Want to know your share of the $4.3 trillion dollars the US dished out in 2021 to the healthcare mafia? $12,914. Ginormous. If you are a four-person family, in 2021 it cost your family $51,656 to support the greed and grift endemic in America’s one of a kind corporate healthcare fleecing operation. And it goes up every year. Of course, the healthcare dons can’t be bothered to send you an annual bill. They have a partner in crime — the U.S. government. The chunk of your taxes that doesn’t go to support the profligate habits of their other buddies, the dons in the weapons, tech, and energy industries goes to support a public and private health superstructure —public health agencies woefully underprepared to meet the growing need, like the CDC, populated by incompetents looking to join the private agencies they are supposed to regulate. In the private sphere, your individual medical needs can really make a dent in the piggy bank. If you have insurance, you’re on the hook for premiums, deductibles, copayments, and out-of-pocket expenses, chief among them paying for drugs two or three times more expensive than any other place on earth. If you are unlucky enough to be one of the 30 million Americans who have no health insurance, you have three choices — don’t get sick, go bankrupt, die.
All told, U.S. healthcare is a budget-buster, devouring 18.3% of U.S. GDP. Among its other “achievements,” it is the nation’s number one inequality-producing industry. While health industry titans are living large, with salaries topping $20 million, 37.9 million Americans (12% of the population) live below the poverty line and, even more unbelievable in the richest country in the world, 500,000-600,000 are homeless on any given night (2.5 million American children experience homelessness at some point in the year).
With off the charts profit-taking and a government disinclined to “just say no,” U.S. healthcare is an abject failure when it comes to results. One statistic that stands out like the proverbial sore thumb —one-quarter million medical errors (“defined as an unintended act, either of omission or commission, or one that does not achieve its intended outcome [BMJ 2016] happen every year and have become the third leading cause of death in the U.S. (after heart attacks and cancer). Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of the healthcare industry’s business model, which hasn’t changed since 1971 when John Ehrlichman, advisor to President Nixon, described it — “All the incentives are towards less medical care because the less care they (health insurance companies) give them, the more money they make.” Amazing isn’t it that so many years later, nothing has changed, it’s still profits first, patients second.
Although it’s only 4% of the world’s population, America, thanks to its profit-driven health care system, had more COVID deaths (over one million) than any other country including a populous nation like India with over a billion people but only one-half the Covid deaths. How could this be? Undoubtedly, U.S. healthcare run by a gang of bag men and women determined to squeeze maximum profit out of every phase of its operation shoulders most of the blame for this shoddy performance. One “tell” is the way most of the industry profits by keeping vital supplies like masks, gowns, surgical gloves and respirators to a bare minimum. “Just in time ordering” has a simple but deadly bottom line — increasing profits by starving inventories. During the height of COVID, bare shelves and concomitant delays in obtaining needed products and equipment cost many patients their lives. Hospital beds were also MIA. Since 1975 a strenuous effort to rebrand hospitals as an attractive investment for the private equity market, has resulted in a forty percent decline in the number of hospital beds at U.S. hospitals nationwide. This proved catastrophic during the height of the pandemic as Covid sufferers flooded into hospitals with no available beds. Many spent their last hours alone and lying on the floor in hospital corridors.
Lapses in treatment may be understandable (though not forgivable) during a pandemic, but how does the healthcare industry perform in non-pandemic times? One statistic tells it all. According to the Commonwealth Fund, the U.S. has the worst maternal mortality rate, more than double that of any other wealthy nation. More shocking, the economic disparity between the experience of white and black women has elevated maternal deaths among black women to crisis proportions.
One statistic that is particularly meaningful when it comes to assessing the track record of the U.S. healthcare system is life expectancy. U.S. life expectancy at birth has declined 2.7 years from 2019 to 2021, the biggest two-year decline in life expectancy since 1921-1923. [CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics] Those unlucky enough to be born in America in 2021 (average per capita income $63,000) can expect to live 76.1 years. That same child born in Japan in 2021 (average income $40,000) can expect to live 85 years, in the U.K. (average income $45,000) 80.1 years, even in Estonia (average income $23,000) that child can expect to live 78.9 years. Most troubling is that all those countries spend less than half of what the U.S. spends on healthcare.
The diagnosis on the current state of healthcare in the U.S —Too much money spent for too few results. Is there a solution? What about our elected officials?
Nothing doing. They are bought and paid for by the very strata of society that oppresses the people. In their hands the first amendment becomes an effective propaganda mechanism to keep the people’s gaze focused on wedge issues — identity politics mainly. While they artfully distract us from the real rot in the system, the life and death problems confronting most Americans continue to mount. 63% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, an unfathomable situation in the richest country in the world. [LendingClub 10/24/2022] It follows that income and wealth inequality in the United States is the highest among all the economically powerful G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany Japan, UK, US, Italy)
Healthcare is one of the biggest boondoggles. The Covid scare was the golden goose. While one million Americans were dying, Pfizer, the least trusted company in the least trusted industry, was cashing in to the tune of $100 million, profiting off the hysteria ginned up by the corporate media. [Reputation Institute, 2018]
Even though it’s hard to admit, most American know how crappy their healthcare is. Millions are its victims every year. When asked most Americans decry the system, but insist their doctor is “different.” Corporate healthcare shills in both corporate and social media convince the public to look elsewhere for the source of their misery. Meanwhile the rape of the consumer/patient goes on and on. Big pharma is the chief predator. Consider the plight of millions of diabetics. The insulin they need to stay alive cost 10 times more in the United States than in any other developed country. In one of its lamer moves, Congress passed a law putting a $35 copay cap on insulin but restricting the cap to Medicare recipients. The loud and clear message to those under 65 —if you can’t afford insulin, die.
An even more depressing sign that the American voters have been swept into inaction by the blandishments of a healthcare-controlled media and their own lethargy came out of the 2022 midterms in Oregon. Measure 111 asked Oregon voters to change the state constitution to codify health care as a human right via the State Constitution by “ensur[ing] that every resident of Oregon has access to cost-effective, clinically appropriate and affordable health care as a fundamental right.”
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