For-Profit Healthcare Meets the Pandemic and Collapses

Single Payer Now

Although the U.S. has less than 5% of the world’s population, U.S. COVID cases currently (as of Jan. 18, 2021) comprise a staggering 20% of world-wide COVID cases and 15% of the world’s COVID deaths. How is that possible? It boils down to one big lack —a national single payer health care system (aka Medicare-for-all). Instead America has a for-profit healthcare industry focused on private gain not public health. The evidence is everywhere you look whether it’s the contradictory messaging coming out of government health agencies, stumbling and bumbling progress in acquiring needed equipment and supplies and the specter of all segments of the medical industrial complex from providers to institutions trying to make a quick buck off the backs of desperate Americans. How could single payer healthcare surmount these obstacles? First and foremost, end the reign of the private health insurance industry where faceless bureaucrats hold the power of life or death over their customers by denying treatment or medication. End those punishing premiums, deductibles and copays that make health insurance unaffordable for a vast number of Americans. End employees’ fear that losing their jobs will cut off their families’ access to medical care. End those narrow provider networks which rob people of the freedom to choose a provider or facility. Between for-profit medical care and rampaging COVID, it’s been a bleak winter in the U.S. To those of you who shake your heads in frustration or bow them in resignation, check out “For-Profit Healthcare Meets the Pandemic and Collapses” and prepare to be dumbfounded at how deep the rot in for-profit medicine goes.

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Liability-Proof: On the March to Big Profits, Big Pharma Leaves No Stone Unturned

Overpatnted Overpriced

Leave it to the drug industry to work all the angles. But that’s the way it is when you’re Big Pharma and your business model is to receive billions in public subsidies, charge exorbitant prices for life-saving medicines, and withhold those same life-saving medicines from countries that cannot afford to hand over the big bucks. Think how the champagne corks are popping in the boardrooms of wealthy investors as Pfizer predicts 2021 revenues from the COVID vaccine alone will top $36 billion. Then there’s Moderna with no history of winning FDA authorization for any of its drugs now expecting 2021 revenues of $18 billion from its COVID vaccine. In fact, two of Moderna’s founders and one of its investors are among 44 new billionaires on Forbes’ list of 400 richest Americans. But that’s not the only way big Pharma brings home the bacon. Thanks to its outsized gifts to Congress and the White House, it has total immunity from having to pay for its mistakes. Unlike every other product manufacturer, vaccine makers cannot be sued for defective vaccines that cause lasting harm or death. In short, big Pharma has a total and impermeable vaccine liability shield. Even the Supreme Court gave its blessing to this monumental blunder. Why you might ask. Because big pharma like the schoolyard bully uses threats to get its way—hold us accountable for our screw ups and we’ll stop making vaccines. You’d have to be a fool or a pharma flunky to believe that a profit-hungry industry would walk away from a pot of gold, even a somewhat reduced one. What description best fits politicians under the thumb of pharma as well as the heads of federal health agencies looking to advance their careers with future employment in the pharma industry? Read “On the March to Big Profits, Big Pharma Leaves No Stone Unturned” and decide for yourself.

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