...that people can take without blowing fuses. And I'd say that seven and a quarter years of Bush/Cheney, during which time hardly a day's gone by without its very own stunningly corrupt outrage, emanating from the slime creatures and vampires who hang around in the foul miasma that used to be the seat of legitimate government back when this was still a democratic republic.
Caution... long-winded screed follows. Read at your own risk. Do not drive, operate heavy machinery or sign binding legal contracts for at least an hour after reading.But regarding your post, yes, this IS what our nation has become. I watch how the US medical system -- and its insurance company leeches and parasites -- treat my wife, who's recovering from injuries sustained when a cement truck plowed into a line of stopped cars on a local freeway. She was third in line and got nailed from behind by the SUV pushed into her, they whipsawed forward when the SUV pushed her into another SUV in front of her. She's been undergoing physical therapy, massage and chiropractic treatment, along with seeing our GP weekly, since August.
The medical people are obviously into making her better -- and only that. The insurance company that's getting billed for all this assumes she's a crook, liar and scam artist. They've made it clear that they KNOW she's full of shit and they're damned impolite about it.
They're salivating over that magic moment when some pretext arises that will enable them to bail on her bills. Maybe she saw a chiropractor for a sore back when she was in high school. GOTCHA! Maybe she's faking the whole thing and so they've had her under periodic surveillance to see if her range of motion improves when the docs aren't looking. GOTCHA!
Sick fuckers. I think it's time that being an insurance industry exec became a risky profession and, if her recovery goes to hell because of their meddling, I'm planning on a private little chat with a particularly odious example of the species.
I should also mention that, no matter the injury or illness and how inconsequential it may be compared to my wife's injuries, I enjoy great credibility with docs, therapists, insurance agents, personal injury lawyers and the whole rest of the infrastructure. No good reason; I'm certainly not rich or famous. But I am a white male, which means I own the place and my satisfaction is uppermost in the hierarchy of internalized American values. Sick, ain't it... But on with the story.
Just focusing on privatized medicine, you're living in the only country in the alleged civilized world where the combination of poverty and lack of medical insurance is a capital crime.
It's not a huge secret; the whole world knows we have a heartless medical system that rations care by bank account and kills more than 18,000 people each year for the simple reason that they have no medical insurance.
For starters,
this 2004 study from the Institute of Medicine blames lack of medical insurance for about 18,000 deaths each year in the US. I've seen an updated study by the same organization that ups that number to 22,000, but I can't find it now so 18,000 will have to do.
Here's what the ground-breaking World Health Organization (WHO) 2000 report rating medical systems in 190 countries has to say about average life expectancy for boys and girls born in the US in 1999:
The United States rated 24th under this system, or an average of 70.0 years of healthy life for babies born in 1999. The WHO also breaks down life expectancy by sex for each country. Under this system, U.S. female babies could expect 72.6 years of healthy life, versus just 67.5 years for male babies.
"The position of the United States is one of the major surprises of the new rating system," says Christopher Murray, M.D., Ph.D., Director of WHO's Global Programme on Evidence for Health Policy. "Basically, you die earlier and spend more time disabled if you’re an American rather than a member of most other advanced countries."
The WHO cites various causes for why the United States ranks relatively low among wealthy nations. These reasons include:
* In the United States, some groups, such as Native Americans, rural African Americans and the inner city poor, have extremely poor health, more characteristic of a poor developing country rather than a rich industrialized one.
* The HIV epidemic causes a higher proportion of death and disability to U.S. young and middle-aged than in most other advanced countries. HIV-AIDS cut three months from the healthy life expectancy of male American babies born in 1999, and one month from female lives;
* The U.S. is one of the leading countries for cancers relating to tobacco, especially lung cancer Tobacco use also causes chronic lung disease.
* A high coronary heart disease rate, which has dropped in recent years but remains high;
* Fairly high levels of violence, especially of homicides, when compared to other industrial countries.
USA! USA! USA! We're #1 (at something).
He omits lack of a decent universal-access, single-payer system, such as those in "other industrial countries" take for granted as a major contributing cause. If you
look at this list, you'll notice that most of the countries ranked from 1 (France) to 36 (Costa Rica), all ahead of the US in a composite of various statistical categories that indicate a society that treats health care as a right and not a privilege.
You'll also find that these countries don't piss away their national treasure and bankrupt themselves on phony wars and global militarism and corporate welfare and lunacy like the "Star Wars" missile program.
Countries like The Congo, Burma/Myanmar and Pakistan do that kind of thing. They also practice torture on their political enemies, so I guess the US is in good company for several reasons.
On the other side of madness, though, countries like Italy, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Japan, Singapore and Spain -- to name a few -- live up to the demands an unintimidated citizenry places on them. So they spend tax money to improve the lives of their populations; not to commit mass murder half a world away.
And one more insult we endure because we're afraid of authority and institutions, not the other way round:
A recent study compared health expenditures per capita in 2005 among 31 countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Notice that US residents not only paid the most overall (~$6,400), or two and a quarter times the average of OECD countries, but were among the biggest spenders per capita on publicly funded health care systems at nearly $3,000 apiece. Be sure to look at Chart g5-1-01 for details.
So in 2005, the US taxpayer shouldered the burden for just under 50 percent of all medical costs nationwide by being forced to fund health care programs such as the Federal Employees Health Plan (FEHP), the Cadillac version of the FEHP that our fine elected officials enjoy (and which they say we can't have); the cost of covering ER expenses for those without insurance; Medicare; and the costs of various state-run Medicaid programs.
That means government spending per-person (via tax dollars) on health care in the US was higher than total per capita health care expenditures in almost any other country in the world – including those with single-payer, universal-access national health care systems.
So we're paying for national health care; we're just not getting it.Heartwarming, isn't it? And for every regulatory agency during the Bush era of government by malevolence and neglect, there's another zillion outrages.
Bushie and his corrupt regulators have failed to deal with everything from lead paint on kids toys from China; to an emerging pattern of unintended side-effects attributed to prescription drugs, even though they've been OKed by the FDA; to new rumblings about firing Air Traffic Controllers, which sounds like Bushie channeling his inner Raygun, with the safety of the flying public of absolutely no concern; to letting giant polluters regulate themselves; to telling 9/11 first responders the air was safe to breathe -- then refusing to cover their medical expenses or covering the costs for them to spend their final days at a nurturing hospice, where they can at least die with dignity.
Yup... I'm outraged. And I stay that way. The causes change all the time because there are more reasons to despise BushCo than there are asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.
It happens that the madness of expecting a for-profit corporation to spend money on medical claims rather than on exec compensation is so naive that I often think we actually deserve to live in this third-rate sinkhole. But I know too many people who are screwed for life by this system to just let it go.
Agitation R us.
wp
Edited for tpyoes
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