We don’t have “health care” in the US; not really. What we have is a tightly controlled delivery system for pharmaceutical companies for the sake of unconscionable profits which help to destroy our economy. Yes, we can blame the mortgage bubble, and the commercial real estate bubble, but there are a few other bubbles which constitute the same fraud where someone in private business gets government to hold a gun to our heads and force us to pay them.
While I don’t agree with the notion we can fix government and make it behave, and especially can we not use government to make others behave — unless we wipe it all away and start from scratch — I heartily recommend this review of the situation from Alternet. This summarizes neatly the pervasive nature of influence buying by Big Pharma. The various major pharmaceutical firms compete only in who gets to stake out the turf first on a particular drug. Otherwise, they collude on price fixing and regulation buying, along with perverting the entire medical field so it’s just a delivery mechanism for their products.
And it only keeps getting worse.
Yes, a few doctors remain who care and actually practice medicine as the high art it should be. Good luck finding them. That business of 100K deaths per year is not just made up, either. There have been several studies pointing this out, and links can be found in the comments attached to the article at Alternet.
