Nurse Ratched, to my imagination, was the most despised movie villainess of all time. She didn’t murder anyone, but by the sheer frigidity of her indifference, Nurse Ratched caused debilitating anxiety and heart-break. She’s my nominee for the face of the US health insurance lobby.
When Nurse Ratched –yes, it’s not spelled Ratchet– callously provoked the suicide of Brad Dourif’s vulnerable character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I would defy any viewer to deny they wanted to see the evil nurse dismembered. Couldn’t we rekindle a little of that seething anger for those who are obstructing health care reform?
How is their dispassionate defense of our nation’s feudal profit-based medical system any less homocidal than Jeffrey Dahmer? The health insurance business is doing the deed, but their DC lobbyists, like Richard Umbdenstock (AHA), Karen Ignagni (AHIP), Nancy Nielsen (AMA), Billy Tauzin (PhRMA), and David Nexon (AMTA) are keeping would-be rescuers at bay. They’re riding shotgun on genocidal manhunts.
Health coverage triage isn’t some genteel game of music chairs in the waiting room. These are wheelchairs, and the losers who fall are swept out the door and in the gutter. And the for-profit health industry is removing thousands of chairs at a time.
What is this polite respect opponents are showing one another over the immoral behavior of health insurers? Signa and Humana are killers plain and simple. They deny coverage, delay approvals, withhold disbursements, and throw up bureaucratic barriers until their patients are too enfeebled to fight, or too dead to sue.
While the public is made to debate whether our nation can afford to offer health care to its citizens, and feeling like cheapskates for wanting to deprive the insurance industry of its cleverly earned, admirable profits.
This was one of Eric’s most lucid comments, so why did it gather no comments in response? I really can’t say.
Today I read another very interesting comment about the US lack of health industry.
‘If we truly want to know something about the real threats we face in everyday life, we can consult actuarial tables, crime statistics or epidemiological data. Before nervously looking around an airport terminal for suspicious characters, why not drop by your friendly, local “Big-Box” hospital?’
So just what is a Big Box hospital? It is you being processed as some kind of sick ‘product’ on an assembly line of cut, push, and tear. YES, that’s what it is. Exactly.
See today’s Counterpunch for the complete commentary by Bill Manson titled, ‘What to Fear: Hospitals’.
It includes such observations as this, should-be rather obvious one…
—The Hypocritical Oath?: “First, make money—even if you do harm.” —
http://www.counterpunch.com/manson11262010.html
Yes, that’s it! That’s Big Business working you over to ‘earn’ their profits! Kind of sicko… ‘Your doctor’ has been turned into some sort of flesh eating zombie out of a horror flick! Where can you run to to hide?
Yeah, one part of the Mythos is that there is no shortage of medical care, no crisis, nothing to see, citizens keep moving nothing to see.
Then they flip the coin, and say people commit crimes in order to go to jail and get health care. Which would be almost true, a lot of fatal illnesses get you dropped from insurance. And with no way to earn a living, no way to keep their homes, some would opt to die in prison, in a bed with sheets and such, rather than out in the gutter. You’d have to be really desperate to take that option.
Far more desperate than the Industry Lobbyists would have you think.
They say the same for people who go to jail to escape poverty and homelessness, which are two more nodes on the same problem.
And another side of the economic draft.