The Soapbox View: Who Knows What Our Medical Industrial Complex Costs?

Once upon a time, but this century, a Michael Moore documentary on health care aptly titled Sicko cited various methods for how people pay for, and are paid by, the medical system. There’s an audio clip from the Nixon Watergate tapes that records Mr. Nixon essentially saying he doesn’t care if the public is nickeled and dimed out of direct access to their doctors by the developing HMO system, as represented by the provider Kaiser Permanente.

Today The New York Times published a balanced story exposing that members of the Obama administration exchanged private e-mails promising Insurance Industry lobbyists that drug costs would not be lowered by importing cheaper foreign drugs. Republicans cry foul seeing the deal as hypocritical. “He (Obama) said it was going to be the most open and honest and transparent administration ever and lobbyists won’t be drafting the bills,” said Representative Michael C. Burgess of Texas, one of the Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee examining the deal. “Then when it came time, the door closed, the lobbyists came in and the bills were written.”

Democrats point to Republicans play the same game. “There was no way we had the votes in either the House or the Senate if PhRMA was opposed — period,” said a senior Democratic official involved in the talks, referring to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. The Times noted liberals bothered by the deal-making in 2009 now find the Republican criticism hard to take given the party’s long-standing ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

“Republicans trumpeting these e-mails is like a fox complaining someone else raided the chicken coop,” said Robert Reich, the former labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. “Sad to say, it’s called politics in an era when big corporations have an effective veto over major legislation affecting them and when the G.O.P. is usually the beneficiary. In this instance, the G.O.P. was outfoxed. Who are they to complain?”

Meanwhile the day before, June 7, The Huffington Post outlined statistics showing Republican Mitt Romney’s health plan, as Governor of Massachusetts, is similar to Obama’s and has not hurt that state’s economy.

It just takes a lot of money to survive in this world so we should be more understanding of the desperation to feed their families that necessitated pulling the rug from under the doctors’ feet. If doctors aren’t shrewd enough to have a slice of over-priced drugs it’s their own fault in the market economy. Yet what has that to do really with the doctor/patient relationship that today is reduced to a file a doctor may have time to possibly read sometime before you’re shuffled out of the office before your allocated ten minutes, or so, is up. The problem isn’t how to fix medicine, doctors might already have a clue. It’s how are all these people going to get paid.

6/6/2012

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Who Knows What Our Medical Industrial Empire Costs?

6/6/2012 concluded: The problem isn’t how to fix medicine, doctors might already have a clue. It’s how are all these people going to get paid.

June 21- 27, 2016

Escalating Rhetoric

I believe the above conclusion reasonably sized up the equation. It's not just that we've come a long way to reach a point. But that we've reached this point for such a long time. It seemed obvious. Expand the, technically, socialism for the rich, insurance system. It's not confusing. Insurance started as a business and it and the medical profession went on for decades in collusion thinking that's capitalism when it shouldn't matter how much money a customer has. People should be able to afford a service. It sounds so much better off when a doctor would take a cow. What's called let the market decide, can't decide. Can't. This baby's been so bent, folded and mutilated the equation's not about market. I'm sure band-aids aren't costing what marketers charge just trying to grab purchasers off the street. Or Internet. No one made this mess. A grand result of collusion that was the way in so's it's the only way out too. Problem with Obamacare? Evolve it. Or keep making polished messes as was accomplished rehabilitating the poor.

Look into The Medical Machine by Noam Scheiber in The New York Times because people should be told what they don't want to know. As, like it or not, in sports vernacular, things must be sucked up. So, since, at least for this paragraph, complaining's in vogue. Where's Society's Oscar for being so narrowly drawn by lower shallow common denominators?

Real life's the tragically animated cartoon.

Hello Robert Caro. Your recent, quoted in The New York Times, citing of Robert Moses as "the most racist person I ever met," brought to mind what's happening right here and now in River City. As New York City propelled forward into the darling 21ST Century, whose leverage strengthened and who's kidding whom? Virtually everything, if necessary, of the city's increased wealth from the last decades should have gone into renovating the New York City Housing Authority buildings. Because reliable people knew and know those buildings were consciously and unconscionably constructed in a fashion to remind the inhabitants they're poor. Still standing, and I'm always seeing scaffolding projects on the buildings' outsides. Or is the plan all along been to renovate inside when the right sucker(s) come(s) along. After a marginal renovation to fulfill a contract so the purchase can go forward. I don't even have to close my eyes to see the Disneyfication of Riker's Island.
The problem isn't where money sits or doesn't stay. The problem's money's not really circulating. Caught upward in financial hurricanes swirlingly levitating the money far enough away from the unreachable social strata-s scapegoated as charity.
It's drably prison esque corridors of virtual darkness in the bright of day in the Housing Authority's halls and I'm not kidding. The City should be feeling some Jacob Riis sized shame for that Robert Moses Legacy. The horror. The shame. Let's remember he built sound structures. But inside remains designed embarrassment. The shame.

Is The New York City Grit Gone & Fabulously Polished Up?

The greatly amazing, splendidly magnificent, super, extravagantly classy, fantastically wonderful, luxuriously superb, brilliantly incredible, terrifically tremendous sensationally fabulous new New York City filled with service industry employees who can't afford to live there unless bunked at exponentially higher rates than already happened. Our stacking's already been designed. The press full of praise for our upcoming adaptability to the new and improved boxed utopia.

Although, I'm speculatively sure, the same roughing it aspect, can be presumed to not resemble the lodgings of you-know-who's kids. But then I'm not one to lament the tops rise when eventually all boats will once the reckless veneer's worn down and off.

HARLEM

Essentially traipsily riding the streets of Manhattan for a quarter century, I knew the city's outward appearance like the back of my hand. The perennial potholes etched against the rough grain that started to become paved over about the time I went into seclusion near Astoria, New York's Socrates Sculpture Park for the last five years to finish that novel I'd chased practically my whole life. Similar to Rip Van Winkle I've woken to a brand new world. Absorbing, up close, this new era of shinier, sleekly, taller dwellings as rewards for this new generation's elite. Like Rip must have, I thought how the hell did I sleep through that, though I didn't. I knew what was happening. But getting up close, the change is overwhelming. Why Disney joined rather than compete with this tourist trap. But anyway. Caro credits the last two pro-business mayors which is accurate to a degree. You could see it coming. They were just there for the credit for keeping the door open. The blight was a bargain.

A month or so ago crossed paths with East Village Folk Historian Clayton Patterson whose leaving the city he'd lost has been documented. We'd met in 1987 when he visited the production studio for Fifth, Park and Madison about the bicycle labor force that carried business on its' back for solid decades and now basically brings everyone's food.

Ba dump bump. So. The counterculture's either buried or from their contributions commercialism matures, or ruthlessness will have won? Happy Landing. Because, as is, inflation is never caught. Ahead leverages behind such that even accurate books are cooked, to many, many degrees.