Health Care in America - "Corruption at the Core of the Collapse

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The Broken American Health Care System

What is the driving force behind the failure of the most expensive heath care system in the world to provide a better quality of life?  A lot of us have opinions.  So do the media, politicians and academia, but none seem to be addressing the reason behind every failure of an institution like medical care in society.

There comes a point when the institutions no longer serve the purpose they were created to address.  They evolve to a position where they believe the survival of the institution is more important than the mission of the institution.

When that happens, and inevitably it will when all good causes become their own bureaucracy, we have the seeds of corruption planted.

In America we spend about 9.9% of our disposable income on food.  Thirty years ago we spent 15% of our disposable income, meaning we spend over 5% less today on food than thirty years ago.

Now compare that to our experience with health care costs.

An article  was written June 28, 2009 by George Will titled: "Americans Will Regret Health Care Fix".  It described the cost of health care in America as follows.

The Hudson Institute's Betsy McCaughey, writing in The American Spectator, says that in 1960 the average American household spent 53 percent of its disposable income on food, housing, energy and health care. Today the portion of income consumed by those four has barely changed -- 55 percent. But the health care component has increased while the other three combined have decreased. This is partly because as societies become richer, they spend more on health care -- and symphonies, universities, museums, etc.

It is also because health care is increasingly competent. When the first baby boomers, whose aging is driving health care spending, were born in 1946, many American hospitals' principal expense was clean linen. This was long before MRIs, CAT scans and the rest of the diagnostic and therapeutic arsenal that modern medicine deploys.

In a survey released in April by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard, only 6 percent of Americans said they were willing to spend more than $200 a month on health care, and the price must fall to $100 a month before a majority are willing to pay it. But according to Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, Americans already are paying an average of $400 a month.

Most Americans do not know this because the cost of their care is hidden. Only 9 percent buy health coverage individually, and $84 of every $100 spent on health care is spent by someone (an employer, insurance company or government) other than recipients of the care. Those who get insurance as untaxed compensation from employers have no occasion to compute or confront the size of that benefit. But it is part of the price their employers pay for their work.

During the past thirty years health care as a percentage of our gross domestic product has grown by more than ten times.  That does not include your taxes paid for the government expenditures on health care.  The cost now is over $2.6 trillion a year and rising, both in terms of treatment and insurance.

Make no mistake, health care, long a public service through churches, non-profit organizations, government owned facilities and other resources, has now become BIG BUSINESS.

Pharmaceutical corporations led the way into making health care a profit center, not a public service, and now virtually every aspect of our health care system is privately owned, profit centered, and financed by Wall Street.

Wall Street may be reasonably good at financing new businesses like the Internet companies and health care industry but once Wall Street takes control of the industry through controlling the financing, that company serves a new master, Wall Street profitability.

Before you get out your protest banners and decide to occupy hospitals, I mean it is fashionable to protest against anyone we think is ripping off the public, look in the mirror because you are the one embracing a system now under the control of the financial institutions.

My point is this.  Health care is more about serving Wall Street interests than the people's interest.  Of course this is America and we encourage capitalism and these health care capitalists are operating within the framework of the law.  I guess if you owned stock in enough health care companies you would be profiting from the gouging of the American public with excessive health care costs, but most of us don't own health care stocks.

Our health care industry has evolved to the point where moral and financial corruption permeate the entire system, even corrupting those in the industry who really want to help people.

The medical industry is dependent on funneling millions in campaign funds to politicians who have to vote on their funding, in bribing doctors to prescribe drugs, in bribing universities to compete on a cut throat basis for grants from private corporations for survival, and for encouraging doctors to own testing equipment which in turn has to be justified to keep.

Conflicts of interest and ethics issues dominate the health care landscape.  It has become so financially competitive that excessive and unnecessary treatment is the order of the day as a simple and nearly undetectable way to pad the revenue stream.

Why X ray a single tooth if you can X ray the whole mouth?  Why take one or two spinal X rays when you can take multiple X rays of the spine?  Why not set up follow up doctor appointments for reasons of billing for the office visits rather than transmitting test results?

If a drug company pays a doctor to prescribe their drugs, and the more drugs prescribed the more the doctor makes, don't you think more prescriptions will be written?

How can FDA employees fairly evaluate a New Drug Application (NDA) worth potentially billions of dollars in new revenue if the same employees can quit their jobs and go to work for the same drug companies for far more money?

The top five drugs in terms of sales revenue in America all make between $3 and $5 billion a year for the owners, the pharmaceutical company.  If new health research or treatment does not generate profits first and foremost, it is of little value to a profit driven health care system.

If congress or the president eliminated conflicts of interest in the industry, both in terms of the relationship between government workers and the industry and between the industry and practitioners, it would be a great start to cost reduction.

The same conflict of interest exists when doctors are convinced to own expensive equipment like CAT scan and MRI machines, blood laboratories, pharmaceutical offices and others.  If Medicare or a health insurance company allows excessive CAT scans and MRI analysis for the purpose of making sure people are diagnosed and the doctors own the machines, don't you think more screens will be prescribed?

There are a thousand and one ways to get caught in a conflict in an industry that is barely regulated.  Usually there are industry watchdogs like the Securities and Exchange Commission assigned to keep an eye on the system.  However, even they are subject to the same conflicts because the SEC failed to see the housing and banking crisis coming.  More than likely they just turned their back to it.

A comprehensive and fair conflict of interest law could be proposed by the president and approved by congress and a thorough ethics law could be adopted by the medical and health care industries and that would start to unscramble the layers of conflicts and ethics violations we face today.

Unfortunately, such leadership by our politicians and health industries is nonexistent and will be as long as the industry finances the political campaigns in Washington and through the nation.  So we also need campaign financial reform, meaningful reform, to fix that inherent problem.

Fix the conflict of interest, draw up enforceable ethics laws, and clean up the campaign finance mess and it will lead directly to reduced health care costs.  Once again, nothing has been proposed by politicians to correct this mess.

Isn't it about time to REALLY start fixing things?

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Democrats Can't Pass Budget - Republicans Can't Tell Budget Cuts - What to do?

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So we have a stalemate in Washington, what else is new? Since neither the majority nor minority party has demonstrated any leadership to date on controlling our budget maybe they would like to hear from the people about how to go about balancing the budget.

Here is my primer on how to get control of America, our budget deficit and national debt.

1. No Congressman (House or Senate) should be allowed to vote on any bill benefiting their campaign contributors. A very straight forward law to prevent conflicts of interest. It should be illegal to vote on bills where the congressman received campaign money from a special interest. Such a rule does not exist and is long overdue.

2. Consolidate half of the overseas military bases in the USA along the Mexican border bringing home - 20,000 - 25,000 troops and support staff to each of four new bases, one in Arizona, one in New Mexico, and two in Texas strategically located along the border to discourage illegal immigration.



Over 1 million American troops are stationed overseas and NOT in a war zone. By relocating a total of about 100,000 troops back to America we would save billions of lost dollars and substantially reduce the cost of keeping troops overseas. A second phase of this relocation would be to bring home an additional, 500,000 troops over the next five years.

3. Require pharmaceutical companies to provide prescription drugs for 25% less than currently charged for the Medicare and Medicaid programs the first year, and an additional 25% less the second year. If they resist get generic drugs.



4. Require health insurance companies to reduce premiums by25% through eliminating unnecessary testing and treatment and adopting tort reform.

5. Create a National Trust for National Parks as a private, profit making enterprise and require the selling of stock to purchase these national treasurers and make them more profitable. Make stock available to all citizens allowing the purchase of trust stock with tax refunds and other incentives. All National Parks should be highly profitable and services could be expanded with private capital available for expansion. This could save raise several billions in the purchase of the Park property by the private trust and the profits from the operation could earn stock holders significant annual dividends. Right now there is no way for the average citizen to earn a fair return on their money.



6. Reduce foreign aid by 50%.

7. Establish small business development initiative to encourage rapid expansion in small business and innovation. Among components would be free patent service for small business, free trademark service for small business, free laboratory testing of small business products and a senior corps of retired business executives to consult with small business owners. This would eliminate some of the prohibitive start up costs of small business encouraging more hiring and expansion. The cost to the government would be more than offset by the increase in taxes paid by the businesses.

7. Offer free medical insurance to anyone agreeing to work beyond the Social Security retirement age of 62 or 67. Raise the retirement age to 65.



8. Undertake a one year review of all government expenditures, waste, duplication and lack of legal authority for the existence of programs with a goal of reducing agency costs by 15%. This review would give the agencies a chance to offset losses with cost efficiencies and elimination of waste.

9. Expand charter schools to 50% of all public education students within three years establishing performance standards on the charter schools and requiring them to give first preference for teacher hiring on displaced public school teachers.



10. Require an economic impact statement on all new expenditures which documents the legislative right to fund the program, identifies a five year budget for the new initiative, identifies the permanent funding source for the program, and determines the cost analysis of hiring employees versus contracting out for the service.

This is part one of my program to balance the federal budget and begin to eliminate the national debt. I welcome all other ideas from readers to help our congress do the job we elected them to do.

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Congressional Investigations - When does Congress Investigate Itself?

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This has been the year of intense Congressional investigations as the bankers, auto people, housing and oil people have been paraded in before a packed and stacked House or Senate Committee and derided, ridiculed and disgraced in full view of the world.

Who are these holier than thou House and Senate members who preach to the bad guys about ethics, special interests, conflicts of interest, bribes and a host of other problems that helped bring down the economy, wipe out home values, and even help destroy the environment?



About the only positive result of the hearings is that we are discovering it was not the lack of rules and regulations that was behind most of these problems, it was the lack of enforcement of the laws, rules and regulations that were already on the books.

Now last time I read the Constitution it was Congress that passed the laws and approved the regulations, yes the same ones that got us in trouble. That must mean Congress might just be the primary party that did not do it's job to protect the people.



Of course Congress knows this, they just forget to mention it. They also know the reason Congress has allowed rules and regulations to be flawed or not enforced is that special interests control Washington. And yes, these are the same special interests that spend hundreds of millions of dollars filling the very campaign coffers of the people sitting at the hearings acting as if they are holier than thou.

The most important hearing Congress could hold to fix ALL the problems facing America is a hearing of itself, and the relationship between the hundreds of millions of campaign dollars they get from special interests and their performance in office.



The people are not stupid. They know Congress is the best money can buy. But when it is the best money can buy then it is also serving the wrong master. Congress is addicted to special interest money and that money has compromised the ability of our elected representatives to serve the people.

It is almost like a Saturday Night Live skit watching Congress lambast the witnesses in the hearings about the corruption, conflicts of interest, immorality and disregard for the public interest while they are filling their campaign accounts with money from these same special interests.



Campaign reform, especially finance reform, is the only solution for the malaise that has enveloped our nation's government. While all of our leaders are blaming special interests for our problems, not a single person in the White House, Congress, leaders of the house or senate, or even our president is talking about taking on the biggest special interest in Washington, the politicians addicted to the special interest money.

They could fix this problem overnight if they had guts and the interest of the people in mind but they are not about to shut down the money spigot that has enabled them to get and stay elected. They are nothing but hypocrites and have made a mockery of their oath of office to defend the Constitution and protect the Republic and the people of the Republic.



The Washington establishment serves no one but itself and has demonstrated over and over that it has no interest in changing. Only the people can force the change through the electoral process and if the early elections this year have demonstrated nothing else, they have shown the people are sick and tired of the status quo. "Throw them out, throw them all out" seems more and more the theme for this year's election and it cannot come a day too soon.