Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
I’ve been mainly writing about the ongoing genocide in Palestine lately, but I have a topic here that, at face value, does seem vastly less important than the slaughter of innocents, but strangely enough, the two are both found on a continuum. By that, I mean both topics involve the devaluing of life and the fact that in the United States, people are viewed as a resource to be mined, or in the case of the Palestinians, a group to eliminate to make way for further profitable endeavors. Either you make the oligarchy money, or you are to get out of the way (by any means necessary). The inherent value of life and the right to exist and flourish are definitely not part of the value system perpetrated by those in power currently.
The topic I’m speaking to at this time is the lack of any coherent healthcare delivery system in the United States and the subsequent insanity involved in pharmaceutical pricing. The very notion that it is acceptable to tie one’s health in a civilized nation to having ample cash is clearly anathema to most of the world, but it’s the way things are in the United States. Countless individuals toil at jobs that do not provide even cursory health coverage. Many individuals who do have some coverage generally try to avoid tapping into many needed health resources due to the sheer cost-inhibitory manner of it all. Co-pays, deductibles, coinsurance, and mandatory first-born deposits will cost you even if you have insurance. We are at a time when even those who have fairly “decent” insurance ration it, many times avoiding care in the early stages of a condition, which often manifests itself later in more expensive and less treatable conditions. The setup of care in the United States is anything but sensible or cost-efficient.
The nation spends vastly more on care, of course, than other nations with universal coverage, but still leaves many without access to much of anything but Emergency Rooms. Have you been to an Emergency Room lately? They have become the place where the rubber meets the road in terms of societal dysfunction. Individuals with no place else to go show up to stay warm, to cool off, to have a spot to occupy for a time. It’s a place with any number of non-medical, but certainly tragic situations. This pairs with individuals who don’t have primary care and arrive at a crisis situation for their condition. The Emergency Room is not allowed to dump patients; it’s called EMTALA, but beyond that initial stabilization, there’s no guarantee for the needed continued care for medications required or recommended medical equipment. It’s a crap shoot if any medical providers will take you on without the right insurance after that Emergency Room visit. Even if one is able to access some care, the bills and subsequent damage to finances can leave one unable to rent apartments and such due to poor credit. I know the Democrats say they are working on that one, but they say a lot of things, don’t they? Not to mention, even if this part of the equation is evened out, the foul system is still in place. It does nothing to address the root of the matter.
So the system is beyond fucked, of course, but it is still quite lucrative for the multiple intermediary insurance companies that are inserted between the patient and the needed care. We spend vastly more than other nations to arrive at a system that doesn’t care for all. In fact, it’s estimated that 68,000 people die in the US from preventable causes simply because there is no overall coverage for citizens. It is an inescapable realization, however, that this number is wildly underrepresented. How would you be able to be in the mind of those who get up in the morning, have that same damn headache or chest pain that won’t go away, take a ton of aspirin to press on, only to collapse and die at a later date because the condition was a timebomb? I don’t think there’s anyone with a notepad collecting data on these deaths in a systematic manner. It’s probably because they don’t really want accurate numbers on this carnage (kind of how they don’t count COVID issues anymore in an organized fashion). I generally do this when something robs my vibe. I close my eyes and cover my ears like I’m a Democrat hearing the names of murdered kids in Gaza at the DNC.
The notion that all could be covered is viewed as unlikely in the extreme, even within the Democratic party, yet other nations pull this off without difficulty. Our “lethal” military (in theory) covers all of us, as in, they will go to war for “us,” but non-lethal, life-affirming health care is a bridge too far. So we have socialism for the military but not for basic needs that seem more relevant to the average person. Of course, our tax dollars do help provide universal coverage—just not for Americans. I will give you one guess what nation sucking the teat of the US has those benefits.
I would say the common denominator in all of this is the fact that the United States works more like a farm or a mine, pulling resources from the individuals and giving them to corporations, often with no reciprocal gift in kind. To simply provide for healthcare by utilizing tax dollars and paying those who provide the actual services is a clean and direct situation, but in the supreme wisdom that only the US can muster, we have middlemen to the extent that the whole scenario is falling apart. The greed of insurance companies knows no bounds, and like any parasites, they will keep eating, even to their own detriment.
Small towns are losing their hospitals because much of their rural population is too poor to have good coverage but not so poor to fit into Medicaid (which, of course, strongly red Republican states don’t want to expand). The rural areas are also disproportionately poor elderly individuals who have major gaps in their Medicare coverage. They opt for disadvantage plans pitched by Joe Namath because they need some manner of coverage for those gaps. They just don’t realize that the behemoth companies selling these plans are in it to make some lucrative blood money. They do this by deny, deny, delay techniques. Insurance companies are always trying to get away with shit because they have to; they only really answer to shareholders and, of course, Satan. That’s not true. Satan wouldn’t want anything to do with Medicare disadvantage plans, even he has boundaries.
To indicate how ridiculous the system has become, let’s take a look at a few pharmaceutical products and their costs in the United States. Hepatitis medications are a big one. A round of Harvoni (seriously who the hell names these things, I assume Harvey named this drug)–anyway, this will set you back $94,500 for a full curative course. Solvadi comes in at a bargain $84 K for treatment, so around $1,000 per pill. If you happen to be in India that same pill comes in at……….$4 bucks. The ever-popular Ozempic is around $1,350 for a couple of the pens, but a quick scan finds that the same in Mexico goes for about $230. New migraine meds like Qulipta go for around $1500 per month, so basically, any new medication comes out with costs that are comical in a nation that still has a minimum wage that wouldn’t even buy a puff of dust off those pills.
But… but don’t these companies have to pay for research and development? Yeah, they do, but that seems to come in at about 20% of their estimated income. They also need to spend a lot of money convincing healthcare professionals to pitch their shit so that does cost a bit as well. Hot pharmaceutical reps hired out of college sororities and fraternities need to be paid something as they schmooze at the offices, convincing sexually stunted nerds that they really like them, so probably they should pitch that med more often. It’s the stripper really likes me situation. Oh, my god, the Wegovy girl really gets me, and how stressful it is to be a doctor!
So then there’s about six billion for advertisements (which in most countries is illegal–why should you be advertising medications to the patient…..it’s unethical or at least very unseemly). When you put on the network television, you know, a major older Boomer/Gen X habitat like CNN or Fox, you will see so many happy people, free of their IBS (and their spare cash), able to roller-blade on piers while happy children and dogs run past. This is the ideal of America: happiness through purchases and healthcare industry-managed conditions. Thomas Kincaide should have done a little pharma factory painting with glowing light in the windows. Ah, ‘Merica.
Some of these medications are clearly a band-aid for a situation that needs fixing at the foundational level (so many people require medications for depression……maybe one should look into why everyone is so depressed). But either way, the medications to treat conditions largely caused by the society become a very effective manner to bleed money out of the population. And of course, a lack of many of the medications will literally cause the individual to die. Insulin really isn’t a lifestyle choice for a Type 1 diabetic. Not being able to afford an epi-pen isn’t something that needs to be remedied by a Goop product.
I was amazed to find out that there is an anarchist group named Four Thieves Vinegar Collective. They are trying to crack the code on meds giving open source “ideas” on how to make them. They have a theme of “right to repair your body,” and they disagree with the barriers to that. The barriers they cite are price, legality, and lack of infrastructure. They don’t sell anything, but I’m sure there are laws against all of what they encourage, so for our purposes, I’ll use the “hey, this would be a fantastic idea to do……in Minecraft”. It’s kind of what people say when they think it would be great if certain people would just go ahead and die…..”in Minecraft,” that is.
It’s fascinating to see that such excessive greed is giving birth to ideas such as this. It’s kind of like Breaking Bad…… but to do good. What a world we are living in. I welcome the day I step out of a trailer in my underwear after making some hep C meds…..in Minecraft, of course.
The post Nice Health Ya Got There, Mister. Be a Shame if Someone Took it for Cash appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathleen Wallace.