A Society That Throws the Sick Away

[Guest guest]

A Society That Throws the Sick Away

http://tinyurl.com/a9j28 [LA Times]

By Barbara Ehrenreich

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Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of

" Nickel and Dimed:

On (Not) Getting By in America " (Owl Books, 2002).

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April 28, 2005

 

Most countries are proud to have a healthcare system.

It's an organized

way of helping the sick and infirm — a mark of genuine

civilization.

Not so here, alas, where the health system is rapidly

becoming a health

hazard. After decades of privatizing, profiteering and

insurance

company-driven bureaucratization, Florence Nightingale

has morphed into

Vampira.

 

Healthcare costs are sucking the blood out of the

economy, for one

thing. Consider poor General Motors, once the nation's

flagship

corporation and now sinking under the weight of its

employee health

benefits — which account for $1,500 of the sticker

price of each new

vehicle. As GM contemplates bankruptcy, other

companies thrash around

frantically trying to shed their insurance-needy

American employees.

They downsize and outsource — anything to escape the

burden of health

costs. The result? Our " jobless recovery " : Companies

don't want to

assume responsibility for their workers' medical bills

and — this being

the global temple of free enterprise — neither does

the government.

 

Then there are the U.S. health system's toxic effects

on individuals,

and I'm not referring to Vioxx or the approximately

200,000 people who

die each year as a result of " medical mistakes, " but

to its financial

effects. Harvard's Elizabeth Warren recently co-wrote

a study showing

that more than half of all personal bankruptcies are

triggered by

medical costs, and it's easy enough to see how. If you

lose your job —

through, say, downsizing or outsourcing — you lose

your health

insurance, and the uninsured are routinely charged up

to three times

more than those who have an insurance company to

negotiate their

hospital bills. As for emergency rooms, which the

hardhearted or

incurious imagine absorbing all the poor and uninsured

— well, the

average visit to an ER now costs a little over $1,000,

which is a high

price to pay for an asthma attack or an infant's

fever.

 

Certainly the health system makes plenty of people

rich — Big Pharma's

overlords, for example, and CEOs like HealthSouth's

Richard Scrushy

(who received about $267 million in compensation from

his company

between 1996 and 2002) — but it makes a lot more

people poor:

indirectly, by inhibiting job growth, and directly, by

grinding

individuals down to bankruptcy (which, thanks to the

new federal

bankruptcy law, offers no fresh start to the

debt-ridden). Add to this

the well-known fact that poverty is a risk factor for

dozens of

diseases — from asthma to AIDS, from depression to

diabetes — and,

well, I rest my case.

 

When doctors notice a tissue growing nonstop — as U.S.

medical costs

are doing — and in the process draining nutrients from

the body as a

whole, they insist on prompt excision, i.e., cut the

thing out before

it kills. So too, one might think, economists should

be calling for the

immediate destruction of the American healthcare

system: Stamp it out

and drive a stake through its heart. Because Americans

will still need

healthcare, the solution is obvious: If we can't

outsource our

illnesses — and there is so far no technology for

transferring one's

cancer or atrial fibrillation to a starving African or

Asian — we can

at least outsource our healthcare.

 

It's already happening, in fact, though only in a

helter-skelter way.

 

An estimated 2 million Americans cross the borders

every year to

purchase their prescription meds in Mexico or Canada.

U.S. X-rays are

increasingly interpreted by radiologists in India.

 

Patients are being globalized too, as hundreds of

thousands of them

from all parts of the world flock to Manila,

Singapore, Bangalore and

other centers of low-cost, high-quality care. Some

hospitals in India

lure the rich with airport-to-hospital bed-car service

and

post-surgical yoga holidays, and I can foresee cheap,

Motel 6-style

hospitals springing up in Tijuana for the American

working class.

 

All right, it's painful to admit that the nation that

produced Osler

and Salk, pacemakers and MRIs can't do healthcare

anymore. But there

are other things we don't do here much anymore, like

manufacturing.

According to Business Week, companies are increasingly

outsourcing

their R & D too.

 

In the case of healthcare, it wasn't the science that

foiled us

(though, with more schools teaching only biblically

approved versions

of biology, that may soon be a problem too). No, we

Americans just

couldn't figure out the technology of distributing

healthcare to the

people who need it. We left the whole business to

business — both of

the profit-making and private " nonprofit " variety —

and business

screwed it up.

 

The abolition of the American healthcare system will

lead to some

difficult readjustments, of course. Our doctors,

nurses and

technicians, who are among the best-trained in the

world, will have to

seek work in the emerging Asian centers of medical

tourism. As for the

estimated 2 million to 3 million insurance company

functionaries whose

sole business it is to turn down your claims, these

folks may be a bit

harder to reemploy because they have no counterpart in

any civilized,

health-providing nation.

 

 

 

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I am only one; but still I am one.

I cannot do everything, but still I can do something;

I will not refuse to do the something I can do.

- Helen Keller