For-Profit Health Care As The Engine Of Poverty In The USA

Birthing simulator in use at a U.S. Air Force hospital. What's wrong with this picture?

It's been a couple of years since I wrote the satirical novella Your Health Is Important To Us, and I've been thinking on the need to add a new chapter.

I wanted to express how for-profit health "care" has been the engine of poverty for my generation and those that followed.

Mine was the last cohort who could cling to middle class comfort by means of jobs that buffered the effects of exploitative health insurance. Many of us have lost or are losing our grip, and many younger than us never had any health care or full benefits employment to hold onto.

That sense was what I was trying to express in my novella, which owes much to the tragicomedy of life under Zionism, The Secret Life of Saeed the pessoptimist by Emile Habiby. And to Voltaire's Candide, which inspired Habiby. And to The Good Soldier Schweik by Jaroslav Hašek, about a little man ground down by inexorable historical and cultural forces. Today's little man would be, I feel certain, a woman. Thus I created the anti-heroine Candida Albicans Smedley.

An actual heroine of the health care battles is Dr. Margaret Flowers. She has been on the front lines of the fight for universal health care in the richest nation on the planet, and I've blogged about her efforts to lead us in this direction a few times before.

Dr. Flowers was arrested in the Senate protesting the absence of voices for single payer in the hearings that led to the Affordable [sic] Care Act aka Obamacare. (Full disclosure: Subsequently, Dr. Flowers and I and my husband were arrested at the Obama White House protesting the ongoing slaughter of innocents in Iraq.) She has skin in the game of bringing health care to the masses, retiring from her career as a pediatrician to pursue social justice.

I usually keep up with Flowers' work by reading Popular Resistance, the website she helped found before "resistance" was a word co-opted by the Democratic Party branch of corporate government.


You know, the branch that brought us the insurance company giveaway called the Affordable Care Act.

This morning I read her critique of half measures like the ACA in her article for Counterpunch, "Improved Medicare For All Is The Answer." It shouldn't take someone with a medical degree to figure out what's wrong with the ACA, or to conclude that abolishing it without a replacement would be even more cruel and impoverishing to millions. Some of Dr. Flowers' clear thinking:

Most people who purchase health insurance have no idea which plan is best for them because nobody can anticipate what their healthcare needs will be in the future. A study of the Massachusetts health exchange plans done by the Center for American Progress showed that some plans were best for patients with cancer and other plans were best for people with heart disease or diabetes, but that isn’t something that can be advertised up front. Even if it were, people can’t predict if they will be diagnosed with cancer, heart disease or diabetes in the future. HR 676: The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act solves this problem by creating a single public plan designed to cover whatever our healthcare needs will be.

Dr. Flowers doesn't need me to explain that the goal of HR 676, i.e. covering "whatever our healthcare needs will be" is not the goal of federal health care policy.

That goal is the same whether we're talking about health policy, foreign policy or evironmental policy: protect profits for the corporations that put politicians in office.

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2014/jun/mirror-mirror

Because of the exorbinant costs of health procedures and pharmaceutical drugs, health care is an important driver of growing poverty and wealth inequality. It's a racist issue because it falls most heavily on people of color whose health outcomes and longevity are worse than the white majority. It's a class issue because, as depicted in Your Health Is Important To Us, health care is a constant drag on the economically depressed. 

A normal health crisis such as an automobile accident, a heart attack, cancer or, increasingly often, opioid addiction, can easily cause bankruptcy and the loss of one's home. And if you die early from lack of health care? "Americans are dying younger, saving corporations billions."

Be scared, be very scared, says our corporate government. Time and tide wait for no woman -- mostly everyone needs some form of health care in the end.

Medically induced poverty will be the great equalizer of the 21st century USA, sparing only the very, very wealthy. Unless there's a revolution soon, and Dr. Flowers' ideas prevail. Here's a final quote from her article:

I refer to a saying used by my now-deceased mentor Dr. Quentin Young: “You can’t cross an abyss in two jumps.” The only way we can get to a universal single payer healthcare system in the United States is by creating a universal single payer healthcare system in the United States. Anything less than that will fail because it will not achieve the savings on administration and prices needed to cover everyone and it will not compete with the powerful private insurance industry.

With Corporations In Charge Of Your Health Care, What Did You Expect To Get?

I would boycott Hobby Lobby, the corporation that won its Supreme Court case to be able to deny birth control health coverage to its female employees, but I've never shopped there in my life (guess what -- I never will). 

Ironically, it's a craft store chain with an enormous female customer base. Hobby Lobby could be the perfect test case for the power of non-cooperation because if every woman who shops there stopped, the chain would be forced to close in a matter of weeks, possibly days.

Many will see this landmark court case as evidence that electing liberals is super important because of whom they appoint to SCOTUS. In the puppet show that is U.S. electoral "democracy" the SCOTUS, POTUS and Congressional players are deployed to mimic balance of power while the super wealthy corporate interests behind them all continue to amass fortunes and squeeze the rest of us into our austerity boxes.

I see the Hobby Lobby debacle as prima facie evidence that corporate health care is the ultimate oxymoron, because corporations are about profit and health is about, well, health. Most every rich country on the planet figured this out decades ago. 

Us? We got the "Affordable" Health Care Act to further enrich the nasty health insurance corporations that wrecked our system in the first place.


Dr. Margaret Flowers was one of eight sheros who stood up in the Senate hearings that kicked off crafting what conservatives vilify as "Obamacare" without allowing a voice at the table for the option most doctors and citizens wanted: single payer. After being dragged out of the hearing at the direction of its chair, corporate rent boy Sen. Max Baucus, Dr. Flowers went on to lead a movement for popular resistance to government of, by and for corporations. 

Or, one could say, by rich men.

...of the five best-paid executives at each of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index companies, 198 were women, or 8 percent of the total. (Bloomberg study)

In case you needed any more evidence that rule by patriarchs is not healthy for children and other living things, the U.S. maternal mortality rate has doubled in the past 25 years while the newborn mortality rate for babies born in the U.S. is higher than that of any other wealthy country.

For an explanation of why these basic health metrics continue declining, I suggest reading Birth Matters by midwife educator and pioneer Ina May Gaskin. It is one of the most thought-provoking public policy analysis books I've read in recent years. An excerpt:

We now find ourselves in a situation in the US and in many other parts of the world where women are increasingly being denied what is perhaps the most powerful and primal experience a woman can have: the right the give birth without the use of medical interventions unless these prove necessary. Women have been taught to believe that they must sacrifice themselves in important ways in order to have a baby -- that the greater good for the baby means that the mother must submit herself to greater risk, even if that means a C-section for which there is no medical reason.

Why, you may ask, would a woman have a C-section for no medical reason? For-profit health care strikes again: the price differential is about $20,000.

But Gaskin looks a lot deeper into why a system of "health" would systematically disempower half the people it serves.

And that's the most hopeful thing about the Hobby Lobby decision. It may just be the catalyst that sets off a mass movement of women in the U.S. unwilling to see their daughters and granddaughters crushed under the juggernaut of for-profit medical care and government. All the women in this country would need to do to claim their power and stand up to corporate government would be to stop supporting it. If all of us did this together, suddenly, the system would crumble.

CODEPINK's Alli McCracken in action outside the Supreme Court, which has a huge buffer zone to keep protestors away from its doors -- but denied Planned Parenthood clinics the same protection in another bad decision last week.