Healthcare Crisis! Crisis or Corruption?
Is the current healthcare crisis real or a byproduct of a breech of fiduciary responsibility by corrupt politicians fueled by corporate greed? Is it truly a crisis or simply a manipulation of the media by the managed care industry? A contrived issue designed to line the pockets of those in power at the expense of the common American?
While forty million Americans are now without healthcare insurance, profits for the 17 top U.S. health insurers have risen over 114 percent to over $414 million dollars. Profit margins doubled while revenue climbed 21 percent to $9.3 billion on average. Pay for the five top executives at 16 of the health insurers almost doubled to $3 million a year from $1.6 million. Since 1999, the drug industry has given more than 60 million dollars in political contributions. They have spent hundreds of millions more on an army of more than 600 lobbyists to pursue and protect their financial interests.
While physicians are bound by the Oath of Hippocrates to act in the best interest of the individual patient, managed care and HMO entities act only in the best and most profitable interest of the corporation. Managed care networks function like drug cartels under the protection of government bureaucrats and special legislation giving them favored tax status and significant exemptions from antitrust laws. These insurance companies are the only industry given the significant monopolistic right to set doctors and hospital fees, reimbursements, benefits, insurance premiums.
Ill conceived legislation such as the ERISA laws (Employee Retirement Income Security Act) of 1974, which were set up to protect employee pension funds in employer-provided, self-insured plans have been used effectively by managed care and HMOs as a shield to protect themselves against medical liability lawsuits by shifting the liability for medical malpractice to the individual physicians involved. When managed care bureaucrats deny the use of certain diagnostic procedures or therapeutic techniques for cost-containment, the plans and their administrators are exempted from lawsuits of medical malpractice by claiming they are not practicing medicine but merely administering the fiduciary responsibility of their plans.
It is sad that the greatest nation in the world has allowed the subversive creed of political corruption and corporate greed to undermine what was once the most advanced medical community in the history of the world. A community of giving and caring individuals forced to compromise the integrity of their chosen professions to feed the ceaseless greed of soulless corporate and political infidels. Sadder still are the untold number who will die simply from the lack of medical care, denied life by corporate bureaucrats who have been given control over life and death by those elected to protect us from such uncaring evil.
Woodrow Wilson said it best when he wrote, "The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy." How long this invisible empire remains in power is up to you. It has long been known the price the common man pays for indifference to political affairs is to be ruled by evil men.