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Someone wrote to me concerned about what will happen if the recent United Healthcare CEO’s assassination is used to implement a government-run healthcare system in America.
Seattle Extremist @SeattleIndepen1 Dec 9If you think health insurance companies are bad, just you wait until they get rid of those and have the government take over things. Goodbye, privacy. Goodbye, rights to your own body. All while medical conglomerates and pharmaceutical companies charge us into oblivion for
Quote Seattle Extremist@SeattleIndepen1 Dec 9 Replying to @truthstreamnewsI’m going to keep saying it, Melissa: this is not a groundswell of decent average folks against greedy insurance companies. This is a big psyop by the medical cartels against the insurance companies to open up a further plundering of the American people. If they can sinkShow more
I actually had to take a bit to consider this, and I admit that wouldn’t have been the case a decade ago.
Because some people (but especially medical executives) out there seem to have forgotten, I thought I’d begin by pointing out the word “healthcare” is actually composed of two words: health and care. Both have multiple definitions, but “health” is generally defined as well-being, while “care” is the process for providing for that well-being.
First Off...
Watching the way our government and its so-called health agencies operated during the pandemic was, admittedly, a non-stop horrifying clown show of failure.
There are so many scenes out of a knock-off medical Idiocracy from that time which I will never be able to forget for as long as I live. Actual doctors who attempted to come out against some of the unscientific lockdown measures got censored off this platform back when it was Twitter, while the fake accounts of non-existent doctors who tweeted fabricated stories about their equally non-existent loved ones dying of Covid got boosted to the public, promoting not just government narratives but a completely false reality.
Truthstream Media @truthstreamnews Jan 6, 2023Twitter created an alternate reality where real, actual doctors got banned for legitimate questions about the mainstream narrative, while fake doctors who actually never existed got 43k with fabricated narratives about losing loved ones to covid who… also never existed.
We’re talking insane levels of censorship-imposed gaslighting here.
But going farther back, do you remember another clown show that was our government's staggering inability to even build a basic website for Obamacare?
Whole portions of the HealthCare .gov site were unfinished at the time of its legally mandated launch by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in October 2013, and it went down within just two hours. A total of just six people — that’s six people in the whole entire country — were even able to finish signing up on the first day the site was live.
“I’m going to try and download every movie ever made, and you’re going to try to sign up for Obamacare, and we’ll see which happens first,” Jon Stewart snarked at former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
(Yes I made this art, no I couldn't help it)
That’s a pretty expensive joke, though. Fixing the hot mess of half-finished code ballooned what was previously a $93.7 million dollar budget into $1.7 billion dollars. Yeah, you read that right. It somehow cost the government (which ultimately means, the taxpayers) almost two billion dollars just to build a functional website, leaving one to wonder if there's literally any simple task federal bureaucracy can't magically find a way to turn into a black hole for wasting our money.
And that's just the beginning of what happened when Uncle Sam dipped his stanky big toe into healthcare. The so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA) also fined Americans via a lovely tax penalty if they failed to sign up for insurance which became anything but “affordable” for many (our family included). The costs associated with health insurance premiums and deductibles, already on the rise at the time, jumped so much higher once the ACA was passed.
Gee, what a surprise. I'm so surprised. Aren't you surprised at how surprising this is?
Regardless, with its 21st century post-Patriot Act track record of surveillance, disregard for privacy, and legal loopholes, personally I wouldn’t trust this government to take care of an artificial cactus, let alone take charge of running something we deign to call “health care”. That Said...
As Americans, we already don’t really have any of the things listed in @SeattleIndepen1 's original post right now as I write this.
As for our privacy, well what are the odds but UnitedHealth’s Change Healthcare platform — a widely used payment processing system within the healthcare industry — just saw the largest healthcare data exposure in U.S. history in a few months ago, with 100 million people exposed.
UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty with his super serious Senate testifying face
That data doesn’t just affect 100 million Americans directly but likely also includes anyone linked through family records, too.
We all saw how bodily autonomy went in regards to mandates during the pandemic, with thousands of people being forced into a position where they had to choose between getting jabbed or losing their job (and thereby possibly losing not only their ability to feed and house themselves, but probably losing their health insurance as well).
Did you know that medical bills are currently the number one cause of bankruptcies here? Over half a million American families are forced to file bankruptcy ever year in this country due to medical bills they cannot and will not be able to pay. The ACA didn't do jack to stop that, either.
We have impressive (but impressive in how utterly pathetic it is, not impressive impressive) “Only in America” stories, like how Nobel-prize winning physicists feel forced to sell their medals to help pay for their exorbitant medical bills:
AP Climate @AP_Climate Oct 3, 2018Leon Lederman, an experimental physicist who studied subatomic particles, has died at 96 after selling his Nobel Prize for $765,000 at an auction to help pay medical bills. http://apne.ws/hhVpDHu
A single day in a hospital in the U.S. will cost the average patient over $5,000, which is more than even fancy schmancy Switzerland, and looks completely insane when placed in a graph next to Australia ($765) or Spain ($424).
Pharma is already charging people here into oblivion far away more than anywhere else in the world, too.
In just one example (of way too many to list here), Vox reported that Americans spent a combined $6.5 billion just on Humira prescriptions in 2014 alone. One of the best-selling drugs in the country, Humira is an injectable used to treat autoimmune diseases like Crohn’s, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and more.
While Americans spent an average of $2,669 for Humira, the Swiss were paying just $822 to buy the exact same drug.
So here’s what that looks like in another rage-inducing chart color-coding how badly we're getting ripped off here:
Vox has 11 blood-boiling medical cost 'Americans are getting robbed blind' charts that all pretty much look like this one
If Americans paid what the Swiss did, we would have spent just $2 billion instead of $6.5 billion — for literally the exact same drug:
“It’s exactly the same product, but, in terms of the American patient, you’re just paying double or more the price for no more health gain,” says Tom Sackville, chief executive of the International Federation of Health Plans. Every two years, his group publishes a report that compares health care prices in different countries. And it shows that Humira isn’t some weird anomaly; nearly every procedure or drug costs way more in the United States.
To repeat because it is worth repeating: Americans are paying way more in the U.S. for nearly every medical procedure or prescription they need than anyone else anywhere else on earth and for no more health gain.
Vox also pointed out that we use the doctor way less than citizens in other countries do, but we still wind up paying way more for our health care. Gonna take a huge leap and guess the reason we use it less is because who can even afford it? People in my own family have cracked jokes about how they won't go to the doctor unless their arm and their leg is falling off because that's the only way they can afford the arm and a leg it will cost to fix it!
People in this country routinely have to make decisions between whether they’re going to go the doctor or be able to keep the lights on or food on the table, and married couples even consider getting divorced here just so they can get their kid on Medicaid.
We are to the point that medical expenses aren’t just the most common type of campaign being set up on the site GoFundMe in the U.S., but crowdfunding for medical expenses as a practice has become so normalized that it has literally “become a health care utility for paying medical bills” here now.
On an aside, more than 500 GoFundMe campaigns this year were trying to raise money to treat mostly kids for a rare disorder called spinal muscular atrophy. Apparently a few years ago Novartis released a new single-dose gene therapy for it called Zolgensma (due to the unspoken rule pharmaceutical products must sound like they were named after make-believe alien planets in cheesy sci-fi novels) for the low low cost of just $2.1 MILLION DOLLARS.
Zolgensma, which can cure in a single dose something if left untreated will definitely result in death, is currently the most expensive drug ever approved. But don’t worry. I'm sure some other pharma company is practically drooling all over themselves as I write this in a rush to make even more Dr. Evil ransom-for-not-blowing-up-the-world levels of money off the next horrible medical condition.
Anyway, hundreds of thousands of medical expense campaigns have gone up on GoFundMe in recent years, and the vast majority fail to reach their financial goal.
It should go without saying this isn’t a viable system, but I’m going to say it anyway. Ready?
“This isn’t a viable system.”
And the prices for health care in America just. Keep. Going. Freaking. Up.
As previously mentioned, health insurance rates have continued to rise and especially since the ACA was implemented, but I don’t believe it is hyperbole to say that these insurance companies are also acting as racket-running mafia middle men between doctors and the care their patients can receive in this country.
Comments like this one have been not even remotely uncommon over the past week, but just because there are so many of them out there now does not make each one any less horrifying:
THIS IS LIKE A TORTURE FILM EXCEPT IT IS REAL LIFE AND WE LIVE IN IT
Can you imagine how you would feel if that was your child? And you cannot afford the insanely high costs of his medication out-of-pocket without insurance in a country where we’re charged more for meds than anywhere else? So you have no choice but to sit there like it’s A Clockwork Orange and watch him suffer over and over? Just to get to a point where the health insurance company you probably pay so much money to every single month will finally give your desperate kid the medication he needs to stop his needless suffering??
Do you know how many Americans get prescribed a medicine or a procedure or some form of care — because that prescription is what the medically-trained doctor in his wisdom and expertise believes is best — and yet that patient is denied that treatment by insurance companies which are not doctors?
Yeah, breaking news I guess but health insurance companies aren’t doctors. You’d be forgiven if you didn't know that fact, considering how much power and control these companies seem to wield over what care a patient may or may not be able to afford to receive in the U.S.
Despite the charts floating around out there, no one in this country really knows how often our health insurance companies actually deny claims either, especially when private insurance plans are considered, because these companies go out of their way to keep this data hidden:
Although the Affordable Care Act permits regulators to require insurers to share information on claim denials, the federal government has so far not collected much of this data and has shared even less with the public, according to a 2023 report from ProPublica. Still, some recent reports show that denials have been on the rise...
Denials have been on the rise due, in part, to the use of AI according to an Oct. 2024 U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report:
While the Subcommittee continues to investigate the use of predictive technologies by Medicare Advantage insurers, the data obtained so far is troubling regardless of whether the decisions reflected in the data were the result of predictive technology or human discretion. It suggests Medicare Advantage insurers are intentionally targeting a costly but critical area of medicine — substituting judgment about medical necessity with a calculation about financial gain.
Human judgment is being substituted to AI and the reason is exactly what you probably thought it was when you first read it: financial gain. But of course, that’s the main reason any corporation set up to maximize profit as its first primary objective would do that.
Do you happen to know how many modes of care scientifically proven to help people are straight up excluded from health insurance coverage in this country?
That’s not a rhetorical question, I really don’t know. I bet it’s a lot though.
Why? Because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seems to be cartoonishly biased against anything proven to help but that has a low-profit potential.
Gee, I’m not Sherlock Holmes but could it possibly be because nearly half of the FDA’s funding just so happens to come from (loud dramatic inhale) the very corporations it is supposed to be regulating?
sick sad headline in a sick sad country
And amazingly we are to believe that no one, not one person anywhere at that agency, stopped at any time and went, “Hey guys, um, isn’t this big fat check we’re cashing right now the absolute dictionary definition of a conflict of interest?”
Great.
Meanwhile, as we’re over here paying more for our healthcare than anybody else in any other nation on earth by far, we’re not in even ranked in the top ten of developed nations for life expectancy.
In fact, we have the lowest life expectancy and the highest infant and maternal mortality rates out of any other high-income nation while we are paying more for our health care than all of them!
Don't you just love that for us?
Well, here’s a recent headline for you:
U.S. global rank in life expectancy is projected to decline from 49 in 2022 to 66 in 2050.
AND PLEASE.
PRETTY PLEASE.
DO NOT EVEN GET ME STARTED ON DENTISTS RIGHT NOW.
So this just came out last month...
This is like something straight out of Little Shop of Horrors but with a lot less showtunes:
“There are many cases where teeth, they’re perfectly fine, and they’re being removed unnecessarily,” said William Giannobile, dean of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. “I really hate to say it, but many of them are doing it because these procedures, from a monetary standpoint, they’re much more beneficial to the practitioner...”
AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH IT'S LIKE A LITERAL NIGHTMARE FROM HELL WHAT IN THE ACTUAL F — !!!
Ahem. Sorry about that.
If we were being a little more honest with ourselves ladies and gentlemen, what we actually have here in Modern America is a thoroughly disgusting racket that might as well be called “Sick Neglect”.
Sure, it’s not very catchy, but it’s just so much more accurate.
Primum non Nocere: First Do No Harm
The Hippocratic Oath, which is still used at many medical school graduation ceremonies today, is an ethical code attributed to an ancient Greek physician named Hippocrates. For centuries this oath has remained the guiding spirit for medical practitioners on how to treat their patients — to help them if they can, but at the very least it famously includes, “I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm”.
However, as our modern so-called healthcare system in America gatekeeps medical practitioners and potential cures, it somehow jurisdictionally exempts itself seemingly altogether from this ancient ethical guideline — keeping medicines and treatments from people that would actually help them have a better quality of life, or in some cases, keep them alive period.
By doing so, in the saddest irony perhaps ever, our “healthcare system” is in many ways condemning people to an existence of pain, treatable but untreated sickness, and at worst, an untimely death. To conclude, do I have any faith in the government’s ability to make a noodle salad?
Hell no, but with all due respect, please take a good look around before you romanticize what is actually going on here.
Our healthcare system is a massive joke and a deadly unfunny one being played on us all every single day, and it is in need of an even more massive overhaul. American healthcare has been a nonstop horror show for such a long time, but Obamacare was probably the final nail in its coffin. We’ve been living with a maniacal bloodthirsty zombie ever since that just wants to eat us. That is what this is.
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