This is worth watching if you wish to obtain a better understanding of the dimension and sources of problems in US healthcare.
This may be surprising if all you have been given is the usual misdirection and scapegoating of victims that is the mainstay of the moneyed interest in defending their abusive privileges. And unfortunately, people fed on their steady stream of well crafted slogans presented by impressive but phony experts, and media figures, and bought and paid for politicians, will absorb and repeat these slogans without thinking all too often.
If you have recently had a major encounter with the US healthcare system you will understand this implicitly. After seven years of fighting a major illness in the family, I have gained a great deal of insight into what is going on, from almost every aspect including financial and logistic and structural.
And for the most part Steven Brill is correct in his diagnosis. Unfortunately he is not quite there in his prescription for change. Change is difficult, especially for those who are deeply immersed in things as they are.
If not, and you do not get it yet, if you cannot get past all the misdirection and spin put forward by the Big Pharma and Big Healthcare and Big Insurance monopolists, then you have something in store that may shock and surprise you, when you finally encounter it close up. It is ugly, resembling a carny game or control fraud.
I am no fan of Obamacare. Yes it did do one or two things right, but on the whole it is a bastard child of the Heritage Foundation, and a 'shifting of the deck chairs on the Titanic' that was crafted and promoted by the perpetrators of the problem itself.
At the core of the US healthcare system is the corrupting power of big money, unrestrained by law and in too few hands. It's corrupting influence has been spreading like a virus through almost every system that we have.
And too many people have thrown up their hands, for a variety of good and not so good reasons, and said that change is impossible.
Like any broken system there are many 'angels' who work tirelessly in it, trying to do good with compassion and dedication. We were lucky to have found quite a few, and we treasured what they did, and thanked God for them.
But there were too many who went along to get along, and the worst, those toxic few, those ghouls, who just wallowed in it for their own advantage without regard for their patients as human beings.
It is wrong to demand that anyone make a martyr of themselves. That is too much to require. But many do without thinking. People need support and protection to speak out for these kinds of big changes, since the stakes are so high, and the darkness at the top is so powerful, and vindictive. And most profound organizational corruption flows from the top down.
Like too many corrupt organizations, what well-intentioned participants can say and do to right wrongs and expose injustice is strictly limited, bound by a career destroying rule of omerta about as unforgiving as in a proper criminal organization.
Since this video was made, Charlie Rose was exposed for what he is, and some of the abuses of power, and was fired. He was a child of and mouthpiece for a thoroughly rotten, amoral system of money and power above all.
