Fwd: Medical Economics

[Guest guest]

" Erin M

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 18:38:17 -0800 (PST)

Medical Economics

 

 

Medical Economics

 

 

 

Medical and health authorities often live in an illusionary world where there is

no connection between medicine and economic reality. The U.S. Department of

Health and Human Services reported earlier this month that health care spending

shot up 9.3 percent in 2002, the largest increase in 11 years, to a total of

$1.55 trillion. That represents an average of $5,440 for each person in the

United States though more than 43 million Americans are uninsured. There seems

to be a consensus that a health care crisis of soaring costs and declining

medical coverage is with us. " The problem with health care in America is not

just bringing in 43 million Americans who don't have insurance at all, the

problem with health care in America is reducing costs, " said Senator John Kerry.

Some people like Senator John Edwards has declared that it was time to " make

health care a birthright for every child born in America. " Representative

Richard A. Gephardt describes it as nothing short of a moral issue.

 

Affordable health care ranks very high as a public concern, just below the

economy and jobs, but above terrorism and national security when voters were

asked to list issues most important to them. Public spending accounts for 45

percent of all health spending in the United States, which is a low percentage

compared to the rest of the world where people are even more dependent on

governments to provide basic medical services. It should be interesting to note

that according to the World Health Organization, despite America’s supposedly

superior medical technology, and all this money spend on health care, the USA is

#1 in the world in degenerative disease and the 20th in life expectancy. It is

obvious that true health security is not measurable or achievable with money and

technology alone.

 

Such high costs would crush most governments in the world. The great majority of

people alive cannot afford what western allopathic medicine has evolved into in

the United States. Even millions of Americans cannot afford America’s high

priced super luxury medicine; one and a half trillion represents 14.9 percent of

the American economy, a great slice of the economic pie, and all projections are

for continued increases. What, medical authorities must ask, will happen to the

American health care system and the American people if a rapid contraction in

the economic system occurs? Already a problem and a heavy burden in a slow

moving economy what would happen to the medical field in a collapse or

depression? These are important questions to ask now when we have even the

cool-headed former Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin warning that an economic

catastrophe is on the way.

 

In a paper presented in early January, Robert E. Rubin, the former secretary of

the Treasury, the most celebrated Treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton,

said that the federal budget was " on an unsustainable path " and that the " scale

of the nation's projected budgetary imbalance is now so large that the risk of

severe adverse consequences must be taken very seriously. " Before the week was

out the International Monetary Fund released a report warning that with its

rising budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance, the United States is

running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens

the financial stability of the global economy. C. Fred Bergsten, director of the

Institute for International Economics in Washington thinks, " Things can get

pretty nasty. "

 

Medical authorities at the major institutions in America act under a basic

assumption that is disconnected with reality. They have assumed that society can

afford a form of medicine that is unaffordable, not only to the majority of the

human race, but soon even to the majority of the American public. What point is

there in creating a medical system that people cannot afford? If people and

governments cannot afford health care they cannot receive medical treatments and

thus those treatments for all intensive purposes are not available, thus they

are really not treatments at all. What would be the use of coming out with a

cure for cancer that cost 20 million dollars per individual? Could authorities

claim the war on cancer won when only several hundred people in the world could

afford such treatments? Many common treatments are already beyond the

pocketbooks of anyone without ‘complete’ medical insurance. Those with

compassionate and empathetic hearts know and understand that people

who are surrounded with medical wonders that they cannot afford suffer a

special kind of pain when their loved ones are sick.

 

Though hardly anyone wants to face up to medical economics and the deep

unsolvable problems inherent in a system that is running up trillions upon

trillions of dollars in debt, the American health care system is not

sustainable. Without the increases in debt the entire system would have already

collapsed leaving modern medicine in the lurch. The entire purpose of medicine

is to help people not build fascinating tools to marvel at but leave unused.

This they will be when there is no money with which to lubricate such tools. The

entire senior medical establishment in America has participated in a system, a

system from which it did not and could not separate itself from, the system of

capitalism, but especially from corporate capitalism. The most fantastic

concentrations of wealth in the last 100 years has been in the chemical,

agricultural and pharmaceutical fields which each have contributed in

significant ways to declines in health in the general population. The principle

powers in

each of these industries interpenetrate with the world of modern day allopathic

medicine at the very highest level of decision-making.

 

The pharmaceutical companies are just " treating the researchers and the academic

medical centres as though they were hired guns or technicians or something. They

just do the work. And the drug company will decide what the data show, what the

conclusions are and whether it will even be published, " said Dr Marcia Angell,

former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Increasingly, health care

decisions in the USA are being mandated by small cadres of " specialists " who

decide whether this or that medication will be made legal and available to the

American public. Where scientific evidence once was the criteria for extended

use of a new medication, such decisions are today being made more on the basis

of the profits that can be made from a particular medication. The only problem

is the profit motive just does not make for good medicine.

 

Defective systems do collapse eventually. Malpractice; misdiagnosis,

mistreatment, toxic drug treatments all do hurt people. People in government,

medicine and industry have forgotten completely that truth does exist and that

it does matter. When we fail to look for that truth, when we fail to see it when

it shows itself, when we do not listen we participate in something wrong, in an

error of perception and deed that in the field of medicine speaks loudly of

death.

 

Imagine a likely near future scenario; imagine a Hospital that is as big as a

city like Mt Sinai is in New York City. What will happen if its income, instead

of increasing every year through good and bad times suddenly drops 25 percent?

Which departments will be closed first? Which services cut? What tests left

undone? Money intense medicine has its own addiction to money so it is very

vulnerable to the kind of collapses that Rubin and the IMF are indicating is

possibly in the wings. Medicine has escaped every downturn so far, growing

consistently, and at 1,55 trillion someone is making an awful lot of money. What

would the landscape of modern day medicine look like if it were cut off from a

third of that money? If the Americans were forced to live on a medical system of

" only " a trillion dollars what would happen to them? What if the reality of

medical truth is that 500 billion of that care was unnecessary or what if that

500 billion was contributing to creating more illness? If the

very idea of medicine is wrong in certain areas, and that wrongness of belief

is costing 500 billion we have a serious problem either waiting to happen (as in

collapse of systems) or a problem already happened measurable in suffering and

death.

 

What none of the political people are thinking of is changing the face of

medicine itself. Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri has built his

campaign around a $214-billion-a-year plan to cover every American, ready to

throw even more money into the hands of a system that will gladly gobble up the

extra income. A careful study of medical economics yields a cry for change in

the very structure and philosophy of medicine but when you have most people in

leadership positions with a strong ideological position about medicine, and you

only hear from others who are on your side, you can pretty much predict the

outcome. Nothing will change until that change is forced. Economic realities

force changes in all other realities eventually and as it is in society it will

be in medicine.

 

And if it is not the open economy that will bring medicine and its leaders to

their knees it will be a tidal wave of families afflicted with autism that is

amassing an army to execute the largest class-action litigation the world has

ever seen. " Make no mistake, an army is amassing and it's heading straight

towards Congress and Courtrooms all across this country, " says Michael A.

Chernoff, of Houston, Texas. Many see the autism epidemic as American's silent

holocaust, one that is being mainly ignored by the medical establishment. This

epidemic will cost society another cool trillion to manage as the FDA and the

CDC refuse to look sincerely into the causes. Modern allopathic medicine is

going to be faced with a crisis of faith even as its legs get pulled

economically from under its fat belly.

 

 

 

 

 

Mark Sircus

 

You can see some of my Medical News Commentaries from the past being posted at

 

http://www.congregator.net

 

 

 

I have now posted all my books as ebooks for sale at the following address:

 

http://www.trans4mind.com/world-psychology

 

Posted by Erin M

 

Secretary

 

International Medical Veritas Association

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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