US health system kills far more Americans than corporate wars.

Source

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

There was a piece on my local news this week reminding us all about the killing of a woman in SF by an “illegal” immigrant who had apparently been kicked out of the country only to return on more than one occasion.

A rare case like this is very good news as it focuses on immigration as the cause for all our ills. There are some 11 million undocumented workers in this country and the overwhelming majority of them not only don’t kill anyone, they work their f%&king asses off in low wage jobs and are among the most exploited and abused sections of the working class.

The US 1% or the ruling class, or the capitalist class, whatever name one wants to give them, are in a unique position. Not only do they own and control the means of producing the necessities of life, food, shelter, housing, healthcare etc. They control the means of manufacturing and dissipating ideas through their ownership of the media, the institutes of learning, particularly higher learning and their partnership with the established religious organizations.

So what dominates our thinking, and mass consciousness, especially when it comes to explaining why society has become so hostile, life so hard, work so alienating, is too many immigrants, Muslim terrorists, atheists, foreigners, people on welfare etc.

Meanwhile, the US taxpayer has had to fork out a couple of trillion dollars in predatory wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. US capitalism has been bombing Iraq for some quarter century killing over one million of them.  The US has tortured, maimed and killed millions of people over the last half century protecting us from threats to our way of life----or so we are led to believe.

But despite being in Iraq and Afghanistan for decades, nether Iraqis. nor Afghani’s (Taliban) or even Iranians have killed anywhere near the number of Americans that American medical personnel and institutions  have handing out prescription drugs.  “Last year, an estimated 59,000 Americans died from drug overdose, many linked to misuse of prescription drugs,” Chuck Rosenberg, the acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration told the Wall Street Journal.

Many of this 59,000 would have been working class Americans, veterans of these wars fought in the interests of US corporations and the 1%  Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Department of Defense casualty website, as of June 29, 2016, there were 4,424 total deaths (including both killed in action and non-hostile) and 31,952 wounded in action (WIA) as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom and  "Fighting insurgents and mentoring and supporting Afghan security forces since 2002 has cost more than 2,400 American military members their lives, and has left more than 20,000 wounded,"  http://freebeacon.com/national-security/war-casualties-afghanistan-hit-time-high-country-stands-brink-collapse/

Seems there's a much greater war  that we need to fight at home.

The war in Afghanistan, Americas longest ever war, is in its 16^th year and has cost the US taxpayer  $117 billion. According to reports I have read, $32.3 billion has been spent on “total on governance and economic development” as of March 2017.

The high wounded level is due to technological advances in body armor. The death rate in Vietnam was much higher than it is today so there are hundreds of thousands more wounded workers that cost money and as we all know, that’s money out. The patriotism and flag waving is for when they’re leaving, heading out to war not coming back as one of the costly wounded.

Apart from this 59,000 killed through a failed medical system, I read today that the Justice Department has just charged some 400 people including 56 doctors “ ….with committing  health care fraud that generated  $1.3 billion in false billings.”

On top of this, the very same Justice Department’s Fraud Strike Force, has conducted numerous investigations in recent years that led to more than 3500 people being charged over the past decade with falsely billing Medicare for more than $12.5 billion.” (WSJ 7-13-17)

Now any thinking worker knows that when the mainstream media and the biased justice system with its class bias publicly expose theft of this magnitude, it is just the tip of the melting iceberg. And as they do with all the revelations of graft, thievery and other such daily goings on, the media and political representatives of capitalism put it down to bad apples, “Too many trusted medical professionals like doctors, nurses and pharmacists have chosen to violate their oaths and put greed ahead of their patients,”

Far fewer people in the US die from terrorist attacks by foreigners than die due to a piss poor health care system. There’s hundreds of thousands more that die due to this failed system. 

In 2016 a study from Brown University stated that:

As of August 2016, the US has already appropriated, spent, or taken on obligations to spend more than $3.6 trillion in current dollars on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria and on Homeland Security (2001through fiscal year 2016)

.

To this total should be added the approximately $6.5 billion in dedicated war spending the Department of Defense and State Department have requested for the next fiscal year, 2017, along with an additional nearly $32 billion requested for the Department of Homeland Security in 2017, and estimated spending on veterans in future years.

When those are included, the total US budgetary cost of the wars reaches $4.79 trillion.

The funny thing is that immigrants, who are an easy mark for those who do not want us to think about these statistics, actually add value to society.

It’s hard at times for me to accept that people can actually fall for the trick, actually think immigrants or people on welfare are draining our resources when in actuality we are being conned. It’s a bit humiliating really, that millions of us tolerate a class of people who also identify as “Americans” ripping the rest of us off to such an extent, killing us off at the same time and blaming other hard working people for our problems.

How long will we put up with that I wonder?