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Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Recent
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August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
is not an Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside
Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
CIA's Most Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson
Strike Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the
Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
Website of the Day
Defending Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting
August 12, 2003
Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and
Iraq
Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax,
It Was All a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House
Website of the Day
Black
Mustache
Hot Stories
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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August
23, 2003
America's Healthcare
Scandal
Marketplace
Medicine
By DAVE LINDORFF
Politicians are fond of saying that America has
the finest system of healthcare in the world, and no doubt it's
true that if you have endless resources, or a gold-plated health
plan--the kind that is becoming increasingly rare as more and
more companies shift more and more of their workers into ever
stingier HMO's or take away their healthcare benefits altogether--you
can get medical care that is as good as it gets.
But for most of us, the picture is a
lot grimmer.
Because healthcare in America is run
on a for-profit basis, it is basically controlled by the paymaster,
meaning the insurance industry. Medicare is an exception, but
as the government continues to lure and push Medicare recipients
off onto private HMO-type plans, even that is becoming increasingly
a for-profit operation.
What does this mean? That the people
who are making the decisions--both in terms of broad treatment
policies and also in terms of individual patients' treatment--are
primarily motivated by cutting costs and maximizing profits.
Worse than that, because we're talking
about American business practices here, the people and companies
that are making these critical medical care decisions aren't
even thinking about cutting costs and maximizing profits in a
long-term sense. Given that most corporations consider long-range
planning to mean looking a year ahead, they're not likely to
be thinking about what healthcare measures or individual medical
treatments are likely to be cost-effective over a five or ten-year
period, much less over the life of a patient, but rather, what
will be the cheapest health policy or treatment over the next
three weeks or three months.
For example, it would obviously be immensely
more cost effective as a matter of national health policy over
the long term--and certainly for individual patients--to have
a national program of free vaccinations for the flu, which annually
kills tens of thousands of elderly or infirm Americans. Saving
those lives, and reducing the millions of person days thre rest
of us spend miserably nursing the flu each year, would obviously
represent an enormous cost savings even for the insurance industry
that has to pay for all that care, but the initial outlay for
all those vaccinations would be an upfront cost that would not
be recovered for months. The result: no national flu vaccination
program.
The same thing could be said for high
blood pressure. If insurance companies all paid for routine screening
and treatment of high blood pressure with the most effective
medicines available (instead of pawning off only the older, less
effective treatments on poorer patients), heart disease could
be reduced dramatically, which would actually be a huge cost
savings for the insurance industry (and for Medicare and Medicaid).
But again, because the initial cost of such a program would be
large and would not pay for itself over the short term, no one
is doing this.
The list of such idiocies is endless.
Meanwhile, we are treated to scandal
after scandal, courtesy of our vaunted free-enterprise medical
system.
Consider the tale of Tenet Healthcare,
one of the nation's largest for-profit hospital chains. A few
days ago, Tenet agreed to pay a $54-million fine to the federal
government, in the words of the New York Times, "to resolve
accusations" that the company's hospital in Redding California
had in conjunction with several of its doctors conducted unneeded
heart operations on hundreds of patients who did not need such
costly, invasive and life-threatening procedures. As is common
in such corporate settlements with the government, Tenet (no
stranger to scandal) was allowed to settle without having to
admit guilt--a nice concession by the government, since it makes
it much harder for those hundreds of victims of the surgeons'
knives to sue for malpractice damages than if the hospital company
had been forced to admit its craven behavior.
Here's a scandal that simply could not
occur in a society with public medicine: Unnecessary heart surgery,
performed on hundreds of people because the doctors and the hospital
saw a way to make millions of dollars.
Tenet, in fact, is a new name adopted
by a company once known as National Medical Enterprises. The
name change was in large part an effort to distance the firm
from its sordid past, which included an enormous scandal involving
NME's psychiatric hospitals, which were hit with one of the largest
fines in the history of the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services for reportedly keeping psychiatric patients overlong
in the hospital, often against the patients' wishes, so as to
collect more from Medicare and insurers. After a change in top
management, the company emerged from that scandal, largely intact
but with a new alias, though not, as the Redding Medical Center
case demonstrates, with a new ethical standard.
Tenet is no exception, though. Columbia
Healthcare, another large hospital chain, also has paid huge
fines to the government for bilking Medicare--and in the end,
much of that bilking inevitably involves unnecessary medical
treatments. Smaller scandals, which occur routinely, don't even
make the national news. And we're not even talking here about
the large scandal--the denial of adequate treatement, or of any
treatment at all, to tens of millions of American citizens who
are without health insurance.
The sorry state of America's healthcare
system--the costliest in the world by far--should have the public
screaming for massive reform. So far, however, all we've got
on the table are Bush administration calls for more privatization
of Medicare, and a bunch of pallid calls for some kind of minimal
private insurance coverage for all from some of the Democratic
presidential candidates. Only progressive candidate Dennis Kucinich
is calling for a publicly funded national insurance program,
though even his healthcare scheme continues to rely on private
physicians and hospitals to actually deliver services--and even
that modest reform is being ignored by the media (along with
Kucinich's entire campaign).
Maybe it's time for a health victims'
march on Washington. The heart surgery victims of Tenet Healthcare
could be the vanguard of the march, chests bared to expose the
scars of their needless operations.
Dave Lindorff
is the author of Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit
Hospital Chains, (Bantam Books, 1992) Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
A collection of Lindorff's stories can be found here: http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html
Weekend
Edition Features for August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
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