The Poor Die Younger in America

The Saint Petersburg Times | The Wrong Rx
http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/072505HB.shtml

Despite all the time and effort lawmakers have spent trying to fix our health care system, it is still the costliest in the world.

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One of our dirty little American secrets is that one gets in health care what one is able to pay for. If one checks the 16 categories of cancer death risk -- four with a subdivision each of four categories (A, B, C. D) -- one discovers that one's odds of survival really depend upon catching things early on. Needless to say far too many people wait too long until there is no hope of survival. The game varies, I gather, from type of cancer to type. Colon cancer can be spotted and treated early on with a colonoscopy -- a simple procedure which still costs some hundreds of dollars that many cannot afford. I am aware of such things because we have excellent medicine in NYC and I take advantage of the free research study-based checkups -- I was cleared for prostate, discovered that I have some smokers polyps in my lungs that are checked yearly in a free study, am on various medications that keep my blood pressure controlled and my brain functional -- we have an excellent primary doctor who checks things regularly.

This is not to say that despite supposedly good medical insurance coverage through CUNY we do not have to battle endlessly to get our medical insurance companies to pay up -- we lost $10,000 last year in medical expenses that should have been covered, but battled back another $10,000 that had been initially denied.

The upshot is that with the most expensive per capita medical system in the world, ours is still based upon class divisions and capacity to pay.

How very cruel! And now all those returning wounded veterans are apparently being ripped off as well. That seems to be the lowest blow of all in this corrupted system of divisions of spoils to those who have the power and control over the allocations of such things. I gather than our Congress has the best of all medical care and and that it is totally free? That says something about American politics and our politicians.

I recall Dave Rogers, former head of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and before that dean of two medical schools and following thereafter University Professor of Cornell University cursing out the A.M.A. greedies for having defeated universal medical coverage back when our European neighbors were introducing it post WW2. He suggested that the fault lay with the greed of the doctors -- certainly not all -- who funded that organization. And so it goes. The poor die younger in America.
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"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
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Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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