I was interested and put off to find that on Sunday some
I can understand the reason for 3 of those ads being front and center, but I would think the Mexican story would have taken more precedence than the guns from evidence to back on the streets story.
The story on BBC was pretty in depth. On top of that I ended up watching a rare News Hour episode as well and when they talked about the whole
The state of reporting seems to be pretty sad as for a long time now the mass market news programs are all about dramatics as opposed to fact finding and information dissemination. In the past decade this seems to have taken on a more dramatic shock and awe style with such programs as 48 Hours and Dateline trying to hook ratings by creating their own scoops (To Catch a Dumb Motherfucker Parts 3 thru 21). This brings me back to the only TV I really watch, Nova and Frontline, both PBS documentary series. I watch Nova to learn sciencey stuff and Frontline to be kept up to date about the war on non-Christian religious extremism and about how the government is REALLY fucking up/us over.
I dig investigative journalism as long as it’s something that actually matters. Fortunately and surprisingly for my employer they started an investigative series this past Sunday that actually took my attention. Unfortunately, unlike the other series they have done in the past that haven’t really grabbed me, this one only seems to have done 1 installment, with no word on future ones…oh well.
The article is about how private doctors are being paid hansom wages by drug companies to tell other doctors and patients to buy their drug. Yeah, shocking right? I mean NO ONE knew this was going on. I mean drug manufacturers, insurance companies and medical facilities only care about the health of the patients correct? There is something incredibly wrong with every single entity involved in the process when a patient decides to go with a doctor recommended fish oil pill that is a prescription from an international drug manufacturer and costs 10 times more than the OTC equivalent only because the customer won’t have to pay as much out of pocket.So the ‘drug’ is covered by insurance as a prescribed medicine, when the same exact thing I gotten for a fraction of the price normally through a grocery store. Yet instead of the patient paying $300 or so over the course of the year to swallow a pill of omega-3 they opt to have their insurance provider, whom they pay (or someone pays) probably on average $150 a month to cover most if not all of the $2000 yearly prescription. Because they don’t make any connection between them giving money directly for the product instead of paying people to pay people for it they think they are saving.
As some people have said in the past few days as the administration pushes for the health care reform, you can’t just blame the insurance companies. And honestly, you can’t, at least not entirely. The problem is thus; a number of doctors enter the profession for the money and the prestige, not necessarily to help people. Some clinics/hospitals care more about gaining as much funding as possible, usually through clinical studies and not through patient care, over providing the best possible care for their patients. In turn many hospitals charge exorbitant fees to the insurance providers in order to nullify any costs accrued through patient care. The insurance companies, who are only in business to make money do anything they can to minimize their overhead and pass the buck to the consumer as much as possible. While corporations are expected and/or forced to provide some extent of medical coverage to some of their workforce they try to offset as much of what they see as wasted expenditure on the employees themselves. Drug manufacturers are actually only in the business to make money, researchers for the companies may have the drive to do well but I can assure you the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline doesn’t. The way they do this is by helping people, sure people aren’t going to buy your product if it doesn’t work, but it doesn’t mean you need to slap such a high price tag on designer medicine or refuse to produce a ‘generic’ derivative. If drug companies really cared about helping people above anything else we wouldn’t have patents on the drugs and any manufacturer who had the ability to do so would be able to use the same formula and bring it to the people, to help them be healthy and all. Then we come to the consumer who for the most part only pays attention to what the doctors feed to them and what advertising imprints in them.
A doctor who is being paid by a drug manufacturer to tell its patients and colleagues to use a particular medicine only has their own personal interest in mind. The drug companies know this and use this to benefit them. It’s a lot cheaper to pay a doctor $40,000 a year to sling your message than to spend $2,000,000 for a yearly ad campaign that is doing the same thing. Everyone is to blame for why it costs so much in this country. The only way we can make it better is to throw the old systems out and start over…but it will never happen as long as we are capitalism. There is too much stupid money in medicine and people don’t want to give it up.
People cry that a socialist health care system will destroy America, that it will be too expensive, that health care will be abysmal and old people will be passed up for medical care because they are too old. Here’s a news flash, it already is expensive. Our healthcare is abysmal, the waits are long and the coverage isn’t always the greatest. There are some states in this country I would refuse medical care in. Elderly people are already passed up for medical coverage. The transplant lists are not based entirely on how long one has been on the list. Doctors routinely tell elderly patients not to undergo a procedure due to their advanced age and the increased chance of failure. A man who is 93 years old with cancer is highly unlikely to begin chemo due to a number of reasons that make sense but are still uncaring. Whether it is a just thing or a logical thing isn’t easily discerned, but it is a fact in our current health care system which is not a product of socialism.
I think a large push against socializing the medical system in this country along with other things from average citizens is the idea of personal greed and selfishness. One push back I here ever so often and seems to be the most truthful and most understandable, if not agreeable is that people don’t think they should be responsible for people who choose not to take care of them selves.
“I shouldn’t have to work and pay for someone who chooses to sit on their ass.”
I agree with this on some things. I firmly believe if you are able bodied and can get a job, then do so. There are plenty of positions out there, some aren’t great jobs, some don’t pay the best, but hell, its better then not getting paid. McDonalds is hiring all the time. Instead our welfare system, which I believe in but also believe is broken and mismanaged, makes it so you can make better money by sitting on your ass. That I think I wrong, but the person who has a medical reason for not being able to work shouldn’t be left to die either. But when it comes to medical care, the ability to see a doctor when you need help, which is a basic, modern, necessity to live. It is something that everyone requires and everyone deserves. There are two ways to pay for it; the government or the individual. If the government pays for it then everyone can have access to it. If the individual pays for it, then only those that can pay for it have access to it. But hold on…how will the government pay for it? Who pays the government? Everyone who works and purchases luxury goods and owns property does. So in essence if you are opposed to having everyone covered to some extent with quality and respectable medical coverage you are uncaring for your fellow man, regardless of who they are. If you feel it is unfair and un-American for someone who chooses not to contribute to society to receive medical coverage provided by your tax dollars when they get sick and you would rather have them die in a gutter then I think you need to reevaluate your understanding of what it is to be a human being.
I think most people are socialists when they need help for socialist programs (college students) but the minute they actually start making money they don't want to give it away so they turn capitalist/conservative.
