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ck4829

(34,905 posts)
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 09:37 AM Jul 2017

The problem with healthcare in the US is that, on the macro scale, it's not used for medicine

As in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of illnesses, injuries, and disabilities; but rather it is used for social control.

Institutions in the US, from the government on down, use our healthcare system to:

Exclude people. Whether it's the 'wrong' people from care or the 'wrong' people from the profession itself because someone is poor or 'immoral'.

Blame the victim. Instead of treating people, this is where people are blamed for their conditions, happens everywhere from STIs to preexisting conditions.

Delegate morality. Where "lessons of morality" are forced down the throats of 'lesser' people, like with Chaffetz saying people need to choose between healthcare or an iPhone.

Polarize us. Healthcare in the US is used to create differences between class, race, and gender. Affluenza will never be a preexisting condition or put in a "high risk pool" and this is why viagra for men is cool but birth control for women faces more and more hurdles.

Coerce people. Notice the need to make employers the gatekeepers of who gets health insurance, you need to play by their rules.

And more.

Until this system is subjugated to a system where healthcare in the US is used for the purposes of medicine, there is no healthcare reform being done, and one might even say we don't truly have healthcare in the US at all.

Code Blue

17 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Yavin4

(35,310 posts)
1. Exactly. We have a class based health care system.
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 09:44 AM
Jul 2017

Like most things in America, we use a class system to discriminate, but we cover it up using morality, sexism, and racism. Everything that you listed in your post is based on a class.

If you work as a banker on Wall Street, you will probably have terrific healthcare because you are in a certain class (well-educated, highly skilled). However, if you work at a fast food restaurant (low skilled), you will probably have terrible health care. To account for this, we propagandize the public into believing that the fast food worker does not deserve health care because he/she is too lazy to acquire high skills or too dumb or too lazy.

Freethinker65

(9,904 posts)
2. Do not overlook healthcare in the U.S. being run largely by for profit corporations.
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 09:50 AM
Jul 2017

Insurance companies act as middle men extracting large sums of $$$ that could be going to care. The ACA was proposed with built in profit limits.

ck4829

(34,905 posts)
3. Centralization of healthcare is yet another factor
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 09:54 AM
Jul 2017

Martin Shkreli is also a big player in that role IMHO. I haven't studied it as much (yet) but I already know it is no less important in what's going on.

ck4829

(34,905 posts)
5. I know that the class war has been going on for a long time
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 10:03 AM
Jul 2017

Maybe it's time to hit back, as a certain orange man-child says, ten times as hard.

Wounded Bear

(58,362 posts)
7. According to Warren Buffett, the war is ongoing...
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 10:10 AM
Jul 2017

from a 2011 article:

"BUFFETT: Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won. We’re the ones that have gotten our tax rates reduced dramatically.

If you look at the 400 highest taxpayers in the United States in 1992, the first year for figures, they averaged about $40 million of [income] per person. In the most recent year, they were $227 million per person — five for one. During that period, their taxes went down from 29 percent to 21 percent of income. So, if there’s class warfare, the rich class has won."

from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/theres-been-class-warfare-for-the-last-20-years-and-my-class-has-won/2011/03/03/gIQApaFbAL_blog.html?utm_term=.53023c164667

Wounded Bear

(58,362 posts)
6. We do not have a health care system in the US...
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 10:07 AM
Jul 2017

We have a loosely regulated health care industry. That is to say that we have corporations, working with profit as their primary motive, providing various levels of goods and services related to health care.

"System" would imply some kind of control by a centralized entity, anathema to capitalists unless said entity is a privately held corporation.

sharedvalues

(6,916 posts)
9. No. We get great healthcare and we spend a lot on it
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 10:27 AM
Jul 2017

The US has a great healthcare industry that delivers excellent care for those who can pay. We need to preserve the medical system in the US.

Our problem is with payment- GOP donors have decided that poor people shouldn't get help. Every other country in the world has decided healthcare is a basic human right.

Moreover, healthcare is actually a PROGRESSIVE system today in the US. If you have insurance (and many poor people do, through Medicaid and Medicare and other private insurance) you can go get treated at the best institutions in the world. You can go to MD Anderson or Stanford and get the best care in the world. You'd be in a room next door to the rooms of the very rich.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Our healthcare problem is that as a society we need to decide to pay for healthcare for people that can't afford it. The medical side of our system is in pretty good shape.

ck4829

(34,905 posts)
11. Oh it's good, but suppressed by this control.
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 10:37 AM
Jul 2017

Mitigate these factors and we will truly have the greatest healthcare system in the world.

bucolic_frolic

(42,478 posts)
10. We expend a lot of resources to treat
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 10:31 AM
Jul 2017

the consequences of the toxins of our civilization

Make more toxins to treat the consequences of toxins

This is not even a zero sum game, it's a game for falling further behind
in the race for health

SpankMe

(2,931 posts)
12. I'd argue it's being used as a cash cow - profit center more than social control.
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 11:26 AM
Jul 2017

Like the stock market, the whole medical care system in the US is a utility used o leverage money out of a certain class of people - to wit, anyone who has or wants medical care.

IronLionZion

(45,163 posts)
14. You stumbled upon the original arguments against social security and medicare
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 11:53 AM
Jul 2017

and why national health insurance has been blocked hard in our country while others have adopted one form or another.

There was a time when assholes really did not want the "wrong type of people" to get any sort of benefits or social programs, purely out of spite and bigotry. Read up on how they tried to stop African Americans from getting social security and how long they tried to fight it.

Other countries had been devastated by WWII and decided they needed to treat their many wounded who have pre-existing conditions and chronic conditions and did have nearly as much spite or opposition to diversity that we had here in America.

DownriverDem

(6,187 posts)
15. What we are fighting
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 11:55 AM
Jul 2017

The repubs do not believe that health care is a right or that the government should play any role. They have been fighting since the 1930s to get rid of Social Security and the 1960s to get rid of Medicare and Medicaid. When folks hit their 50s they start to see just how important Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are. Seniors in nursing homes after they pay down their funds, end up on Medicaid for survival. The fight is difficult because almost half the country believes the repubs.

thesquanderer

(11,937 posts)
16. That's all secondary. On the macro scale it's used mostly for one thing - to generate profits.
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 12:04 PM
Jul 2017

Even most of the other things you mentioned ultimately serve to make the system more profitable.

Hortensis

(58,785 posts)
17. Imo, an anti-Democratic trash piece in both senses of the word.
Wed Jul 5, 2017, 02:48 PM
Jul 2017

CK4829, imo this is both extremist nonsense with virtually no relation to reality and, since the Democratic Party is absolutely committed to extending our "dreadful" healthcare to all people, it's also anti-Democratic Party propaganda trash.

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