From: Dick Fojut [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2010 2:53 PM
Subject: How Wall Street Destroyed Private Medicine - Roberts
HOW WALL STREET DESTROYED PRIVATE MEDICINE
We think you may find the following article of interest. (Paul Craig
Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the first Reagan
administration.) See you Friday.
----------------------------------
HOW WALL STREET DESTROYED PRIVATE MEDICINE
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/100121_wall_st.htm
By Paul Craig Roberts
January 21, 2010
At my annual check-up, my doctor handed me a sheet explaining the reasons
for office fee increases for Medicare Patients. It is worth reporting at
length.
Medicare fixes the prices for Medicare patients' health care. All office
charges for Medicare, including office visit charges, have been set by the
Federal government since 1984. In real terms (adjusted for inflation), these
fixed prices are less today than they were three decades ago.
During the last four years, there have been large decreases in Medicare
reimbursements for laboratory services provided in-house by private
physicians. Payments for in-office blood work, for example, have been cut 35
to 47 percent. Yet, a physician's overhead continues to increase as a result
of uncontrollable costs, such as property taxes, building insurance,
electricity, maintenance, malpractice and workers compensation insurance.
As one result, my doctor had to close both the x-ray unit and the state and
federally licensed medical laboratory on his premises. Now patients are
inconvenienced by having to go to other locations for services that formerly
were provided by the doctor at lower cost. A one day medical check-up is now
a multiple day event and more expensive.
While Medicare payments to doctors have been cut, regulations have been
increasing: "Almost every outside diagnostic procedure (CT, MRI scan,
sonogram) ordered by this office now has to be pre-approved by some outside
agency. Many medications are now requiring pre-approval or step therapy.
Each requires filling out 1-2 pages of forms and/or two or more phone calls.
This requires personnel time and therefore more cost. Consultant referrals
are requiring more paperwork and time to schedule."
My doctor has more people employed doing paperwork than he does delivering
health care.
While Medicare payments for in-office services to private doctors, including
those for blood work and x-ray units, were drastically cut, payments to
outside corporate facilities for the same services were increased. It is
obvious what is afoot. Corporate lobbies are using their whores in Congress
to shift income from physician offices to corporate labs, corporate medical
service providers, and hospitals that are owned by national corporations.
Legislation that cuts payments to private physicians and increases the
payments to large corporate entities is intended to destroy private practice
and to create in its place corporate bureaucracies in which doctors are wage
slaves. The physician's income is diverted to shareholders, CEO bonuses, and
Wall Street. Health care is being replaced with health business.
As a result of the way American medicine is being reconstructed, patients
will cease to have a doctor whom they know and who knows them. Important
information is lost in a system of bureaucratized "health care" in which a
patient sees whatever face happens to be on duty at the corporate provider.
Impersonal health care thus brings a cost of its own, and its quality can be
low compared to private practice. Indeed, the U.S. is creating a "health
care" system that is more costly and less efficient than single-payer
national health systems. But it will enrich corporations and provide play
for Wall Street.
It turns one's stomach to watch libertarians and "free market economists"
defend bureaucratized impersonal health care as "free market medicine."
There is no free market present. Corporate lobbies and campaign
contributions use government power to create bureaucratized monopolies that
destroy medicine for the practitioner and the patient. Wall Street pushes
for greater shareholder earnings, which are achieved by denying care.
Just as independent businesses have been destroyed by corporate chains from
Wal-Mart to auto parts to fast food, medicine is being destroyed by monopoly
capital. The risks of starting a private business today are many times
higher than they were a half century ago. Chains have turned Americans who
once were independent business men and women into employees.
The fate of the health care bill demonstrates the power of private lobbies.
What was to be health care for Americans was instantly transformed into 30
million new patients for the private health insurance industry. The
"solution" to tens of millions of Americans being unable to afford health
care is a law that requires them to purchase a private health care policy or
be annually fined. As most of these uninsured Americans cannot afford to
purchase a private policy, the plan is for the federal government to use
taxpayers' money to subsidize their purchase of a policy from private
companies.
In other words, tax money is being diverted to the pockets of private
businesses. This is par for the course in "capitalist" America.
In today's America, Karl Marx's criticisms of capitalism are understated.
Wherever one looks, the scene is one of the government using taxpayers'
money to enrich private interests. Taxes are collected from people who can
barely make it, and the revenues are transferred to multi-millionaires and
billionaires. The federal government piles debt on the backs of
heavily-burdened and dispossessed Americans in order that investment
banksters can pay annual bonuses that exceed the lifetime earnings of most
Americans.
Every aspect of the US military has been mined for private profit. Supply
and other functions for the military, such as those provided by Halliburton
and Blackwater, services once provided by the military itself at low cost,
have been privatized. These services now cost many multiples of the cost to
taxpayers of in-house military provision.
The "war on terror" enriches the armaments/security industry and enables
Israeli territorial expansion. The Israel Lobby and the munitions industry
are major sources of funding for U.S. political campaigns.
Prisons have been privatized in order to create profits for private
corporations. The prisons require high incarceration rates in order to be
profitable. Consequently, "freedom and democracy" America not only has the
highest incarceration rate and the highest absolute number of prisoners in
the world, but also a prison population comparable in size to the prison
population of Stalin's Gulag Archipelago.
Congress allows private companies run by hardline Republicans to count
electronically without paper trails the votes in elections. It has been
proved over and over that the electronic voting machines, with proprietary
undisclosed codes, can rig any election, especially if there are no exit
polls or the captured media can find a way to discredit the exit polls.
And now we have private health care destroyed by the greed for profit. There
are many reports of health care corporations, but not private doctors,
rationing and even denying health care to policy holders in order to
maximize profits. There are reports of people with treatable forms of cancer
who were not told by their corporate health care providers in order to avoid
the cost of their treatment. These reports are in compliance with capitalist
America's emphasis on profits uber alles, to hell with people, the
environment, honor and integrity.
Wall Street is romanticized by libertarians and "free market economists."
They believe, entirely on the basis of their ideology, that Wall Street
finances venture capitalists who bring economic progress and higher living
standards. Wall Street does no such thing, especially since financial
deregulation turned Wall Street into a speculative hedge fund.
Wall Street is concerned with annual bonuses. It will do anything to get
them.
Today the interests of American capitalists are as far removed from the
interests of the population as the bureaucrats of state owned firms under
socialism. Neither can fail, no matter how incompetent or inefficient, as
they have the public purse as their backup.
The Wall Street investment banks, which created with the compliance of the
regulatory authorities and the credit rating agencies, "toxic" instruments
that were sold world wide, thus destroying the prospects of people in many
countries, are devoid of integrity and honor. Their only god is greed. And
they control the US government, which is too dependent on campaign
contributions to restore regulation.
The lobbies of greed rule America. The White House, Congress, even the
federal judiciary are impotent in the face of capitalist greed.
There is no government of the people, for the people, by the people, only
the rule of private interests.
---------------------------
Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
during President Reagan's first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall
Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the
William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies,
Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution,
Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President
Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An
Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet
Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with
Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and
Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click
here for Peter Brimelow's Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the
epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
*** exposing the hidden truth for further educational research only ***
CAVEAT LECTOR *** In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. NOTE: Some links may require cut and paste into your Internet
Browser. Please check for daily real news posts and support the truth!
(sorry but don't have time to email all posts) at
<http://tinyurl.com/33c9yr> http://tinyurl.com/33c9yr or
<http://groups.google.com/group/total_truth_sciences/topics?gvc=2>
http://groups.google.com/group/total_truth_sciences/topics?gvc=2 ; You can
also subscribe to the multiple daily emails by sending an email to
<mailto:[email protected]>
[email protected] ; free book download:
<http://www.lulu.com/content/165077> http://www.lulu.com/content/165077 ***
Revealing the hidden Truth For Educational & Further Research Purposes only.
*** NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security
Agency (NSA) may have read emails without warning, warrant, or notice. They
may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no
recourse, nor protection.......... IF anyone other than the addressee of
this e-mail is reading it, you are in violation of the 1st & 4th Amendments
to the Constitution of the United States. Patriot Act 5 & H.R. 1955
Disclaimer Notice: This post & all my past & future posts represent parody &
satire & are all intended for entertainment and amusement only. To be
removed from the weekly list, please reply with the subject line "REMOVE"
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"total_truth_sciences" group.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected]
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/total_truth_sciences
