US Healthcare: Beyond the Ability of Cosmetics To Hide Its Ugliness

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.

US Healthcare Costs a Global Outlier and Monument to Crony Capitalism

I think the Big Pharma/Health and Big Finance sectors have similar cartel like structures where a few large companies dominate the field, exercising considering political power and the ability to obtain subsidies and protections from the system while fending off regulation and price restraints.

There are others of course, like the energy field from exploration to distribution, often known as Big Oil, but which now includes natural gas and electric energy production and distribution.

The recurring myths of the efficient market and 'free trade' are exacting a heavy toll on the general public and the real economy.  They provide ideological cover to a favored elite that is acting in the manner of a privileged and extractive aristocracy while beguiling many with the allure of easy money.

The concentration of ownership in the media has become an inhibiting and directing influence in public discourse that is hard to miss.

The current recovery fueled corporate perks and ZIRP for the financial sector, a fine example of 'trickle down' economics, will be remembered as one of the great policy errors of modern economic history. They pretend ignorance, they feign helplessness, and they know.  But they are getting paid not to act effectively, and even not to see, but to spin some fantasy.

They 'feel your pain.'  They just do not do anything substantial about it.  Even a second term president can still talk as though he is a recently arrived outsider, critiquing the actions of some predecessor and a corrupt system in which is he barely involved.

These are not leaders.  They are like modern CEO's, professional organizers and managers, who talk a great game about their accomplishments but, when the truth comes out, posture that they stand outside the very system for which they have long held the ultimate responsibility.  

But even worse are those who make little pretense to justice and goodness and moral principle, preferring to appeal to the darkest impulses, the fears and hatreds of a society.  Their actions betray their words.

The lack of serious reform, in large part because of the partnership between Big Money and Washington's new political class, and the dormancy of the progressive impulse, will eventually stress the fabric of society to the limit.  And then change will come.

Read the entire story here.

The Fruits of 'Free Markets' and Inequality: Female Mortality Rates In the US

"There is a frightening graph in a recent article in Health Affairs by David Kindig and Erika Cheng. Kindig and Cheng looked at trends in male and female mortality rates from 1992–96 to 2002–06 in 3,140 US counties.

What they found was that female mortality rates increased in 42.8% of counties (male mortality rates increased in only 3.4%). The counties are mapped below: red means that female mortality worsened.

You can see a strong regional pattern: just about every county showed had worsened female mortality in several southern states, while no county showed such decline in New England. There are many questions about what explains this pattern. For example, did healthier women migrate out of the south from 1992 to 2006?

Nevertheless, the map depicts a shocking pattern of female hardship, primarily in the southeast and midwest."

Read the rest from Bill Gardner posting at The Incidental Economist here.

And although they are certainly not the same as overall female mortality rates, here are the latest CIA World Factbook figures on maternal mortality rates (MMR) per hundred thousand. Obviously the lower the number the better.

Hey, don't complain, thank God we're not like Chad or Somalia right?   And how come all those socialist single payer countries are nearer the bottom, and they do it so much more cheaply?

Perhaps some neo-liberal hack can explain the economic principles of freedom involved to the child of a dead mother.

I know what comrade Stalin's or Herr Hitler's answer would have been about deaths and large numbers with regard to the needs of the state. Funny how the extremes tend to converge

Healthcare Costs: France and the US

Hint: The US is the one where the costs are substantially higher.

Thank you to Business Insider for the chart.

And for good measure here is another piece debunking myths about Canadian healthcare.

Blaming the Victim and Other Biases and Their Use by the Predator Class To Subvert the Unwary

It is an occasional human fault to get pulled into the habit of 'blaming the victim.'

Most people do not do it regularly, except in the case of some uninformed prejudice or in response to misinformation.

But some people seem to do it more often and sometimes habitually. Why is that?

As we might imagine, nothing can make a certain type of person feel better about themselves than attributing the misfortune of another to foolishness or stupidity. Since a similar misfortune has not happened to them, they must therefore be a superior type of person, and not the ordinary person that they fear they might be who just happened to get lucky.

In my experience this 'distancing' of oneself from the rest of humanity is at the root of much of the bad behaviour that can become institutionalized into the corruption of an organizational structure that eats at the fabric of society.

Sometimes people do engage in serial risky behaviour that leads them into trouble.  It seems as though everyone knows at least one person who gets themselves into a bad situation by acting foolishly and recklessly. Sometimes it is caused by mental illness, alcoholism or some other negative influence. Everyone can think of someone who 'brought it on themselves.' And our imaginations can extend that instance quite easily and broadly.

We can use these few anecdotal examples to blame the victims unjustly on a more general and uninformed level. And we often fall into this bias on the prompting of con men and sociopaths of the predator class who use it to justify their own criminal actions and personal injustice. They are not burdened with empathy for their victims, and even delight in their misfortune. But they must find ways to make their actions more acceptable to society as a whole that normally does have such concerns for equity and justice.

Personal exceptionalism is rooted in pride, and is the antithesis of the old saying, 'There but for the grace of God go I.'

Those MF global customers? They had it coming because they should have known better. Those people who lost money in the stock market? Well, no one MADE them buy those fraudulent paper assets that professionals recommended to them. That family who lost their home to foreclosure because the father was severely injured by sickness or accident? They should have planned better and taken more precautions.

In its extreme example, the subornation of human caring becomes a form of madness, the 'demonization of the other.' That whole group/class/race/nation of people who are being mistreated, brutalized, cheated, starved, and even murdered? It is unfortunate of course, but they are lazy/cheap/stupid/dirty/sneaky/different/subhuman and so they had it coming. But we are not like that so we are doing well and even prospering.

But these are just thoughts from my own direct experience.  Here is a systematic and more thorough analysis that I found to be interesting.

Blaming the victim – why do we do it? For example, are rape victims responsible for what happens to them? Are victims of car crashes or other accidents responsible for what happened to them? These are the kinds of questions we examine as we look at the strange human tendency to blame the victim.

Here is the concept map for the biases discussed in this show:

Download Podcast here.

Source: Blaming the Victim and Other Biases

Attribution Map Quiz

1: Fundamental Attribution Error
•“people do what they do because of the kind of people that they are, not because of the situation they are in”
•“people tend to underestimate external influences when explaining other people’s behavior”

2: Actor/Observer (bias) Difference
•“Whereas we are very likely to find internal causes for other people’s behavior, we tend to look …to the situation to explain our own behavior”
•Example: in a murder trial, the prosecution will call the person a murderer, defense will focus on the difficulty of the person’s life at the time or their childhood, characteristics of the person murdered. “That person drove my client to do what he/she did”

3. Self-serving Attribution (bias): while we tend to take credit for our successes (attribute success to internal causes), we blame our failures on external causes
•I earned an A, my professor gave me a C
•Why? Because it threatens our self esteem to think that failures were caused by something about ourselves
•Example: sports – when a team wins, they attribute it to talent or skill, when they lose, they attribute it to bad luck, poor playing conditions, bad calls from the umpires rather than “I didn’t train hard/study hard enough”, “Our team wasn’t as good”
•It feels bad to attribute our failures to ourselves

4. Optimism bias: “good things are more likely to happen to oneself than to others and bad things are less likely to happen to oneself”
•A kind of “defensive attribution”
•Why do we tend to hold this belief? Because the world is a scary, unpredictable place and that makes us feel anxious. The only way to feel a little better is to believe that it couldn’t happen to me. “I would have acted differently”, “That wouldn’t happen to me because…”I would make different decisions”

5. Belief in a Just World: bad things happen to bad people, “or at least to people who make mistakes, poor choices, etc.” thus, bad things won’t happen to me because I wouldn’t make those mistakes.
•“the belief in a just world keeps anxiety-provoking thoughts about one’s own safety at bay” Aronson, et. al.
•when the world seems chaotic or dangerous, this is anxiety provoking. so we attempt to reassure ourselves by blaming the victim

Dean Baker: Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform Was Doomed From the Start

I thought this interview with Dean Baker was interesting. I obviously do not agree with everything that he says, especially regarding the deficits and the attitude of the markets towards them. The US markets are far removed from being efficient mechanisms of capital allocation these days, and as such are unreliable indicators of just about everything except the latest trading fads and speculative excess.

But Mr. Baker touches on one point that gives me much room for thought, and that is the enigmatic president, Barack Obama. His appointments have often seemed eccentric, especially for someone who was elected on a wave of reform sentiment. He largely threw his mandate away in the first year on the very controversial health care reform bill that pleased almost nobody, and was obtuse in its requirement for individuals to purchase private health insurance from monopolistic health management corporations.

But his seeming obsession with trying to teach the seasoned politicians (whoremasters all) of Washington how to act in a bipartisan and selfless manner, as if they would take the least guidance from such a relatively inexperienced upstart, seems designed to fail. It is becoming increasingly difficult to take Obama seriously in matters of reform.

The sad part is that as bad and ineffective Obama and his cronies may be, the same and more can be said of the opposition Republican party. Some people are retreating into mere partisanship these days because they cannot deal with the uncertainty of the situation, but the sad truth is that America is lacking in leadership capable of uniting the people except through greed and fear, a dangerous cocktail in troubled times.

The US has a range of serious problems, but the greatest of these is political reform, and the return to Constitutional, rather than corporate, governance.

"Baker says that the committee, titled the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, was doomed from the start because of the strong views of the co-chairs - Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Although the commission was designed to be bipartisan, Bowles, the Democratic co-chair, is not a typical Democrat. He is a director at Morgan Stanley, one of the banks benefiting from a Wall Street bailout.

Baker says that both co-chairs have expressed hostility toward Medicare and Social Security, two of the nation's core social programs and demonstrated a loose grip on reality. Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chair and former Senator from Wyoming, said that he wanted to cut off Social Security payments to senior citizens who drive their Lexuses into their gated communities.

Baker counters that while Simpson and his friends may be wealthy, most senior citizens are not, noting average person over 65 lives on less that $30,000 a year. "It's like appointing someone you knew had racist views to head a civil rights commission," Baker says. "It's not the sort of thing you'd like to see."

Postscript: Someone sent this commentary to me, and I got a 'kick' out of it. Obama to Run as Republican in 2012

Obama does actually resemble a moderate Republican of the old school in most of what he does. That could be attributable to his desire to fit in and please the powers that be, and a further indication of the general shift to the right that the US has taken over the last 30 years. It in no way detracts from his incompetence and ineffectiveness. He reminds me of a classic modern American CEO, a well credentialed and highly articulate empty suit, a nicely appointed lump who serves his 'backers' from beginning to end and deals primarily in connections and privilege, rather than effectiveness and results. He is the new and improved version of politicians compared to the dreadful political machine troll like a Richard Shelby, or the smarmier car salesmen types like a Bob Corker, Barney Frank, or a Chris Dodd.