Day 1199 – What’s Wrong With Our Hospitals?
Friday May 1, 2020
184 Days until the election on November 3rd
264 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
May Day! Which is different than saying, “May Day!” As in “May Day! May Day! May Day! We’re going down.”
No May Day is supposed to be the big Communist Day of Workers of the world rejoicing. Unfortunately, it seems that no matter the system, the workers get screwed.
This is because, as Garrett Morris said on SNL impersonating a Caribbean baseball player, you have to “keep your eye on the ball.” If you think for a second that someone else is going to take care of you, you get screwed. Capitalism, Communism, authoritarianism – doesn’t seem to matter.
Take our hospitals – We thought, and by “we” I mean the collective we i.e. “It is generally assumed or thought to be true” we, that hospitals were there to take care of the sick. That turns out not to be true, just as insurance companies are not there to take care of all the people who fall sick, or hurt, or die, or whatever. Nope, not true. At least not true in America – the U. S. of A. Un-uh, nope. You might have known that insurance companies were there to make a profit, and maybe you suspected hospitals were in the same game, but I bet you thought that if you got sick you could go to the hospital and they would take care of you. Generally, that is true, but we are now discovering that if a lot of people go to the hospital and are sick – the hospital will go bankrupt and shut down. Did you know that? I didn’t. (Am I channeling Donald Trump here? OMG, help me!)
Turns out hospitals are fee based. That means they schedule patients for procedures and get paid for doing them. That’s how they make their money. People showing up sick are an inconvenience, but the hospitals put up with it because by and large it isn’t that much of a strain. But now? Now with a pandemic raging, and scheduled surgeries and procedures put on hold, hospitals are losing money – a lot of money.
BTW scheduled procedures are referred to as “elective” in that you can choose (ie elect) when you want to do them; like when the doctor has time for you. It does not mean that you don’t need it. It does include cosmetic surgery, but it also includes a back operation or a knee replacement or a tumor removal. No, they don’t need to rush to do it, but they need to get that tumor out before it grows and kills you.
It also turns out that many of the hospital doctors have been bought up by hedge funds. Hedge funds like to make money. When they aren’t making money they cut back on expenses, like now. During a pandemic doctors who get paid the hedge fund who charge by the services they perform aren’t making money. There is no category, I guess, for “subject gasping for breath and needs a breathing tube shoved down their throat so they can breath due to corona virus” so they can’t get reimbursed so the hedge fund guys say, “Sorry, we need you to cut back on your hours.”
In other words our hospitals are not there to treat the sick, They are there to perform procedures that the doctors get paid to do.
Likewise, insurance companies are there to make a profit, not to help you in a time of need.
So the question in my mind is, “Is this what we want?”
Several things come to mind. In Britain they have a health care system based on helping the population stay healthy. How is that working out? It seems to me – pretty good. Yes, there have been problems along the way, but every year it seems to be getting better and the results are that the population is getting healthier and the cost isn’t breaking the back of the nation. It’s something like half the cost of our system.
In Canada, they have a system where the private companies are regulated by the government. This seems to work pretty well too.
Hum, maybe we should try a system that isn’t into gouging every penny they can from us, and one that actually works during a pandemic?
And finally, all the arguments I’ve heard from the right and the Republicans are basically, “We don’t want to change, because then we couldn’t elect to have surgeries and procedures when we want them.” Yeah, right. I call BS on that, and I’d rather have a system that works during a pandemic and one that costs half the price of the current system and one that covers everybody.
Bernie’s rallying cry of “Medicare for All” can now be replaced with an even more fundamental one “Hospitals for the Sick.”
In a side note, I saw Ivanka standing near her dad. Every time I see her I’ve wondered, “Is she as dumb as she looks?” Every time I come away thinking, “Yes. Yes, she is.”
PS The Hatteras Lighthouse
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