Health For Hire Potential Medical Income Stream
Living in a capitalistic society at times seems as if it is the responsibility of everyone else to help others part with their money, in a way that is a benefit to themselves. Capitalism has intruded into personal areas of life. In nature and in old primitive societies of the past, some African, and Eskimo cultures as an example, when someone became old and felt they were of no use, or a burden to the family, the elderly or the family took care of the situation.
In Africa, an old sick person would be taken outside of the village at dusk and left. In the northern tiers where Eskimos lived they were pulled out on the ice a long way from the village and left. I am sure every society around the world had a system that worked for them. Whether it was cruel or violates the importance of human life, it was how things were done.
Today I see an artificial value on human life prompted by greed. Medicine has progressed to a point where if you have health insurance doctors can fend off heart disease and other potentially quick death diseases. What this does is keep someone alive as the odds of developing cancer become an increasing possibility.
I don’t know if it holds true any longer, but I read the odds of developing cancer go up one-hundred percent each year after the age of seventy. Cancer by its nature is expensive to treat. Many insurance plans require individual financial participation on top of the premiums paid monthly. If the going rate is perhaps twenty percent of the cost, the cost of cancer treatment could cost one individual tens of thousands of dollars.
Arriving at the age of retirement, cancer is a growing concern added on to other health concerns. Diabetes and high blood pressure appear as prevalent health issues starting around middle age. So what does this have to do with capitalism? The cost of living as long as possible has everything to do with capitalism.
It seems medicine has moved away from, or perhaps never really was well rooted in, a deep need to help fellow humans. The cost of becoming a doctor, and practicing medicine, to include use of hospitals, and belonging to HMO’s has made the cost of receiving medical care so incredibly expensive, doctors are now as much accountants as they are practitioners of medicine.
Colleges of medicine, hospitals, doctors, and HMO’s, medical equipment makers all make a profit. Not profit to live on, but as large a profit as the receiver of their wares will bear. The business of medicine has no primary goal of curing you. The new medical business model revolves around making you a patient as early in your life as possible for as long as possible.
This focus on your current health is about your future worth. If, or recently when you are diagnosed having Type II Diabetes, or a heart or artery condition, emphasis is placed on your prescribed medications. Other health promoting choices are almost an afterthought. Serious diet help is for the most part window dressing. You are now an income stream for the business of medicine. The whole system would collapse if you opted out, or recovered to the point where you did not require frequent doctor visits with expensive tests, etc. In other words more of your income spent on your health each year.
Some medicines being touted in commercials, have possible side effects much worse than the disease; if any side effects occur, a new income stream is created by your [now] more serious health condition. Once you are depleted of your liquid assets, the cost of keeping you alive moves on to the state. The state at times has very deep pockets which capitalistic medicine takes advantage of.
This is my perspective and opinion, of course, and you are free to disagree. I feel we have been coerced, or maybe influenced that our life regardless of the quality of that life and the financial consequence does not matter. There comes a time towards the end of life when the cure is not worth the price of admission.
