Health care in the USA — sick, sick, sick
With the overwhelming acceptance of Mike Moore’s Sicko and the push-push-push from Democratic candidates, health care and coverage is on our plates big time … and about time. With the exception of Dubby’s Medicare/PharmCo snafu-bamboozle of several months past, nobody has talked about health care since Hillary took it in the bloomers for her assistance to her then-president husband back in the 90’s.
Of the gazillions of things wrong with our health system, I found this point worth pondering with a friend expecting a child — the [natural, uncomplicated] birth of a baby costs $8,000 today. And a course of the newest types of antibiotics will likely be well over $100.
Mike was very canny this time — he chose to expose the insurance companies that control the life or death of citizens by approving or, more often, disapproving care; and he took aim at the experience of the the middle class, as opposed to the poor. The message he’s sending is generic — if this can happen to them, it can happen to you. It’s making waves.
Here are some video clips, and reads. The second piece, on Cuba, should give us pause … especially on a day when we’re hearing echo’s of that old worn-down concept of Cold War … Cubans under Castro may or may not be happier than Americans, but they’re going to live to bitch about it a lot longer, it appears. Following that, in-depth coverage of Obama’s plan. The last piece is full of disturbing statistics, from an alternative health site.
The Republicans, of course, do not debate health coverage — they’re just happy as clams with the system, as is. It’s right up at the top in the Dem discussions, though … so if you’re looking to remediate this mess, Think Blue.
Jude
Sicko
The trailer, Youtube
Mike Moore interview on Real Time with Bill Maher
Youtube
Sicko? The Truth About the US Healthcare System
Andrew Gumbel, Independent/UK
Monday, June 4, 2007
Cynthia Kline knew exactly what was happening to her when she suffered a heart attack at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She took the time to call an ambulance, popped some nitroglycerin tablets she had been prescribed in anticipation of just such an emergency, and waited for help to arrive.
On paper, everything should have gone fine. Unlike tens of millions of Americans, she had health insurance coverage. The ambulance team arrived promptly. The hospital where she had been receiving treatment for her cardiac problems, a private teaching facility affiliated with the Harvard Medical School, was just a few minutes away.
The problem was, the casualty department at the hospital, Mount Auburn, was full to overflowing. And it turned her away. The ambulance took her to another nearby hospital but the treatment she needed, an emergency catheterization, was not available there. A flurry of phone calls to other medical facilities in the Boston area came up empty. With a few hours, Cynthia Kline was dead.
She died in an American city with one of the highest concentration of top-flight medical specialists in the world. And it happened largely because of America’s broken health care system - one where 50 million people are entirely without insurance coverage and tens of millions more struggle to have the treatment they need approved. As a result, medical problems go unattended until they reach crisis point. Patients then rush to hospital casualty departments, where by law they cannot be turned away, overwhelming the system entirely.
Everyone - doctors and patients, politicians on both the left and the right - agrees this is an insane way to run a health system.
When Elizabeth Hilsabeck gave birth to premature twins in Austin, Texas, she encountered another kind of insanity. Again, she was insured — through her husband, who had a good job in banking. But the twins were born when she was barely six months pregnant, and the boy, Parker, developed cerebral palsy. The doctors recommended physical therapy to build up muscle strength and give the boy a fighting chance of learning to walk, but her managed health provider refused to cover it.
The crazy bureaucratic logic was that the policy covered only “rehabilitative” therapy - in other words, teaching a patient a physical skill that has been lost. Since Parker had never walked, the therapy was in essence teaching him a new skill and therefore did not qualify.
The Hilsabecks railed, protested, won some small reprieves, but ended up selling their home and moving into a trailer to cover their costs. Elizabeth’s husband, Steven, considered taking a new, better-paying job, but chose not to after making careful inquiries about the health insurance coverage. “When is he getting over the cerebral palsy?” a prospective new insurance company representative breezily asked the Hilsabecks. When Elizabeth explained he would never get over it, she was told she was on her own.
Everyone in America has a health-care horror story or knows someone who does. Mostly they are stories of grinding bureaucratic frustration, of phone calls and officials letters and problems with their credit rating, or of people ignoring a slowly deteriorating medical condition because they are afraid that an expensive battery of tests will lead to a course of treatment that could quickly become unaffordable.
Even when things don’t go horribly wrong, it is a matter of surviving by the skin of one’s teeth.
In Montana, Melissa Anderson can’t find affordable insurance because she is self-employed - an increasingly common affliction. When her son Kasey came down with epilepsy two years ago, she was saved only by a recently introduced child health insurance programme specifically tailored to people who aren’t poor but can’t afford to pay monster medical bills. She herself remains uninsured for anything short of major care needs.
Over the past 15 years, the stories have become less about poor people without the economic means to access the system - although that remains a vast, unsolved problem - and more about the kind of people who have every expectation they will be taken care of.
Middle-class people, people with jobs that carry health benefits or - as the problem worsens - people with the sorts of jobs that used to carry robust health benefits which are now more rudimentary and risk their being cut off for a variety of reasons.
This is the morass that Michael Moore has chosen to explore in his latest documentary, Sicko, which goes on release later this month. Moore spends much of the film demonstrating that there is nothing inevitable or necessary about a system that enriches insurance companies and drug manufacturers but shortchanges absolutely everyone else. His searching documentary looks at health care in France, Britain, Canada, and even Cuba - still regarded as a model system for the Third World.
Moore has his share of ghoulishly awful stories. The film kicks off with an uninsured carpenter who has to decide whether to spend $12,000 (£6,000) reattaching his severed ring finger or $60,000 to reattach his severed middle finger. Later on, Moore focuses on a hospital worker whose husband needed a bone marrow transplant to save him from a rare disease. The couple’s insurance company refused to cover the transplant because it regarded the treatment as “experimental”. The husband died.
Many more stories are collected in a newly published book called Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis, by Jonathan Cohn. A woman in California called Nelene Fox died of breast cancer after she, too, was turned down for a bone marrow transplant by her insurance company. In Georgia, a family whose infant son went into cardiac arrest were forced to take him to a hospital 45 miles away on their insurance carrier’s orders. He survived, but suffered permanent disabilities that more prompt treatment might have averted. In New York, an infant called Bryan Jones - whose case was trumpeted all over the local media at the time - died of a heart defect that went undetected because his insurance company kicked him and his mother out of hospital 24 hours after his birth, too soon to carry out the tests that might have spotted the problem.
America’s health system offers a tremendous paradox. In medical technology and in the scientific understanding of disease, it is second-to-none. Since doctors are better paid than anywhere else in the world, the country attracts the best of the best. And yet many, if not most, Americans are unable to reap the advantages of this. In fact, as The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has argued, the very proliferation of research and high-tech equipment is part of the reason for the imbalance in coverage between the privileged few and the increasingly underserved masses. “[The system] compensates for higher spending on insiders, in party, by consigning more people to outsider status –robbing Peter of basic care in order to pay for Paul’s state-of-the-art treatment,” Krugman wrote recently. “Thus we have the cruel paradox that medical progress is bad for many Americans’ health.”
Having the system run by for-profit insurance companies turns out to be inefficient and expensive as well as dehumanising. America spends more than twice as much per capita on health care as France, and almost two and a half times as much as Britain. And yet it falls down in almost every key indicator of public health, starting, perhaps, most shockingly, with infant mortality, which is 36 per cent higher than in Britain.
A recent survey by the management consulting company McKinsey estimated the excess bureaucratic costs of managing private insurance policies - scouting for business, processing claims, and hiring “denial management specialists” to tell people why their ailment is not covered by their policy - at about $98bn a year. That, on its own, is significantly more than the $77bn McKinsey calculates it would cost to cover every uninsured American. If the government negotiated bulk purchasing rates for drugs, rather than allowing the pharmaceutical companies to set their own extortionate rates, that would save another $66bn.
Astonishingly, there hasn’t been a serious debate about health care in the United States since Bill Clinton, with considerable input from his wife Hillary, tried and failed to overhaul the system in 1994. That, though, may be about to change as the 2008 presidential race heats up. Everyone acknowledges the system is broken. Everyone recognizes that 50 million uninsured - including almost 10 million children - is unacceptable in a civilized society.
Even the old, classically American free-market argument - that “socialized” medicine is somehow the first step on a slippery slope towards godless communism - doesn’t hold water, because in the absence of a functioning private insurance regime the government ends up picking up about 50 per cent of the overall costs for treatment anyway. The indigent rely on a government program called Medicaid. The elderly have a government program called Medicare. And perhaps the most efficient part of the whole system is the Veterans’ Administration, a sort of NHS for former servicemen.
Rather like London and Paris in the 19th century, where the authorities belatedly paid attention to outbreaks of cholera once the disease started affecting the rich and middle classes, so the American health crisis may be coming to a head because of the kinds of people who are suffering from its injustices.
Corporate chief executives, for a start, are gagging under the ever-increasing costs of providing coverage to their employees. Starbucks now spends more on health care than it does on coffee beans. Company health costs, as a whole, are at about the same level as corporate profits. In a globalized world where US businesses are competing with low-wage countries such as India and China, that is rapidly becoming unacceptable.
That explains, perhaps, why the chief executive of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, has made common cause with America’s leading service sector union - more commonly a bitter critic of Wal-Mart’s labour practices - in calling for a government-run universal health care system by 2012. It’s going to be a tough battle. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries bankroll the campaigns of dozens of congressmen and have so far been brutally efficient in protecting their own interests. The Clintons were defeated in 1994 in part because of the power of the industry lobbies. Doing better this time will take singular political courage.
In the meantime, we will hear ever more crazy stories like the one told by Marijon Binder, a former nun in Chicago who ended up being sued by a Catholic hospital for $11,000 because her two-night stay for a heart scare was not considered a worthy charity case. Binder, who works as a live-in companion to a disabled old woman, wrote on all her admission forms that she had no insurance and, in her telling at least, was reassured the hospital would take care of her anyway.
After a year and a monstrous bureaucratic fight that went nowhere, a civil judge promptly absolved her of responsibility for her bill - a lucky outcome, for sure. Binder said: “The whole experience was very demeaning. It made me feel very guilty; it made me feel like a criminal.” She is, though, alive and solvent. Not everyone in this system catches the same break.
Why Cuba Is Exporting Health Care to the U.S.
Sarah van Gelder, YES! Magazine
June 6, 2007
Cubans say they offer health care to the world’s poor because they have big hearts. But what do they get in return?
They live longer than almost anyone in Latin America. Far fewer babies die. Almost everyone has been vaccinated, and such scourges of the poor as parasites, TB, malaria, even HIV/AIDS are rare or non-existent. Anyone can see a doctor, at low cost, right in the
neighborhood.
The Cuban health care system is producing a population that is as healthy as those of the world’s wealthiest countries at a fraction of the cost. And now Cuba has begun exporting its system to under-served communities around the world — including the United States.
The story of Cuba’s health care ambitions is largely hidden from the people of the United States, where politics left over from the Cold War maintain an embargo on information and understanding. But it is increasingly well-known in the poorest communities of Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of Africa where Cuban and Cuban-trained doctors are practicing.
In the words of Dr. Paul Farmer, Cuba is showing that “you can introduce the notion of a right to health care and wipe out the diseases of poverty.”
Health Care for All Cubans
Many elements of the health care system Cuba is exporting around the world are common-sense practices. Everyone has access to doctors, nurses, specialists, and medications. There is a doctor and nurse team in every neighborhood, although somewhat fewer now, with 29,000 medical professionals serving out of the country — a fact that is causing some complaints. If someone doesn’t like their neighborhood doctor, they can choose another one.
House calls are routine, in part because it’s the responsibility of the doctor and nurse team to understand you and your health issues in the context of your family, home, and neighborhood. This is key to the system. By catching diseases and health hazards before they get big, the Cuban medical system can spend a little on prevention rather than a lot later on to cure diseases, stop outbreaks, or cope with long-term disabilities. When a health hazard like dengue fever or malaria is identified, there is a coordinated nationwide effort to eradicate it. Cubans no longer suffer from diphtheria, rubella, polio, or measles and they have the lowest AIDS rate in the Americas, and the highest rate of treatment and control of hypertension.
For health issues beyond the capacity of the neighborhood doctor, polyclinics provide specialists, outpatient operations, physical therapy, rehabilitation, and labs. Those who need inpatient treatment can go to hospitals; at the end of their stay, their neighborhood medical team helps make the transition home. Doctors at all levels are trained to administer acupuncture, herbal cures, or other complementary practices that Cuban labs have found effective. And Cuban researchers develop their own vaccinations and treatments when medications aren’t available due to the blockade, or when they don’t exist.
Exporting Health Care
For decades, Cuba has sent doctors abroad and trained international students at its medical schools. But things ramped up beginning in 1998 when Hurricanes George and Mitch hammered Central America and the Caribbean. As they had often done, Cuban doctors rushed to the disaster zone to help those suffering the aftermath. But when it was time to go home, it was clear to the Cuban teams that the medical needs extended far beyond emergency care. So Cuba made a commitment to post doctors in several of these countries and to train local people in medicine so they could pick up where the Cuban doctors left off. ELAM, the Havana-based Latin American School of Medicine, was born, and with it the offer of 10,000 scholarships for free medical training.
Today the program has grown to 22,000 students from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the United States who attend ELAM and 28 other medical schools across Cuba. The students represent dozens of ethnic groups, 51 percent are women, and they come from more than 30 countries. What they have in common is that they would otherwise be unable to get a medical education. When a slum dweller in Port au Prince, a young indigenous person from Bolivia, the son or daughter of a farmer in Honduras, or a street vendor in the Gambia wants to become a doctor, they turn to Cuba. In some cases, Venezuela pays the bill. But most of the time, Cuba covers tuition, living expenses, books, and medical care. In return, the students agree that, upon completion of their studies, they will return to their own under-served communities to practice medicine.
The curriculum at ELAM begins, for most students, with up to a year of “bridging” courses, allowing them to catch up on basic math, science, and Spanish skills. The students are treated for the ailments many bring with them.
At the end of their training, which can take up to eight years, most students return home for residencies. Although they all make a verbal commitment to serve the poor, a few students quietly admit that they don’t see this as a permanent commitment.
One challenge of the Cuban approach is making sure their investment in medical education benefits those who need it most. Doctors from poor areas routinely move to wealthier areas or out of the country altogether. Cuba trains doctors in an ethic of serving the poor. They learn to see medical care as a right, not as a commodity, and to see their own role as one of service. Stories of Cuban doctors who practice abroad suggest these lessons stick. They are known for taking money out of their own pockets to buy medicine for patients who can’t afford to fill a prescription, and for touching and even embracing patients.
Cuba plans with the help of Venezuela to take their medical training to a massive scale and graduate 100,000 doctors over the next 15 years, according to Dr. Juan Ceballos, advisor to the vice minister of public health. To do so, Cuba has been building new medical schools around the country and abroad, at a rapid clip.
But the scale of the effort required to address current and projected needs for doctors requires breaking out of the box. The new approach is medical schools without walls. Students meet their teachers in clinics and hospitals, in Cuba and abroad, practicing alongside their mentors. Videotaped lectures and training software mean students can study anywhere there are Cuban doctors. The lower training costs make possible a scale of medical education that could end the scarcity of doctors.
U.S. Students in Cuba
Recently, Cuba extended the offer of free medical training to students from the United States. It started when Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi got curious after he and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus repeatedly encountered Cuban or Cuban-trained doctors in poor communities around the world.
They visited Cuba in May 2000, and during a conversation with Fidel Castro, Thompson brought up the lack of medical access for his poor, rural constituents. “He [Castro] was very familiar with the unemployment rates, health conditions, and infant mortality rates in my district, and that surprised me,” Thompson said. Castro offered scholarships for low-income Americans under the same terms as the other international students — they have to agree to go back and serve their communities.
Today, about 90 young people from poor parts of the United States have joined the ranks of international students studying medicine in Cuba.
The offer of medical training is just one way Cuba has reached out to the United States. Immediately after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, 1,500 Cuban doctors volunteered to come to the Gulf Coast. They waited with packed bags and medical supplies, and a ship ready to provide backup support. Permission from the U.S. government never arrived.
“Our government played politics with the lives of people when they needed help the most,” said Representative Thompson. “And that’s unfortunate.”
When an earthquake struck Pakistan shortly afterwards, though, that country’s government warmly welcomed the Cuban medical professionals. And 2,300 came, bringing 32 field hospitals to remote, frigid regions of the Himalayas. There, they set broken bones, treated ailments, and performed operations for a total of 1.7 million patients.
The disaster assistance is part of Cuba’s medical aid mission that has extended from Peru to Indonesia, and even included caring for 17,000 children sickened by the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine.
It isn’t only in times of disaster that Cuban health care workers get involved. Some 29,000 Cuban health professionals are now practicing in 69 countries — mostly in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. In Venezuela, about 20,000 of them have enabled President Hugo Chávez to make good on his promise to provide health care to the poor. In the shantytowns around Caracas and the banks of the Amazon, those who organize themselves and find a place for a doctor to practice and live can request a Cuban doctor.
As in Cuba, these doctors and nurses live where they serve, and become part of the community. They are available for emergencies, and they introduce preventative health practices.
Some are tempted to use their time abroad as an opportunity to leave Cuba. In August, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced a new policy that makes it easier for Cuban medical professionals to come to the U.S. But the vast majority remain on the job and eventually return to Cuba.
Investing in Peace
How do the Cuban people feel about using their country’s resources for international medical missions? Those I asked responded with some version of this: We Cubans have big hearts. We are proud that we can share what we have with the world’s poor.
Nearly everyone in Cuba knows someone who has served on a medical mission. These doctors encounter maladies that have been eradicated from Cuba. They expand their understanding of medicine and of the suffering associated with poverty and powerlessness, and they bring home the pride that goes with making a difference.
And pride is a potent antidote to the dissatisfaction that can result from the economic hardships that continue 50 years into Cuba’s revolution.
From the government’s perspective, their investment in medical internationalism is covered, in part, by ALBA, the new trade agreement among Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba. ALBA, an alternative to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, puts human needs ahead of economic growth, so it isn’t surprising that Cuba’s health care offerings fall within the agreement, as does Venezuelan oil, Bolivian natural gas, and so on. But Cuba also offers help to countries outside of ALBA.
“All we ask for in return is solidarity,” Dr. Ceballos says.
“Solidarity” has real-world implications. Before Cuba sent doctors to Pakistan, relations between the two countries were not great, Ceballos says. But now the relationship is “magnificent.” The same is true of Guatemala and El Salvador. “Although they are conservative governments, they have become more flexible in their relationship with Cuba,” he says.
Those investments in health care missions “are resources that prevent confrontation with other nations,” Ceballos explains. “The solidarity with Cuba has restrained aggressions of all kinds.” And in a statement that acknowledges Cuba’s vulnerabilities on the global stage, Ceballos puts it this way: “It’s infinitely better to invest in peace than to invest in war.”
Imagine, then, that this idea took hold. Even more revolutionary than the right to health care for all is the idea that an investment in health — or in clean water, adequate food or housing — could be more powerful, more effective at building security than bombers and aircraft carriers.
Sarah van Gelder, executive editor of YES!, was in Cuba (legally) in December 2006 visiting medical schools, clinics, and hospitals. Her travel was supported by The Atlantic Philanthropies, and MEDICC provided program consulting.
Obamacare: Clearing Away The Fog
Jacob S. Hacker
June 04, 2007
If Iraq had the starring role in Sunday night’s Democratic debate, health care was the key supporting actor. Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama, former Sen. John Edwards, Gov. Bill Richardson, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich all spoke with passion about the need to reform a health insurance framework that, in Edwards’s well-chosen words, “is completely dysfunctional.”
Unfortunately, while we have growing clarity of purpose in Democratic discussions, we have not always had clarity of vision. Few candidates have specified how they would achieve affordable quality health care for all. (Sen. Clinton is among those whose health plan remains TBA.) And last week, when Obama released his long-awaited health plan, most of the health care commentariat appeared not relieved, but completely flummoxed about what he was up to.
Obama’s speech presenting the plan didn’t resolve the confusion either: Even more general than the policy blueprint released by the campaign, it simply magnified the uncertainty, fueling initial reports that were either misleading or just plain wrong.
However, after Sunday’s debate and new statements from the campaign (including a posting from Harvard economist David Cutler, a key Obama adviser, at the Campaign for America’s Future blog), the outlines of Obama’s plan are clearer.
And it’s much more sophisticated, bold, and far-reaching than initial reactions suggest.
Granted, I am not a detached observer. I have talked with Obama and his team, and I’m gratified that the proposal they adopted contains core elements of the proposal I’ve been advocating, “Health Care for America.” Still, I have no affiliation with the Obama campaign, and I have talked with other candidates and officeholders, including, most notably, Edwards.
I also have differences with the Obama approach, and I’ll present some in a moment. But first we should understand what his approach is, and how it would dramatically transform American health insurance for the better.
Obama’s proposal is best understood as a new framework to provide automatic coverage for everyone who works (or lives in the family of a worker). In the Obama plan, if you work (or someone in your family works), you are entitled to good insurance, either from your employer or through a new public plan.
Notice what I said: a new public plan. Obama believes that a new Medicare-style public plan for those younger than 65 will deliver big savings and better coverage, and that this plan should be the default source of coverage for anyone whose employer doesn’t provide good insurance. Indeed, he takes a major step beyond Edwards by envisioning a national Medicare-like plan (Edwards would make a plan similar to Medicare available on a regional basis) and by clearly stating that this plan will have generous, guaranteed benefits.
No less important, Obama, like Edwards, is insisting on shared responsibility. Employers have to either provide benefits at least as good as the new public plan or make a payroll-based contribution to the public plan, in which their workers will be automatically enrolled.
This is a massive change. Today, employers have no obligation to sponsor or help fund their employees’ health coverage. If Obama’s plan is implemented, paying at least a minimal amount for coverage will become a basic requirement of operating a business in the United States.
The Obama plan also calls for a “National Insurance Exchange” that allows those automatically enrolled in the public plan to obtain private insurance instead. Some progressive activists have called this a sell-out to the private insurance industry, but they should take note of two features of Obama’s plan.
First, the Obama camp is committed to making the public plan a highly affordable option and ensuring it has generous benefits. They will do this by leveraging the huge economies of scale and bargaining power of a national plan, as well as capitalizing on its capacity for quality improvement and for the provision of preventive and primary care that will keep people healthier.
Second, Obama has also made clear that he is completely opposed to the huge giveaways for private insurers that are currently being provided by Medicare to entice private plans to enroll Medicare beneficiaries. Whether the private plan option will work well remains to be seen. But if it’s appropriately regulated and placed on a level playing field with the public plan, there is a real potential for healthy competition, rather than a race to the bottom.
A lot of blog space is being devoted to the Obama plan’s lack of a so-called “individual mandate”—a requirement that everyone have coverage. The plan does require coverage of kids, but not of adults. I would prefer an individual mandate; I have one in my plan. Edwards, who also backs a mandate, rightly says this is a key difference between him and Obama.
Nonetheless, the role of the individual mandate in plans like Obama’s and Edwards’s (and mine) can easily be overstated. The real work of covering Americans in these plans is done by guaranteeing automatic coverage for everyone with some tie to the workforce. Indeed, according to calculations done by Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute during the preparation of my proposal, 90 to 95 percent of non-elderly Americans will be automatically covered by such a guarantee. Moreover, many of those without ties to the workforce are covered by public insurance through Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Of course, many are eligible but not covered, and this brings us to what Obama can do to strengthen his plan. Obama should be talking much more about how he intends to sign people up for coverage who don’t have a tie to the workforce. He should also be pressed to say whether he really believes that having a separate insurance system for low-income Americans and children—in the form of Medicaid and S-CHIP—makes sense once such an effective national framework for secure coverage is created. And Obama needs to be much clearer about how he will cover the self-employed and early retirees.
Most of all, however, Obama should be reminded of a pithy lesson he no doubt learned in law school: Keep it simple. It shouldn’t take health policy wonks a week to figure out that Obama has actually proposed a bold break with present arrangements. And it shouldn’t require frenzied after-the-fact statements to make clear that Obama’s plan is based on an attractive bedrock principle: If you work or someone in your family works, you should have guaranteed coverage.
Obama is known for the lyrical simplicity of his language and prose. Let’s hope he can bring a bit of that lyricism and simplicity to articulating—and improving—a health plan of which he should be proud.
Jacob S. Hacker is a Yale University political science professor and a fellow at the New America Foundation . He is the author of The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement—And How You Can Fight Back , as well as the “Health Care for America” proposal recently released as part of the Economic Policy Institute’s Agenda for Shared Prosperity.
Americans fed up with drug industry influence, FDA corruption, reveals remarkable Consumer Reports survey
Mike Adams, News Target
Monday, April 16, 2007
(NewsTarget) More than four out of five Americans think drug companies have too much influence over the Food and Drug Administration, and 84 percent believe that advertisements for prescription drugs with safety concerns should be outlawed, reveals a striking new survey from Consumer Reports.
The survey results, released today, are based on a telephone survey of 1,026 American adults conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center. They reveal the Food and Drug Administration to be alarmingly out of touch with the concerns of the American people. Some of the most interesting results include:
• 96 percent agreed the government should have the power to require warning labels on drugs with known safety problems. As Consumer Reports explains, “Right now, the Food and Drug Administration must negotiate safety warning labels with a drug maker.”
• 84 percent agree that drug companies have “too much influence over the government officials who regulate them.” More than two-thirds of those surveyed are concerned that drug companies actually pay the FDA to review and approve their drugs. It’s a situation that turns drug companies into the “customers” of the FDA. (See related cartoon, The Puppets of Big Pharma)
• 92 percent agree that pharmaceutical companies should disclose the results of ALL clinical trials, not just the ones with positive results that they wish to publicize. (Currently, drug companies can bury negative drug trials, and the FDA has in fact been caught conspiring with drug companies to keep negative drug data secret from the public.)
• 93 percent think that the FDA should have the power to demand follow-up safety studies from drug companies. Currently, the FDA has no authority to require follow-up safety studies on drugs after they are introdued to the market. This is a serious oversight shortfall, given that many problems with drugs only appear after widespread use. (Patients are widely used as guinea pigs in any new drug launch.)
FDA Conflicts of Interest
• 60 percent agreed that doctors and scientists with a financial conflict of interest should not be allowed to serve on FDA advisory boards (what were the other 40 percent thinking?). Currently, doctors who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in “consulting fees” from drug companies are not only allowed to vote on the recommendations for FDA approval of their drugs, there is not even any FDA requirement to disclose such conflicts of interest.
New rules proposed by the FDA would reduce this level of corruption by allowing doctors to receive a maximum of $50,000 per year from companies impacted by their decisions. (Thereby making the FDA numerically less corrupt than it is now, but still tolerating blatant conflicts of interest. It’s like setting a “bribery ceiling.”)
• 91 percent said they had seen a drug advertisement on television or in print (a “victory” accomplished by the FDA legalizing such ads in 1998), and 26 percent said they asked their doctor for a brand-name medication after learning about it from an advertisement. This is the purpose of advertising, of course: To increase sales of drugs, not — as is claimed by Big Pharma and the FDA — to “educate” patients about medical treatments.
• 75 percent agreed that the allowing of drug advertising has resulted in the over-prescribing of pharmaceuticals. Fifty-nine percent said the government should restrict pharmaceutical advertising, and 26 percent said they “strongly agree” with such restrictions.
Direct-to-consumer advertising is the bread and butter of Big Pharma, and it is the primary reason the industry has exploded its revenues and influence since 1998. The invention and marketing of fictitious diseases via television advertising has proven instrumental to the drug industry’s successful pushing of medically unjustified drugs onto consumers. (See the Disease Mongering Engine to invent your own fictitious diseases and disorders right now!)
• The survey further revealed 54 percent of consumers think that viewing drug advertisements allows them to “take charge of their health care.” The survey did not, however, reveal whether these people were in fact suffering from deterimental cognitive side effects at the moment they were taking the survey. Statistically, it seems reasonable to assume that approximately half of the adults taking the survey were on drugs at the time they were answering the survey questions.
When Pharmacists Tell the Truth
• More than half of those surveyed said they are currently taking prescription drugs, indicating that more than half of American adults are now on drugs. Forty percent said they have experienced a negative reaction (side effect) from taking prescription medications.
Most side effects go unreported, and there is currently no enforced legal requirement that doctors or drug companies report known side effects to the FDA. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, prescription drugs currently kill approximately 100,000 Americans each year. None of those deaths are accurately recorded as “death by pharmaceuticals.”
• As mentioned earlier, 84 percent agree that advertisements should be outlawed for drugs with safety concerns. The United States is the only advanced nation in the world that allows drug companies to advertise directly to consumers. It was legalized in 1998 by the FDA, following political pressure and influence from the drug companies who knew that being able to promote fictitious diseases and push brand-name drugs would result in windfall profits. (Some drugs are sold at markups as high as 300,000% over the cost of their ingredients.)
The makers of Vioxx and Paxil had studies that indicated safety problems for years, but did not release those results to the public. - Consumer Reports
The real threat of pharmaceuticals
Interestingly, the survey did not ask consumers the following question: How many Americans do you think is acceptable for the drug companies to kill each year?
Because right now, that number is, conservatively, about 100,000 American citizens. More realistic estimates put it at double that number, or 200,000. I’ve often stated that pharmaceuticals kill more Americans each year than diet in the entire Vietnam War, and the number of Americans killed by acts of terrorism are dwarfed by the number killed by prescription drugs that the FDA and drug companies unquestionably knew were killing people. It’s not that these deaths were truly accidental… they were fully documented but ignored anyway by an industry that is now clearly a very real threat to the health and safety of the American people.
This is no exaggeration: The number of people killed by FDA-approved pharmaceuticals since 9/11 is equivalent to dropping a nuclear bomb on a major U.S. city. International terrorists could not even hope to cause the number of casualties in the United States that have been achieved by the drug companies working in conspiracy with the FDA.
If we don’t put limits on the influence and corruption of the drug companies by banning drug ads and demanding serious FDA reforms, the body count will only get worse. Consumers are finally waking up to this reality, and they’re increasingly demanding “get tough” solutions that would require the FDA to protect the people instead of protecting Big Pharma profits.
As Bill Baughan, a senior policy analyst with Consumers Union (Consumer Reports), said, “Consumers expect Congress to take their concerns about drug safety seriously, and deliver legislation that will prevent future Vioxx-type disasters. Failure to act this year on the strongest possible bill, when more than 80 pecent of Americans agree that Congress should do whatever is necessary to ensure drug safety, would equate to gross legislative malpractice.”
Most Americans agree with NewsTarget
What’s really interesting about these results is that they show most Americans agree with NewsTarget on issues like drug advertising, ending conflicts of interest at the FDA, requiring all clinical trials to be published, and other similar topics covered in this survey.
Meanwhile, very few Americans agree with the FDA or the wishes of organizations like the American Medical Association and drug companies themselves — most of which like things just fine the way they are.
Drug companies, of course, would love to maintain the status quo and continue conducting business as usual. But thanks to grassroots consumer advocacy campaigns such as StopDrugAds ( www.StopDrugAds.org), and sites like this one, the real story about the dangers of pharmaceuticals are no longer being censored and kept from the public.
The word is out: Pharmaceuticals are now the 4th leading cause of death in America. The best way to protect Americans from these dangerous, deadly products is to enact sweeping reforms that end the medical racket currently being operated by the FDA / Big Pharma tag-team.
Unfortunately, many of the very lawmakers who will vote on this pending legislation are, much like FDA advisors, “on the take” from the very same pharmaeutical companies that stand to be impacted by their vote. And no lawmakers that I know of are abstaining from the vote due to conflicts of interest. The reality is that Big Pharma has bought Congress, and whatever vote that will soon emerge is a far cry from the real reforms we’d see if our national lawmakers weren’t financially beholden to the drug companies for their own reelection campaigns.
Thus, if Congress actually manages to pass a law that would eliminate drug company influence over FDA decision makers, it would be a clear case of lawmakers under the influence of drug money passing laws to eliminate the influence of drug money for others, but not for themselves.
There should be a law against that, it seems.
True facts about the FDA
The following are facts about the FDA I’ve documented in my new book, Natural Health Solutions and the Conspiracy to Keep You From Knowing About Them. As this book reveals, the FDA has:
Worked to keep deadly drugs on the market as long as possible before reluctantly pulling them (usually only after being sued by groups like Public Citizen). The astonishing story of Rezulin, a diabetes drug, is a good example.
Repeatedly banned and confiscated herbs and nutritional supplements that compete with prescription drugs. Ephedra, for example, was banned by the FDA based on a political agenda, not good science.
Conducted armed raids on alternative medicine clinics, confiscating computers, threatening alternative health practitioners, and scaring away patients. (See Tyranny in the USA: The true history of FDA raids on healers, vitamin shops and supplement companies)
Ordered the destruction of recipe books promoting stevia, a natural sweetener that competes with sales of aspartame (yes, the FDA actually ordered the books to be destroyed).
Been caught red-handed accepting bribes.
Voted to put deadly drugs right back on the market even after such drugs were recalled by their manufacturer.
Openly opposed the banning of junk food advertising to children during World Health Organization meetings.
Suppressed information about the harm caused by dangerous drugs in order to prevent the press and the public from learning the truth about them.
Attempted to silence its own drug safety scientists to prevent them from going public with the truth about dangerous drugs.
Censored scientific information about the benefits of natural foods like cherries by threatening cherry growers with legal action if they did not remove scientific information about cherries from their websites. (See FDA tyranny and the censorship of cherry health facts)
Pursued and shut down companies selling genuine cancer cures that provably work better than any prescription drug (such as Lane Labs’ MGN-3).
Vigorously argued against making “optimal health” a goal of the Codex Alimentarius discussions, striking the phrase from the final report.
Rigged its drug safety review panels with decision makers who have substantial financial ties to drug companies, even while refusing to disclose such blatant conflicts of interest.
Planned, organized, and took part in armed “SWAT-style” raids on vitamin shops, pet food stores, and even a church.
Knowingly approved harmful food additives for widespread use in the food supply (such as aspartame, which has a rather dubious history and has been proven toxic in several studies), even when its own safety experts recommended denying approval.
Allowed the continued legal use of harmful, cancer-causing food additives in the national food supply such as sodium nitrite (which causes cancer and yet is intentionally added to nearly all processed meats).
Refused to ban a poisonous artificial fat from the food supply (hydrogenated oils) for decades, even though the World Health Organization urged member nations to outlaw the substance in 1978. Hydrogenated oils continue to harm infants, children, and adults today.
It is clearly time to reform not merely the FDA, but the entire medical industry. Drug companies are running amok, and this new Consumer Reports survey reveals that consumers are finally fed up with it.
Action Items:
Support the Health Freedom Protection Act introduced by Rep. Ron Paul. Learn more at http://www.stopFDAcensorship.org
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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1 comment June 6th, 2007