The Killing Fields of American Health Care

American health care moves backward as it “continues to be a source of horrendous suffering.” According to Health Over Profit, health insurance companies, hospital executives, and pharmaceutical companies prioritize their greed and lust for profit over the lives of fellow Americans. The article added that health care oligarchs “have created a health care system that is unrivaled in the industrialized world for its degradation and barbarity.”

Both economic inequality and health care inequality grow in America. In addition, life expectancy in the country is relative to income. A Johns Hopkins study shows that 250,000 Americans die annually because of medical errors. This is related to how hospitals give more importance to profit than patient care. Administrators in the medical field also force physicians and residents to work tremendously abusive and unsafe hours. In addition, over 500,000 American families “file for bankruptcy each year as a result of medical bills they cannot pay.”

There are cases wherein doctors prescribe unnecessary drugs and medical procedures so they could benefit a good insurance plan. Consequently, the important drugs and procedures are more likely to be inaccessible in case a patient’s insurance is insufficient.

Another factor that contributes to the decline of American life expectancy is the opioid crisis, “and it is likely that the history of opioid addiction was deliberately withheld from medical students and trainees, thereby making them malleable to the machinations of industry.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that “on average, 130 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose.”

The pharmaceutical industry has also been getting obscene profits from psychotropic drugs, “and the complicity of the FDA and mainstream psychiatry with the push to enslave Americans to these dangerous and highly addictive substances is irrefutable.”

Glenn Melnick, a professor of health economics and finance at the University of Southern California, said the current market for health care is “now so dysfunctional that I sometimes think the only solution is to blow the whole thing up. It’s not like any market on Earth.”