Healthcare

      This is a letter to editor I recently published:

  >'Rather than listen to all the misinformation being bantered about by politicians regarding the American healthcare system, I strongly suggest that everyone simply read the book “An American Sickness- How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back” by Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal. It is available in the Warren public library. As both a doctor and investigative reporter, Dr. Rosenthal offers a meticulously researched account of how healthcare in this country has metastasized into a system which, as she states “…has stopped focusing on health or even science. Instead it attends more or less single-mindedly to its own profits.”  She then backs up that claim with example after example of how hospitals, drug companies, insurance companies, individual doctors, and administrators have gamed the system to maximize profits-often knowingly to the detriment of patient care. This unfortunate deterioration started long before Obamacare or whatever new plan the Republicans come up with. In fact, one economist in the book, Glenn Melnick, states that “It (healthcare) is now so dysfunctional that I sometimes think the only solution is to blow the whole thing up.”  That is the exact same quote I hear from some of the most experienced healthcare workers I talk to right here in Warren. So if anyone genuinely wants the facts regarding American healthcare rather than ignorant sound bites, please read the book and encourage whatever lawmaker you support from either party to do the same.'<

..............and some other reflections:

              A recent tweet by a mother outlining the $200,000 plus hospital bill for her sick son exposed several things about the American healthcare system, and wealth distribution in general. Since 1982 the wealthiest 400 people have increased their worth from a collective 80 billion to 2.4 trillion. One of them, Warren Buffett, admitted in a PBS interview that a proposed version of the Republican health care bill would reduce his tax bill by $679,999, or 17%. His worth according to Forbes is over 75 billion, on which he paid a 16.3% tax rate in 2016.

    That tax on people with incomes over $200,000  is currently helping pay the subsidies for Obama care. At the same time many Insurance companies’ stock price and profits have gone up despite their having dropped out of certain markets, raised premiums and diversified their businesses. So there has been a lot of money moved around over the last 35 years, some of it to the middle and lower classes in the form of entitlements and much of it to the rich.  

    As for the mother and her son, his hospital stay required about a third of the $679,999 of Mr. Buffet’s tax payment, which he freely admits he does not need. The mother paid a $500co-pay. As a society the decision becomes whether to give the wealthy-both individuals and corporations- their money back or save the kids life. Because as a people we have decided to save infants at all costs without having a clear system to pay for them , the life and death decisions have shifted from the mother-who if she did not have insurance would have watched her child die-to the rest of us. The  inefficiency in the health care industry contributes to the dysfunction, but so do 90 year olds who receive extensive lab tests and recurring hospitalizations. Do they deserve to have all their bills paid, or should we refer them to priests instead? Is a premature infant who would die within hours without receiving a million dollars of care worth the expense? Should corporations and individuals pay for that level of care or should nature be allowed to take its course? Those are the realities this country-and individuals- have not been able to reconcile, and meanwhile we debate and debate and move money around without really solving

anything.