The US government, like its British and other counterparts, is a capitalist government. Its purpose is to defend and enhance the interests of capital. In other words, it safeguards the right of a small group of people who do no productive work to live and prosper from those that do. Its god is profit which has its source in the unpaid Labor of the working class.
Capitalists don’t like public entities, even in a capitalist society where they are not controlled and managed by the working class, because any alternative to the free market, to private ownership, is seen as a threat; it might give people ideas. Capitalists will take in to public ownership industries that are not profitable and if they are integral to the working of society like the British coal mining industry; let the taxpayer pay for it. We have seen similar events here in the US after the financial system collapsed. They are aware of the limits of free enterprise. I worked for a public utility that provides water to some three million consumers in California. Up until 1923, there were numerous private companies that supplied this vital service, but they were not reliable, not efficient enough. The capitalists need roads, electricity water services and other social necessities in order to make their system function and profitable. Competition and the ruthless war for profit doesn’t make for good social infrastructure. Anything else, they’ll privatize if they can.
In the US, medicine is strictly a business, this is one of the reasons it is one of the most expensive of all the advanced capitalist countries. In the US, we get the worst bang for our medical buck.
The Laser Spine Institute is a prime example of a criminal for profit health care system. The institute was started by a guy named James St Louis, who, according to Business Week, emerged from bankruptcy and sought investors for his new idea in 2003. Since then, the company has grown to more than 5,000 spine centers throughout the U.S. The company fishes for customers on the Internet using what BW calls “search optimization consultants” at a minimum cost of $100,000 a month.
Business Week describes the procedure involved as a technique that, “…uses lasers to burn off, or ablate, sensitive nerve endings followed by a disc ‘decompression’ that removes material or bone that presses on nerves.” , but there are many detractors. “Nine surgeons told Business Week that “the company is doing surgery that is unnecessary or inappropriate.”
“The evidence that ablation helps patients is pretty weak” says Dr. Roger Chou, the director of the American Pain Society’s clinical guidelines program. The Institute charges around $30,000 for the procedure but has drawn 15 malpractice lawsuits. One woman ended up incontinent and needed $90,000 in care after the surgery and ended up having to go elsewhere to repair the damage. “They’re in it to make money” the victim tells BW. That's capitalism I'm afraid.
Patients have tapped in to their mortgages and their retirement systems to pay for what they assumed would be an answer to their pain, and back pain is painful as those of us that have suffered from it know. Another patient whose insurer covered the $36,000 cost of his surgery was told by Laser Spine staff that he’d be back at his hotel in an hour, but ended up with a terrible stomach ache that they told him was gas. He woke up in hospital some time later with two cut arteries that caused him to have a heart attack.
Ninety percent of the Laser Spine centers in the US are owner operators with doctors as investors. As with any business, the return on the investment is the number one concern so cutting people’s spines is the moneymaker at Laser Spine. Mr. St Louis seems to have done fairly well for himself with a $10.3 million Florida mansion, and an $8 million home in Aspen Colorado. In case he needs to drive from one to the other he has seven cars as well, you never know when the break down occurs.
Some facts about the U.S. medical industrial sickness complex from 2007
Between 2000 and 2007, health care costs in the U.S. rose 73%
Eighteen thousand people die each year because they are uninsured.\
Half of all bankruptcies are caused by medical bills. Three-quarters of those filings are people with health insurance.7
U.S. health care spending is approximately $2 trillion per year, or $6,697 per person.8 The United States continues to spend significantly more on health care than other countries in the world.
Administrative costs account for 31 percent of all health care expenditures in the United States. The average overhead for U.S. private health insurers is 11.7 percent; for Medicare, it is 3.6 percent; for Canada’s national health insurance program, it is 1.3 percent.
According to the UN Human Development Report, while the United States leads the world in spending on health care, “countries spending substantially less than the US have healthier populations.… The infant mortality rate for the U.S. is now higher than for many other industrial countries.” (note: you can check the CIA Factbook for these figures also.)
A baby born in El Salvador has a better chance of surviving than a baby in Detroit. The infant mortality rate in Detroit is 15.5, compared to El Salvador's rate of 9.7.
Canadians live three years longer on average than we do
A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that older Americans are significantly less healthy than their British counterparts -we have more diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, lung disease and cancer. Even the poorest Brits can expect to live longer than the richest Americans.
Cubans have a lower infant mortality rate than the United States and according to the U.N. Human Development Report, a longer average lifespan. *
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| Here's a way of keeping costs high |
The health care industry in the US, or the medical industrial sickness complex as it should be called is a disgrace; it is a product of an uncivilized society. Thousands more Americans die due to this failed but very profitable system for the few than any terrorist groups have killed. Laser Spine is a tiny example compared to the system as a whole, the drug industry, the hospital and out patient care, the insurance companies.
Health care should be a right not a business. All people, including undocumented workers should have the right to free and decent health care at the point of use. The health and drug companies should be taken in to public ownership and managed by the workers who make it function and those who need the services; that includes research. Abolish the insurance companies---no middle-man. What it costs every day to keep 100,000 people in Afghanistan and Pakistan would go a long way in providing proper health care for Americans and would save lives instead of eliminating them.
* Source: sickothemovie.com/_media/SiCKO_sickofactoids.pdf -
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