A Preliminary Look At Healthcare

About 20 years ago, I went to see my doctor because of a pain near my groin. I am extremely grateful to him, for he saved my life. It turned out that I had an incarcerated hernia, something that he was smart enough to intuit. And he took immediate steps to bypass the normal wait time imposed by the insurance company to get me right into the hospital that very day so they could operate on me. And, as I said, they saved my life.

My doctor was an elderly gentleman who had been practicing medicine since the Korean War. But he told me that he was getting fed up with medicine and was transferring his efforts to working for the government at a military base in Arizona. He said to me, “Several years ago big business came to the doctors and said, ‘There’s big money to be made here, boys. Step aside and let us show you how it’s done.’” Ever since that time, he contended, the practice of medicine had gone successively downhill. Understand what I am saying here. He was voluntarily leaving what had formerly been known as the private practice of medicine to finish out his life working in the socialized medical system of the military.

Today I have no health insurance. However, I am fortunate that I receive medical care through the Veterans Administration due to my having given four years of my life in service through the U.S. Navy. I am surprised about how impressed I am by the treatment that I am receiving through the V.A. What’s more, whenever I walk down the hallways of the local V.A. hospital, if I or anyone else looks or acts the least bit confused about where we are going, there always seems to be a friendly employee of the V.A. (doctor, nurse, clerk, maintenance worker) who is there with a smile and a pleasant, “May I help you.”

If you have not visited your local V.A. Hospital recently, I highly recommend that you do so. When you do, remember that the people whom you see there seeking treatment are people who have given a part of their lives, and in some cases part of their bodies and/or part of their minds, to their country. They won’t be there in the coats and ties of the people who “run” our current health system. It’s obvious that some of them have probably never even worn a tie. But every time I visit the V.A. I am proud of each and every one of these people. And I am also grateful for the "socialized" medical system afforded by the V.A. If it weren't for the V.A., most of these veterans would have no health insurance.

The people who today are battling against changes in our national healthcare system remind me of the people who drove my doctor of 20 years ago to the more productive and successful system of military socialized medicine. These people are not concerned about medicine, or about people, or about healthcare. If you listen to them, they are concerned about dollars. They are concerned about the bottom line. The same people who systematically destroyed the practice of medicine over the past several decades now demand, through their highly paid surrogates, to be given the opportunity to work out the kinks in the medical system without any government interference. The fox is loose in the henhouse and it wants someone to restrain the farmer from ousting it.

These people have progressively corrupted the medical system in this country and now they want to be allowed to fix what they, themselves, have broken. Wake up, people, this isn’t about healthcare. This is about money, pure and simple. Did you know that there are insurance companies who deny claims not based upon the merit of the claim but purely upon the proven idea that if you deny every claim when it first comes in the door, some people will just give up and not fight that “decision.”

When opponents of healthcare changes scream about not wanting decisions made by government bureaucrats, do they stop to think about who is presently making most of the health decisions for those who are insured? If you don’t know who I’m talking about, then you haven’t called a health insurance company lately. If you can get through to a human being, the person that you will be talking to is, more than likely, a minimum-wage clerk. Not a medical clerk trained in the ways of medicine, but a clerk trained in the ways of protecting the bottom line.

One of the biggest complaints against improving the healthcare system today is “Who is going to pay?” Well, let me ask you this. If we continue to allow millions of people to be uninsured and underinsured due to the penny-pinching monopolistic policies of the insurance company bureaucracy, who is going to pay? Are we just going to let increasing numbers of people lie around and die? Who’s going to pay? The answer is that we all will pay. We will pay through becoming less human and the result will be a slow disintegration of our society.

The healthcare system shouldn’t be run by people whose number one goal is to keep a consistent healthy bottom line for their business. The people’s health should not be trusted to institutions that have proven time and again that their number one interest is not how to best serve their customers, those who, after all, are the source of the money that they greedily hoard and stuff into the pockets of their top executives. People used to criticize what they called the “me” generation. Well, we now live in an age of the “me” corporation.

To think outside the box where healthcare is concerned needs to start by completely throwing out the question of who is going to pay for it. But the opponents of healthcare reform will hear nothing of that. They rail against the government (need I remind you “of the people”) being involved in running any part of healthcare, but they are slaves to the “government” of big business that has lied to them so consistently through the constant inundation of false advertising and mindless talking heads on television and radio that bombard us incessantly with the lie of the so-called “Great American Dream.” I’ll talk more about that in a future post.

Right now, I have a challenge for each and every reader. Can you think outside the box where improved healthcare is concerned without considering the financial cost? Don’t worry. I assure you that the money can be factored in later. But if we allow money to be the determining factor on the front end of what we consider for the benefit of all of the citizens of this great land, then we will never get beyond the spare change in our pockets.

There are sources of money and of great wealth that have yet to be tapped. That, too, will be discussed in a future post. For now, don't worry about, don't think about, the money. Think instead about the various ways that we might provide good, sound, efficient healthcare for every man woman, and child. Think about it.

Think Outside the Box!