Americans Pay More to Die Earlier -- Why Is Our Health Care System So Screwed Up?

[kpete]

Americans Pay More to Die Earlier -- Why Is Our Health Care System So Screwed Up?

By Brad Reed, AlterNet. Posted September 28, 2009.

Because it was created by Dr. Frankenstein and Satan? Actually, the truth is far less comforting.

Editor's note: This is the first in a series looking at our uniquely dysfunctional health care system.

There are times when it's comforting to imagine that at some point in our history Satan hired Dr. Frankenstein to help him stitch together our health care system.

You can picture the Dark Lord standing over the good doctor in his underground lab barking orders for creating the most insane and irrational health care system in the industrialized world.

"It must cost more per person than any other health care system, and it must leave tens of millions uninsured!" Satan cackled. "It must rely on private markets that give most people no choice in who covers them! It must produce hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies every year! And, and, and! It must produce a system where some patients get excessive and wasteful care, while others have to shuttle off to emergency rooms just to receive primary care treatment! Mwah-ha-ha!"

The reason I consider this scenario to be "comforting" is because it's far less depressing than the actual truth, which is that our medical system has been haphazardly pieced together over the last century almost by accident.

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more:
http://www.alternet.org/politics/142811/americans_pay_more_to_die_earlier_--_why_is_our_health_care_system_so_screwed_up?page=1

[tularetom]

1. Well look at it this way - the sooner you die the less you pay.

[Turbineguy]

2. You have a for-profit system

based on suffering. The more suffering, the more profit (and I don't mean direct physical pain by suffering).

Somehow it's become twisted that way. We've gone from an idea of "get-well-paid-for-helping-people" to this.

Health care providers should be well-paid. It's hard work. It requires a lot of education. But health care cannot function under free-market principles because it's impractical.

When you buy a car you go to various dealers who tell you why you should buy the brand they sell and the advantages of buying from them as opposed to their competitors. You can take your time and research it well. Fair enough. When you are having a heart attack you cannot do that.

In addition, having a healthy well-cared for population is the hallmark of a proper civilized society. And it makes good economic sense given the cost of the alternative. Which is where we are now.

[Echo In Light]

3. Sicko Empire: Profit$ Over People, and people in denial re the aims of their elected Reps

[kenny blankenship]

4. Because it is NOT a system at all. It is a MARKET

America's healthcare "system" is for the most part (for most people and for most of their lives) the same "system" that existed in England at the time that the America colonies revolted and Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations.

"System" as a word in connection with "healthcare" and "America" would imply that someone or a committee of someones designed the delivery medical services to maximize the benefit to any and all citizens, to the citizenry as a whole. Nothing of the kind has ever happened. The model that prevails still is the model of individual economic actors entering a town full of sick people or people worried of becoming sick and plying their trade for THEIR OWN maximal benefit. Public health as a systemic activity of the government stops at suppressing the outbreak of infectious diseases: one step up from digging typhoid pits. Oh, and the sight of poor mothers dragging dead children around the street and disabled people rattling change cups next to their severed limbs has loosened the public purse to the extent that such people are allowed access to doctors under Medicaid.

There has been tinkering at the edges of this "system" but no challenge to its top-down exploitative nature. So time passes, and still patients often seem to resemble workers being squeezed for every last penny of their potential profit, until they literally drop on the factory floor.

[Kievan Rus]

5. The Almighty Dollar...the true God of America

[LatteLibertine]

6. Because the most wealthy want it to be so