An American Way of Death

Healthcare is not really heath care, is it? It is actually sickness maintenance. It’s theoretically about providing resources for sickness: Drugs, medical devices, doctors and nurses. You only need those things when you’re sick. If you actually wanted to ensure people’s health you would make sure they did healthy things, like breathe fresh unpolluted air, drink fresh unpolluted water, eat organic carcinogen free foods. You’d ensure that people got exercise, took yoga classes, or that they maintained a stress free life as in doing meditation every morning and evening. You’d keep them out of stressful polluted traffic every day. You’d have them walk daily. You’d make sure they had respirators or masks in air polluted areas. If insurance did those things, it would be health insurance. It would be sickness prevention.

In America sickness is a profit center. Cancer alone is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Consider all the money required to maintain a person through cancer treatments. It easily averages over a million dollars (about the same amount required to support each troop in Afghanistan for a year). Industries profit on that. The insurance industry, the medical device industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the nursing home industry (and of course the war profiteers), all profit from Americans’ pain, suffering, and death. Call it PSD.

We have a lot of people who complain about the sick industries and the expense of PSD. People pay a lot for insurance. Even if a claim is honored, people have co-payments. They fight daily to get hospital bills paid by their so-called insurance. There is a profit incentive for the insurance industry to deny care. Their business model is to find ways to avoid paying claims and to take in as much in premiums as possible. They know that Americans willingly pay for insurance. Even when they raise their rates by double digit percentages, Americans pay. Even if insurance companies deny claims and people suffer and die for lack of care, they will still pay. Tens of thousands of Americas continue to die annually but they still pay for insurance. It’s an incredibly profitable industry that easily takes in a 30% margin over its costs, and makes huge profits. Very few industries do that.

Americans are conditioned like lab rats to pay hundreds every month, thousands every year, for questionable and often worthless insurance. Obamacare got more people to buy insurance. Authored mainly by Elizabeth Fowler, a prior insurance company executive, either Obamacare is a genius piece of legislation or it’s taking Americans for a ride (depending on if you’re an investor or not). Now millions more Americans pay for questionable sickness insurance. When they get sick, you can bet the first order of business for their insurers is to find ways to deny their claims. And now the government requires by law that all people pay for sickness insurance or they will be fined. So if you have insurance you pay to be denied sickness coverage, and if you don’t have insurance, you pay government fines.

The theory is that if people don’t have insurance, they will be taken care of anyway and everyone else will have to pay for it. That’s only true for legislators, government officials, and the active military who are all 100% covered by government funds at no cost whatsoever. For everyone else this would be true if insurance companies actually paid to help people through sickness. But they don’t. The reality is the opposite, which is to say insurance companies don’t pay. People with insurance suffer and die for lack of care because insurance is not care. It is a business. People without insurance also suffer and die, but at least they don’t pay premiums. They pay government penalties.

And what do we do to insure health? Nothing. Healthy Americans are a liability for the American PSD industries and their stockholders. Those industries depend on pain, suffering and death for their livelihood and profits. In fact PSD enterprises comprise about one sixth of the national economy. Without PSD our country would suffer a great monetary impact. Entire industries could go out of business. Do you work for the insurance industry? Do you willingly work for blood money? Those who have pain, who suffer, or die for lack of sick care, do so for our protected PSD industries to maintain high profits. It’s a uniquely American way of death.