The dutifully obedient corporate media defends corporate medicine.
Those who’ve read or seen Manufacturing Consent or some of Noam Chomsky’s other works know the answer: they are a corporate entity designed to sell advertising and protect corporate interests first, loosely draped in the form of a news organization.
Those who attempt to reform America and push for changes that threaten to weaken corporate power will run into a brick wall in the corporate media. This isn’t hard to understand; in fact, it would be rather hard to understand how it could happen any other way. If the corporate media wasn’t looking to protect their corporate health care friends, you’d have to ask yourself what went wrong.
Our health care system has turned into a corporate profit-care system, designed to look after the bottom line first and ensure healthy multi-million dollar megasalaries for the CEOs. Like the corporate media, the supposed function, health care, is simply a tool by which to reach that goal. If your kidney operation hurts Kaiser Permanente’s CEO’s plans to buy a new yacht, you’re just going to have to sacrifice.
Some may choose to disagree, but obviously single-payer systems around the world are working, providing all of their citizens care, and making enough people satisfied to stand up for that kind of system. Michael Moore has asked Americans to consider the issue. Others would love to disagree with him, but by what grounds does CNN believe a “fact-check” on Moore containing its own errors is all the issue deserves?
Perhaps this is an issue America needs to look at and debate, instead of being told by CNN, “There’s nothing to see here, go home!”
-jb
July 12th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
Update 2: More lies and hackery.
July 13th, 2007 at 8:42 am
You act as though there’s no other reasonable choice but a single-payer system, but of course there is: the one we have now!
You might not care to look, but there are always stories popping up concerning the de facto (and sometimes specified) rationing of health care in the single-payer systems. In our neighbor to the north, it’s done with excessive waiting times, over half a year in some provinces (Prince Edwards Island being an example.) The British National Health Service has specific guidelines in place to extend waiting periods for eight weeks in some regions.
As it happens, my family has plenty of experience with two single-payer systems right here, in the good old US of A: the military medicine system and the VA Hospitals. My sister-in-law, who has had Crohn’s Disease since she was twenty, went to the Langley AFB hospital for a flare up of her Crohn’s, and the doctors there could not diagnose her problems, even though they had a fat record of previously-diagnosed Crohn’s flare ups on hand, and she told them what was wrong; she finally checked out, against medical advice, after they hadn’t done anything for a freaking week, and went to a private physician who, sure enough, realized that she was telling the truth and treated her for a Crohn’s problem.
Either the doctors at LAFB were totally incompetent (a possibility, but in that case, why reject a known diagnosis?) or they were trying to find something else that would cost less to treat.
My father-in-law received such great treatment at the VA Hospitals in Huntington, WV, and Hampton, VA, that he lost a leg he never should have lost (it started with a small diabetic foot ulcer).
But those of us in my family who have been treated by the private health care system have had excellent and prompt care. My wife, who is an RN working in a private hospital, has told me of how well patients are taken care of, not just by her, but by the whole hospital. My few problems have always been cared for well. When I needed non-emergency eye surgery (a cataract), I was able to get an appointment with the opthalmologist within a week of calling him, and once he saw the cataract, he scheduled the surgery within another couple of weeks, part of that delay due to the need to order a specioal lens for me.
Now, why would I want to throw away a working medical care system for the crap that foreigners have?
July 13th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Actually, my point Dana was that CNN was acting as if there’s no reasonable choice but our profit-care system.
But thanks for your personal anecdotes! You should go watch Sicko, there’s a few stories that pop up there too.
July 13th, 2007 at 9:39 am
You had to wait a weeeeek!?!?! I thought there weren’t any waiting times in the states?
Great anecdotes, Dana, they serve only as a testament to your megalomania.
July 13th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Dana if your wife’s a nurse and thinks the system is just peachy then she’s a member of a very small minority amongst American health care professionals. I worked in health care from 1988 until 2002, and saw some of the best nursing talent in the free world wasted on 8-hour days trying to talk insurance companies into paying for routine procedures.
Most health care professionals know that the American system of health insurance is a bad joke.
July 13th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
cbmc> Jeromy and I began working in the health care system as CNA’s in senior care centers in the late 80s. We changed the diapers of the vegetative and forgotten elderly, fed them through syringes, and cleaned them up when they were finally dead. Later during my college years I worked as an orderly on a psych unit. (Jeromy pursued a career as an auctioneer in North Platte, Nebraska). This is when we were teenagers*, btw, so we know exactly where you’re coming from. It’s a fuckin’ hellscape out there in health-care land.
*compare this to Dana Pico who thinks that his daughters deserve medals for working at a freakin’ amusement park over summers.
July 14th, 2007 at 3:45 am
Actually, wait times in the US are appalling – the comfortable anecdotes Americans so frequently tell about how they “only” had to wait a few days to get an appointment demonstrate this.
I’d had a cold that had been lingering (I realized, when someone else pointed this out to me) for six weeks. I rang my doctor. The receptionist heard me coughing while she was setting up an appointment for me three days later, and advised me that while there were no appointments free that day, I should call the next day between 8 and 8:30 to set up an “urgent appointment”. I did: a few hours later, the doctor checked me out, confirmed that it appeared to be “just a cold” but the fact that it had been lingering so long was troubling, said he could prescribe me antibiotics but I should bear in mind it might not be anything that antibiotics could fix (I declined: taking antibiotics randomly never seems like a good idea): and offered blood tests in case there was anything serious behind the cold virus, which I accepted. I was asked how I wanted to get the results of the tests, and I decided (since they’d take varying times to do) that I’d get them all reported to me personally when I came in to have the repeat blood test in a fortnight.
And if for some reason it was difficult-to-impossible for me to leave the house, I could have had a doctor or the district nurse visit me at home to check me out and/or take the blood for the tests.
Further, because the NHS is so effective, private health insurance companies in the UK are kept up to the mark: they know that if they treat their customers badly, their customers will and can leave them. Private health insurance in the UK is a luxury, not a necessity, and customers pick and choose, instead of health insurance companies.
Now, Dana, why would anyone want to throw away a system that works far better for the crap you Americans put up with?
July 14th, 2007 at 4:02 am
The British National Health Service has specific guidelines in place to extend waiting periods for eight weeks in some regions.
Yes, very specific guidelines, for specific situations where it won’t matter if the patient waits for weeks. I waited for months, a few years ago: I’d decided I wanted to have my tonsils out, because after years of bad sore throats every damn winter, I thought a tonsilectomy might help. I got a prompt appointment with the surgeon, who examined my throat, warned me it wouldn’t be a cure-all (it wasn’t, but my sore throats have never been as bad since) and got put on a waiting list. Here’s the thing, Dana: I didn’t mind. Not because I’m a Brit and we’re used to that: but because it was an appropriate way to manage the resources available. It was non-urgent surgery (I’d already waited years to decide on it), I wouldn’t die or get worse or even suffer excessively no matter how long I waited: and it made sense to schedule all four female adults in the city who wanted their tonsils taken out (most tonsilectomies are done on children in the UK) for the same morning, so we’d all share the same ward and the surgeon could just (as it were) zip through one by one. And of course, I had no co-pays to worry about, and got a good supply of very effective painkillers for free.
And of course I got an automatic two weeks off work afterwards, which my doctor made up to nearly three so I could start back on a Monday.
Americans put up with a lot of crap in theirr health service: the ironic thing is that so many Americans, like Dana, are blithely certain this crap tastes delicious because it’s American crap.
July 14th, 2007 at 11:14 am
In the United States all Republicans turn down Medicare because they don’t believe in socialized medicine. Honest.
July 15th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Mark Kleiman points out that the US system almost made him wait till he died – and his experience was:
(A survivor’s story from the UK.)
July 15th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
I have a female friend who wanted to purchase her own medical insurance. It was barebones stuff, basically designed to make sure she didn’t go over $6000 in debt for any individual ailment. Snafu? She had one irregular pap smear.
Denied.
Mr. Pico can complain about Medicare, but it wouldn’t be replaced by private care if it didn’t exist. There would just be no care for even more citizens. That’s the American system, no care for tens of millions so that the privileged may get some extra niceties. Here’s a revelation: deny even more people care, and the privileged will get even more.
No surprise that the club of corporate masters and slaves that comprise the GOP love it. Occasionally a small guy gets fucked over, but the Republican party is adept at teaching its adherents that if you’re out of money, you deserved it.
July 16th, 2007 at 11:03 am
Unless it happens to them or to somebody that they know.
(ie Nancy Reagan and stem cell research)
These fuckers lack the empathy gene.
July 17th, 2007 at 8:49 am
And I used to like CNN. Ever notice how many pharmaceutical commercials
air while watching shows like Larry King?
Here is my experience of the American “Healthcare” system…http://www.kaiserthrive.org/2007/03/04/happy-birthday-lehna-jordann-brewer/
July 17th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Very sorry to hear that. All my sympathies…
July 19th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
clearly part of the “blame Bush” crowd who wants communist medicine and LONG WAIT TIMES FOR AN APPOINTMENT LIKE THEY HAVE IN CANADA! Amirite or what?