“American healthcare is … a predatory conspiracy aided and abetted by government.”: NBC NEWS Opinion, Anne Case and Angus Deaton

a photo of me, by me, looking quizzical. I’m not mad, really I’m not. Or we’re all mad here.

NBC News opinion published a piece today that manifests my opinion exactly.  I’ve been thinking this for many years and saying it for the past ten.  It’s about time that a national news organization exposed the pernicious conspiracy that is causing “deaths of despair” among working-class Americans.  Here’s a link to the opinion piece.

I’m putting my face on this post, because I have little to lose.  I’ve given up my place as a little man in the medical hierarchy.  I am sick of being compromised.  My father was almost a member of this white working class group that almost died from the effects of overly expensive health care.  He dragged himself out of poverty, then was struck down by polio.  He stumbled, almost literally, and rose again through his own efforts.  He had to “use whatever means available” regardless of their effects on his soul and his righteousness.  I learned from him, but I only got so far.

I swore that I would never bend to these corporate conspirators who used the free enterprise system to lift themselves above other human beings and then used their advantages to walk all over the people they subjugated.  I’m mad now.  I was forced to knuckle under to those same corporate leaders in order to make a living.  I would have been better off if I had become a mathematician and retreated into the world of numbers.

This pandemic has exposed the bitter reality for many Americans: they cannot access medical treatment for acute illnesses if they do not have insurance.  They cannot access health care (preventive medicine) without “health insurance”.  Even patients with Medicare are stunned by huge copays for new drugs that are advertised glowingly on television shows that they now watch obsessively.  Life is hard, then you die– if you’re an American, you pay a fine of roughly $8,000 a year for using our medical system.

This is wrong.  Advanced societies have figured out how to provide medical and health care to their citizens and residents without having to pay a huge premium to the owners of the system.  The reason our society (America) pays so much for health is that the people who run the system have an unregulated profit-making system that they have gamed.  Lobbyists for these system-runners (pharmaceutical, hospital, doctor, nursing home, and so on) control the levers of power in Washington and all the state legislatures.

Enough.  Go and vote the bums out, but be warned: the new boss is just the old boss with a new name.  To quote Louis Carroll: “We’re all mad here.”