HEALTH CARE IN PROFIT CONTEXT ALWAYS?

WHEN PROFITS IN THE POCKETS DO NOT PROFIT HEALTH AND MINDS:

Interesting: Here we had on CNBC, Maria Bartiromo (the mile a minute talking head with partially eye occulting hairdo, friend and party to the plutocracy) interviewing the head of the "Cleveland Clinic" .

The later clinic is one of these private contraptions given as an example of excellent private health care for the People. With a third interviewee in tow, Maria and the private head concluded in a chorus that a "public plan" would kill the private sector by offering lower premiums. That, in turn would kill innovation in new treatments and drugs, they all took turns to howl to the sky.
Maria led the howling about the USA having the best health care, the best drugs, the best everything, that the Public would savagely tear apart, etc... The Res-Publica, the Public Thing as a threat to goodness...

This is all the wind of lucre howling... This can be pointed at quantitatively by looking at new drug production.

The creation of drugs in the last twenty years ought to have followed the productivity of computers, and being multiplied by hundreds (the potential for new drugs from natural products is known to be in the millions: countless natural biological products are known to have very strong, very targeted physiological effects, meaning they could be made into drugs). Instead it was divided by three. coming down to a trickle. The production of new antibiotics outright stopped for a decade (now it's starting again a tiny bit). As I pointed on "Too Sick To Care?" (patriceayme.wordpress.com), this has been caused by pharmaceutical companies spending most of their disposable capital in financial maneuvers.

Graphs could be produced, with drug development spending plummeting, while financial maneuvers spending soared, in a zero sum game.

So here we had the example everybody brandishes, and Obama himself brandishes, the Cleveland Clinic, and the discourse was blatantly unbalanced toward the plutocratic, for profit context. No care context. All profit context. And to sugar pill it all, ludicrous chest thumping about the health care of the USA being the best, so far.

As long as it was just having 50 million Americans without health insurance, and many others being driven to bankruptcy from their health problems (as health failure is the # 1 cause of that), it ought to have been fine for the hyper rich. After all they are not known for their altruism, and they were not the ones dying or getting morbid from lack of potential care. Or so they thought.

But now even those rarefied few should get alarmed: the loss of potential improvement in health, even for the plutocracy itself, is enormous, and getting greater every year. The statistics are clear: I am sure that even Paris Hilton could teach them.
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Patrice Ayme
wordpress.com