Big Red Pill

By: David Sherman

Article Category: David Sherman

Most of us have seen “The Matrix.” For those of you who either shun all things sci-fi, don’t watch movies at all, or live in a cave, I will briefly summarize the reference. The protagonist, Neo, is offered a choice between a blue pill, which will allow him to forget his worries and return to an existence of blissful ignorance, and a red pill which will give him the answers to all his most pressing questions. If Bush & Cheney, Inc. can use Jack Bauer to rationalize torture, I can use Neo to explain the need for health care reform in the United States. This is your…

Big Red Pill

“The Matrix” painted a grim future where humans were grown by machines as a source of energy. We haven’t quite hit that point yet (so far as we can tell!), but I believe an eerie parallel has developed. In our case, the megalithic menaces tending the crops and culling the herd are the Triumvirate of Greed known as The Insurance Industry, The Pharmaceutical Industry, and The Health Care Industry.

Over 47 million Americans currently live without any form of health insurance, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that number will rise to over 54 million by 2019. This has been called a travesty. I would call it criminal. Many of those who had health insurance find themselves “dropped” as soon they develop major illness. If not dropped, they find that the costs not covered are still so enormous as to bankrupt them. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, health care costs were the main factor in 62% of all bankruptcies in 2007. I could wax for hours on the further depredations of the insurance industry in matters of home insurance (particularly here in Florida!), but we’ll leave that for another time. The point is we pay and we pay, and as often as not, when the time comes, THEY DON’T.

Sinclair Lewis, a demigod of American literature (and my personal favorite), wrote the novel “Arrowsmith” in 1925, wherein he sought to expose the rampant greed and mercenary heartlessness of the pharmaceutical industry. Nothing has changed, unless you count the exponential growth of profits.

Lewis warned of the questionable relationship fostered by the pharmaceutical companies with private physicians as well as hospitals. Today you can find a dinner hosted by a drug company at the finest restaurants available on any given week. They serve the best food, they pour the best booze, they drink the finest wines. Then they pitch their latest products.

If that weren’t enough, we now allow drug companies to advertise directly to the consumer. This has become so widespread that I would like to take the cartoon gremlin which apparently lives in my toes, and using my restless leg apply it to someone’s anal leakage, but that’s just because I found the Chantix I took to stop smoking can cause suicide, which depressed me enough to want Zoloft, which may cause anal leakage as well, and then I would need… Well, you get the picture, leaky as it may be!

Promotional spending in the pharmaceutical industry went from $11.4 billion in 1996 to $29.9 billion in 2005. At the same time the number of notices regarding violations of the rules governing pharmaceutical promotion sent by the FDA dropped from 142 in 1997 to 21 in 2006! These are the people who are supposed to be our watchdogs for this industry? Sounds like our dog is now wearing their leash!

We also pay more for the same drugs. A study done by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development listed the average per-patient spending on drugs at $401 in 2005. American patients paid an average of $792! Heaven forfend you or anyone you know should get cancer. But if the pain and human suffering inherent in the disease aren’t enough, wait till you get the bill for the meds! Many of the leading cancer drugs costs thousands a month, some over $25,000! I guess when they say say “leading,” they mean leading in profits.

As for the Health Care Industry, and by that I mean the FOR PROFIT Health Care Industry, when did we as a people become so morally bankrupt as to think that making a profit from such a source was acceptable. And make no mistake, I’m not talking about generating enough extra cash to build a new wing on the hospital, or to buy the latest in high-tech diagnostic equipment. I’m talking about TENS OF BILLIONS of dollars in profit! That’s what compassionate giants like Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield posted. I guess when a single Tylenol runs $12 and one day in a hospital bed exceeds $1000, it’s got to go somewhere. I once had a broken sewing needle removed from my foot. It cost $1,475, and that was in 1989! (Damned Halloween costume that year = $1,600!) I could not begin to count how many houses and condos are sold by heirs in Cocoa Beach each year just to cover the hospital debts left behind when the parents or grandparents passed.

Which brings me back to my point. We pay as we go… until all of our pay goes. Then we pay more. Anything we thought we had put aside for a rainy day winds up going as well. Whatever we thought to leave our children or our children’s children… in the end they’ll take that also. We live in the wealthiest nation on the face of the planet, yet We the People of that nation continue to be deceived by those who feed upon our very life’s blood. We are deceived into believing that “Socialized” Medicine is the first step to Communism. England, Canada, France, Sweden, Germany all have it, and they’ve not gone Communist, yet we still believe the same old lies? Why? So long as a single child cries in the night for want of proper affordable health care in the richest nation on Earth, something is WRONG!

That is your Big Red Pill. If you want the blue pill, just continue to believe FOX News.