How Wall Street Destroyed Health Care

[nightrain]

Greed, Be Thou My God
How Wall Street Destroyed Health Care
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS



<<<snip>>>

"While Medicare payments for in-office services to private doctors, including those for blood work and x-ray units, were drastically cut, payments to outside corporate facilities for the same services were increased. It is obvious what is afoot. Corporate lobbies are using their whores in Congress to shift income from physician offices to corporate labs, corporate medical service providers, and hospitals that are owned by national corporations.

Legislation that cuts payments to private physicians and increases the payments to large corporate entities is intended to destroy private practice and to create in its place corporate bureaucracies in which doctors are wage slaves. The physician’s income is diverted to shareholders, CEO bonuses, and Wall Street. Health care is being replaced with health business.

As a result of the way American medicine is being reconstructed, patients will cease to have a doctor whom they know and who knows them. Important information is lost in a system of bureaucratized “health care” in which a patient sees whatever face happens to be on duty at the corporate provider. Impersonal health care thus brings a cost of its own, and its quality can be low compared to private practice. Indeed, the U.S. is creating a “health care” system that is more costly and less efficient than single-payer national health systems. But it will enrich corporations and provide play for Wall Street.

It turns one’s stomach to watch libertarians and “free market economists” defend bureaucratized impersonal health care as “free market medicine.” There is no free market present. Corporate lobbies and campaign contributions use government power to create bureaucratized monopolies that destroy medicine for the practitioner and the patient. Wall Street pushes for greater shareholder earnings, which are achieved by denying care."

<<<snip>>>

source-- http://counterpunch.org/roberts01222010.html

[laughingliberal]

1. Very important. This is one of the ways they are destroying Medicare. nt

[Celebration]

2. well, there is an issue

With doctor's offices having a financial incentive to order in office procedures. That could result in over testing.

Honestly, I can see the need to separate the person who orders such tests from the one who profits from it. That makes economic sense to me.

[nightrain]

3. sure, but not all practitioners are greedy. Sometimes the testing is done at cost.

[Celebration]

4. well, I agree with that

But structurally, there is good reason to separate doctors from fees for testing. There is just too big of a temptation there. That does not mean that all doctors would do it. And, there is just a lot of gray area there...........

One thing that I don't approve of is oncologists making money by selling the drugs for chemotherapy. I find that bizarre, and don't know if I would trust any doctor to make a wise decision in those circumstances.

[nightrain]

5. yeah, that's a tough ethical issue around chemo being sold at greater than cost by

oncologists. I agree...

[wolfgangmo]

6. Sure it's an issue.

But it's a small issue compared to what the corporatations are doing. What you are saying is that you don't think that it is OK for a private doctor to do what ALL the corporations are doing at great profit.

At least in our office we do tons of research to find the most effective /cost effective tests for our patients. I don't know any corps who are doing that. And no, we don't make squat on our tests that are "inhouse" except enough to cover our expenses on stocking/administering/educating about them. The interpretation is rolled into our office visit costs, so the patient doesn't even pay for that.

[Uncle Joe]

7. Profits for the legalized health casinos because those

gambling houses feed blood money back to the political "leaders" supposedly representing the people, their states and the nation.

Thanks for the thread, nightrain.