Drowning in The American Health Care System

Every country's population has a right to decent, affordable health care. And in my book, less is always more and prevention is the name of the game. Unfortunately this is not the case in the American health care system. 

And therein lies the problem. People go to the doctor or to the hospital because they're not feeling well and want relief.  Yet they drown in the health care system and end up six feet under instead of leaving better than when they entered those doors.

Whether it's from over-medication and mis-diagnosis or no diagnosis with a pithy "go home and die" prescription or an infection caught in a hospital. Yes, it's harsh and unfortunately it's more real than most would like to believe. It is not acceptable that 100,000 people die in hospitals every year from one or more of the 1.7 million illnesses they catch there.  That's just frigging terrifying!

I've compiled a few solid articles to highlight this disaster zone with some stories, facts and figures. There are a lot of good doctors out there so I'm not tarring them all with the same brush. However, expediency is the order of the day and people don't get the proper care they deserve.

We need doctors to treat their patients as human beings and not statistics for the insurance companies and digestive farms for the pharmaceutical industry's pills!

• How American health care killed my father - David Goldhill - a grief-stricken, lucid and insightful first-hand account on health care and how it killed his father. Here's an excerpt that cuts to the bone:

Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.

• Dr Peter Pronovost created A Checklist of things to do in hospitals to prevent patients deaths from hospital-induced illnesses as chronicled in The New Yorker.  Simple and cost-free yet most hospitals refused to implement it.

• Blood clots after surgery possibly killing more people in hospitals is highlighted by the Wall Street Journal.

• Health care and Daniel in the liar's den - Deepak Chopra - the lies and deliberate misinformation and spin which are spinning the debate on health care out out of sync with the needs of the American population.

• Health Care Reform - Let's face the truth - Deepak Chopra: the publicly available facts and figures in a video nutshell.

• Let's get fundamental - David Brooks: a well-written article exposing the basic fundmentals of what is needed in American health care, underlining the perverse incentives that's like a runaway bullet train and why Obama must stand firm. All without (mostly) political ideology.
  

It is not my intention to engage in scare-mongering and these stories scare me!  Get the facts from trusted sources in order to make an informed decision. And this is what I've found to-date and not a politician in the bunch!

And just ask yourself this "where is that 1.4 million dollars going that's spent by the insurance lobby execs every.single.day. in Washington, DC?


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