healthcare

Drug Industry Banditry

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healthcareStephen Lendman – US drug and biotech companies are licensed to steal, bottom line priorities their sole interest, public welfare be damned.

Big Pharma is hated for good reason. Its member companies charge the way MBA students are taught – according to what the market will bear. Grab all you can – with full government support, profits over people. It’s the American way.

Illicit drug traffickers look good by comparison. Big Pharma rips off every dollar possible. Their practices are unrestrained unless or until consumers vote with their pocket books, choose alternate products whenever possible or none when they’re not needed, many times the case.

Pill-popping is a national addiction. Got an ache, pain or emotional distress? Get a prescription. Use freely. Consumers know little or nothing about potantial harmful drug side effects, especially when taken longterm. Whenever possible avoid them. Use only as prescribed as needed, when alternate remedies won’t work.

The American Medical Association and likeminded groups are hugely anti-consumer. They deplore natural/alternative choices – challenging their monopoly grip on US medical practice. The corporate run FDA operates the same way.

In 1987, US District Court Judge Susan Getzendanner ruled against the AMA and 10 co-defendants for participating in a conspiracy against chiropractors, finding them guilty of violating federal anti-trust laws.

Western medicine is hooked on drugs – heavily influenced by Big Pharma funding. The AMA and other medical associations depend on it. Medical education features drug use.

Some products advertised in medical journals, consumer publications and television are potentially extremely harmful to health. Solve one problem. Create a greater one. Yet these drugs are frequently prescribed – why patients always need to use their own best judgment. Continue reading →

The New Shackle of Serfdom: Clinging to Healthcare Insurance

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healthcareCharles Hugh Smith – One of the more remarkable characteristics of American life is our passive acceptance of systems that are so obviously completely insane. Yes, I refer to our healthcare system, a.k.a. sickcare because in America sickness is profitable and health is not, and healthcare profiteering that would be the envy of pirates and warlords everywhere is the norm.

What warlord wouldn’t jump on the opportunity to jack up the cost of a medication from $13.50 a tablet to $750 overnight, or as the article highlights, jack up the cost of an off-patent med from $1 a pill to $750 a pill in a few years?

This piratical pillaging is not an outlier–it’s the norm in America’s parasitic pharmaceutical industry:

Cycloserine, a drug used to treat dangerous multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, was just increased in price to $10,800 for 30 pills from $500 after its acquisition by Rodelis Therapeutics.

Imagine getting to jack your weekly wage from $500/week to $10,800/week while issuing a laughably lame excuse.

These profiteering prices are not the shackle of serfdom, at least not directly; few pay these prices in cash–insurers pay. And when prices rise, insurers jack their rates up accordingly (plus a bit to cover their costly political lobbying and the profit margins expected of quasi-monopolies).

Healthcare insurance is the new shackle of serfdom: Americans are forced to cling to whatever coverage they have, lest they lose coverage and risk bankruptcy. Continue reading →

Prescriptions Drugs Now The Leading Cause Of Death By Overdose

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Robert Harrington – The shocking truth conveyed by this article’s headline is that “nearly 52 percent of the deaths were related to prescription drugs.” The unfortunate circumstance around so many prescription drug overdoses is that most victims never even knew they OD’d.

drugThere is now a pervasive pharmaceutical drug culture across America. If you were to look inside the medicine cabinet of many homes you would find a panoply of prescription bottles of every size. Some full, some half full; others empty and awaiting a refill. This predicament is becoming all too common for those who place so much faith on their daily drug ritual.

Regrettably for many of these folks, they rarely ever stop to take notice of the many side effects that each drug is capable of causing. The list of adverse side effects, which is provided by law, can often be worse than the original ailment. This is what many med addicts fail to understand.

Across the country, 44,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2013, more than double the number in 1999, the study by the non-profit group, Trust for America’s Health found. Nearly 52 percent of the deaths were related to prescription drugs. The number of overdose deaths increased in 26 states in the four years to 2013, the study found, and decreased in only six states. [1]

For those who have not done the math, 52% equals 22,880 who actually died from prescription drug overdoses. That only counts the number of people who were sufficiently autopsied so that the actual cause of death was scientifically determined. This tally of 22,880 does not include the thousands of other takers of pharmaceutical medications who also died from overdoses but were not categorized as such. Surely there are untold accidental deaths from what essentially amounts to drug poisoning.

The Elderly Are the Most Vulnerable

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Being Healthy Is Unprofitable

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healthcareCharles Hugh Smith – That good health is insanely unprofitable was highlighted by a staggering statistic in the recent research paper The Concentration of Health Care Spending (via B.C.):

Mean annual spending for the bottom half of (the American population) distribution was just $236 per person, totaling only $36 billion for the entire group of more than 150 million people.

We don’t know why the 150 million people did not consume much in the way of “health services”– they might have been healthy and had no need for healthcare beyond routine tests, or they might have needed care and been unable to afford it, despite the Orwellian-titled Affordable Care Act (ACA).

But let’s assume that the 150 million people–roughly half of America’s 317 million residents–were healthy and had no need for health services beyond minimal prevention and a few low-cost tests.

The total cost of their care was $36 billion–just over 1% of the nation’s $3.2 trillion bill for healthcare and healthcare insurance. Let’s assume that 90% of the populace was healthy, and the remaining 10% were very ill and needed 100 times as much care as the healthy.

The total cost of caring for the 285 million healthy people would be roughly $67 billion, or just over 2% of the $3 trillion we currently spend on healthcare. The very ill 32 million would need $23,600 each, or $755 billion.

The total cost for a largely healthy population and 32 million ill people who required 100 times more care than the healthy would be $822 billion, or roughly 25% of the $3.2 trillion we currently spend annually. Continue reading →

U.S. Healthcare And The Tragedy Of The Commons

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CharlesHughSmith

Charles Hugh Smith – The lessons drawn from the U.S. healthcare system’s failures can be fruitfully applied to a variety of large-scale problems around the world. Let’s start with an insightful look at the fixes that have largely failed to rein in costs and improve actual care/patient health.

Dilemma over Deductibles: Healthcare costs crippling middle class:

“Physician Praveen Arla is witnessing a reversal of health care fortunes: Poor, long-uninsured patients are getting Medicaid through Obamacare and finally coming to his office for care. But middle-class workers are increasingly staying away.

“It’s flip-flopped,” says Arla, who helps his father run a family practice in Hillview, Ky. Patients with job-based plans, he says, will say: ” ‘My deductible is so high. I’m trying to come to the doctor as little as possible. … What is the minimum I can get done?’ They’re really worried about cost.”

It’s a deep and common concern across the USA, where employer plans cover 60% of working-age Americans, or about 150 million people. Coverage long considered the gold standard of health insurance now often requires workers to pay so much out-of-pocket that many feel they must skip doctor visits, put off medical procedures, avoid filling prescriptions and ration pills — much as the uninsured have done.” Continue reading →