever-growing portion of their paychecks on health care and for the most part gotten less for their money, forcing millions into the ranks of the uninsured or personal bankruptcy. One out of every four adults in the U.S. has problems getting access to and paying for health care, according to a study led by Harvard researchers. Although poor and uninsured Americans have the biggest problem, some 28 million people with insurance do not get the care they think they need, or have problems paying medical bills. There's something like $50 billion a year in profit extracted from the health care system, and that's only about one-sixth as much as the bureaucratic costs of actually extracting that profit. In fact, we spend each year about $320 billion or $340 billion on useless bureaucratic work in order to apportion the right to health care according to ability to pay, enforce inequality in care, and enforce the collection of profit by insurance companies, for-profit hospitals, the drug industry--a whole panoply of players. It's the bureaucracy to enforce inequality and extract profits that drives up the cost, and then, to a lesser extent, the profits themselves. Corporate interests themselves may play a role. For employers, rising health care costs are a cost of production. Hence, some may be motivated to support national health insurance even against their interest in being able to deny health care to striking workers, low-wage workers and so on. Bill Clinton became president partly because he promised to do something about rising health care costs. Although Clinton's chances of reforming the US health care system looked quite good at first, the effort soon ran aground.
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Since then a combination of factors—the unwillingness of other politicians to confront the insurance and other lobbies that so successfully frustrated the Clinton effort, a temporary remission in the growth of health care spending as HMOs briefly managed to limit cost increases, and the general distraction of a nation focused first on the gloriousness of getting rich, then on terrorism—have kept health care off the top of the agenda. But medical costs are once again rising rapidly, forcing health care back into political prominence. Indeed, the problem of medical costs is so pervasive that it underlies three quite different policy crises. First is the increasingly rapid unraveling of employer- based health insurance. Second is the plight of Medicaid, an increasingly crucial program that is under both fiscal and political attack. Third is the long-term problem of the federal government's solvency, which is, as we'll explain, largely a problem of health care costs. A free market and competition are good for some products and services, like pizza parlors and auto mechanics, but absolutely atrocious for others. However, the government provides education, fire protection, and all kinds of other basic needs for our country. The right to live a healthy life is one of those fundamental rights, and the private sector is failing us miserably and making a profit off of patient’s misery and death. Its clear that the United States is in need of complete “overhaul” of the current profit driven system. Dr. Mark Stout,
Dean of Distance Education,
St. Augustine Medical Assistant School Online
http://www.medassistant.org
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