Index

Medical Musings for a Gloomy Friday

I just saw an article about a judge that recused himself from a case because he couldn’t claim to be unprejudiced, and in his recusal letter he told some kind of horror story about what an insurance company did with some cancer cases, including his own. I can’t vouch for the story about the judge’s recusal, but we all have at least heard a similar story, usually ending with someone dead or suffering horribly because the insurance company wouldn’t cover getting the treatment they needed.

The problem is that it’s not “medical care” anymore, and it hasn’t been since Nixon made it for-profit and Reagan killed almost all the non-profits. It is medical extortion, literally your money or your life, and the medical blackmailers obviously like it that way - sick people who are afraid of dying will keep paying, and they know it.

Until the system is made sane somehow, there will be no major illnesses cured by the American medical system, and any cures found outside the country will be blocked, prevented from being used inside the country for as long as the medical profiteers control the system. Slow, painful deaths are incredibly profitable for them.

If I should get cancer, for instance, the only way my wife would keep a place to live is to divorce me. There is no escaping the death-or-dollars crowd except to separate finances, so that my medical bankruptcy wouldn’t take her with me.

There is a serious argument to be made for immediate suicide on receipt of e.g. a cancer or Alzheimer’s diagnosis, so that you can at least die with dignity and leave something of an inheritance for your wife and kids, instead of an unrelenting procession of bill collectors and a destitute family. This may sound harsh, but the medical system has no humanity left. Once they dig into you, dying is the only way out.

Obamacare, while a valiant attempt at helping the worst off get some help, didn’t even attempt to get to the corrupt root of the system. Any attempt to do so would have been crushed by McConnell and the rest of the corrupt former republican party - they are the biggest recipients of the system’s profit sharing plan, otherwise known as campaign contributions.

While I can’t say I like the thought of having the government running the medical system, it seems to work pretty well most of the places that have that sort of system. Granted, we have created more new addictive painkillers and other expensive palliatives that any other country’s medical system, but the profit motive works against curing diseases like cancer that are so amazingly profitable.

At this point, the extortionists have so completely taken over what once was the world’s best medical system that I see no other option except taking all of the profit motive out of it completely, and in one fell swoop. Anything less would only be temporary at best, a bandaid on an already infected exit wound.

Postscript 28 May 2019: I am obviously not the only one this gloomy! Nurses are none too happy, either.

This is not the first time I have written about this, either. Things are just getting worse: Cancer will never be cured