Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Santorum etal endorse Health Care Waste and Fraud (With relevance beyond the 2012 elections)



The following are excerpts from a clip which I first saw on Rachel Maddow. The source that checked the text is listed at the end. The audience didn’t come through very clearly but one of the questions that initiated this exchange was something like, ”what can you do to make prescription drugs cheaper?” The constituent went on to say that she was willing to give everything she had to save her son alive but that many people couldn’t afford to do so and they had no choice but to let their loved ones die due to excessive costs.

CNN: Rick Santorum found himself defending a profit-driven health care system to a woman who said her son requires expensive medication to stay alive.

Rick Santorum: "We can make medicine cheaper by using markets. That's how you make medicine cheaper is that you have free people going out there and competing against each other and competition drives up quality and drives down costs."

CNN: Another woman chimed in that she can no longer afford medication she desperately needs because the cost has become so exorbitant.

Rick Santorum: "The only reason new drugs are developed is because Americans actually do pay for the cost of that research," Santorum said. "You have that drug and maybe you're alive today because people have a profit motive to make that drug."

CNN: Santorum tried to explain the need for a profit motive by comparing health care consumption to technology consumption.

Rick Santorum: "People have no problem going out and buying an iPad for $900, but paying $900 for a drug, they have a problem with it. It keeps you alive. Why? Because you have been conditioned to thinking that health care is something that you should get and not have to pay for. “Drug companies, health care companies need to have a profit motive, because if they don't, then how are we going to regulate costs?”

CNN: The mother of the original questioner explaining she's paid $1.3 million a year to keep her son alive, and while she's willing to go bankrupt for her child, it pains her to see his friends die in the hospital because their parents cannot afford the treatment.

Rick Santorum: "He's alive today because drug companies thought that they would make money in providing that care and if the drug company didn't think they could make any money by providing that care, I hate to put it in these terms, but that drug wouldn't be here," he said, adding that he sympathized with the mother, "we either believe in markets or we don't."

CNN: Asked by a reporter after the event about what alternatives people in such tough circumstances have, Santorum suggested that charity was a better option than government intervention.

Rick Santorum: "Even in the tough cases, even at the ones that pull at your heart strings, we've got to believe in people and markets and churches and families and charity instead of government, and that's what I believe" he said. source: democurmudgeon.blogspot.com

For additional reviews of the same interview see the following:

Rick Santorum doesn't know difference between iPad and life-saving drugs at Daily KO
Santorum: Romneycare is 'uniquely unqualified’ at Health Care IT News

As you can see Rick Santorum did little or nothing to try to address her problems; instead he gave her a lecture about how she seems to have felt that she should be entitled to free or cheap care. I suspect that only the most ignorant would believe this; a closer look will indicate that the real people that feel that they should be entitled to preferential treatment are insurance and pharmaceutical companies and those that contribute massive amounts of money to political campaigns. I suspect that a closer look at the plans by Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and any other candidate for higher office that the Mass Media considers “viable” wouldn’t be much if any better.

No candidate business representative or media spokesperson that has a high profile within the most powerful institutions is seriously willing to address the enormous amount of fraud or waste that is surrounding the health care industry any more than they’re willing to address the fraud and waste in any other major industry. This is presumably because the system has been set up to provide powerful institutions with incentives one way or another to go along with the program.

To put it bluntly they all get a cut of the action while the vast majority of the public gets the shaft.

In many cases the evidence of this is incredibly simple and easy to confirm without much if any investigation.
One simple example is the enormous amount of advertising and public relation money that spent on the issue. One way or another, these expenses have to be passed on to the consumer. The more money they spend on advertising the less money they have available for actual health care. These advertisements are rarely if ever presented in an accurate manner; and the consumer who ultimately pays for them are not entitled to any say in the accuracy of them. The consumer is forced to make their decision based on an enormous amount of propaganda thanks in part to the Supreme Court ruling that “money equals speech.” This essentially means that the people with the most money, whether they obtain it fairly or not can have total control over the Mass Media and the political establishment; while the rest of the public is limited to grass roots movements that often have to compete with Astroturf grass roots movements.

I went into more detail on this subject in Health Care Premiums and where they go. the point is that the public has to foot the bill and there is an enormous amount of waste which the public is often not even allowed to review due to proprietary information laws or due to the fact that they have turned the system into something so complex that no one can understand it; however there are many things that are easy to understand and those in power simply decline to discuss them at all and act as if the system is magical and that competition will solve all the problems we have.

There is one big problem with this assumption.

If competition could solve these problems, as they claim, it would have done so by now.
The competition that they indicate will solve the problems is often not even in the health care portion of the business, unless they compete by cutting costs and quality; it is often competition by seeing who can attract the most customers with the most effective, or deceptive, advertisements. As I already indicate this only adds to the costs that they have to pass onto the consumers.

The Mass Media gains an enormous amount of profit from the advertising that is being bought for this system so they don’t have an incentive to expose it; and they don’t. the politicians gain an enormous amount of donations for their campaigns and they can count on the Mass Media to boycott the coverage of anyone who addresses inconvenient issues so their careers are safe as long as they rock the boat; and on top of that the pharmaceutical companies gain an enormous amount of funding for research from the government and they still get to keep the patents for the drugs that they develop. This is an incredible example of corporate welfare but they pass even more campaign contributions to the politicians and advertising dollars to the Mass Media so they both keep their mouths shut about the waste and corruptions.

In "After the Reform: Aiming High for Health Justice" Margaret Flowers, M.D. explains that a public option was left out from the beginning. This article was pointed out by Liberal Libby in her Blog about this, Last Year's Single Payer Summit Post 35 Years of Reaganomics. Many other countries have a single payer system and occasionally if you look close enough you might see that they provide hard studies and statistics that clearly indicates that they’re providing much better care for their people at a lower cost than the USA. As commonly known Canada has much cheaper drugs available and some people that travel to Canada often save an enormous amount of money on their drugs but the Mass Media and the political establishment pay little or no attention to this. On the rare occasions when they do pay attention to it they often attempt to make it appear that Canadian drugs are dangerous; however they rarely ever provide hard facts to back this up and on at least a couple of cases I have seen some examples where it is actually the drugs in the US that have turned out to be dangerous due to lack of oversight.

None of this is even discussed much if at all in the Main Stream Media; instead they act as if the USA has the greatest system in the world and that should end the discussion and avoid any comparisons. A closer look would almost certainly indicate that the only way to convince people that we have has the greatest system in the world would be to avoid looking at any of the facts about other systems or address the basics of how the system is run.

One thing that they did consider worth discussing recently is the fact that if they force Catholic institutions to pay for contraception’s then the expense would have to be passed on to the consumer; ironically they never mention the fact that the cost of advertising and lobbying the government also has to be passed onto the consumer. Nor do some of the media outlets, including Fox put much if any emphasis on the fact that 28 states apparently already require this so this isn’t new for most institutions. Nor do these same media outlets mention the fact that it isn’t about the religious rights of the individual, since the Obama administration isn’t requiring that individuals take birth control against their will, it is about the right of the institutions to restrict access to birth control. In other words the Catholic Church is upset about the fact that the government won’t let their secular institutions impose the religious beliefs of the institutions on the secular employees. Nor do these same outlets discuss the fact that contraception may, in some cases, reduce long term costs, as preventive medicine. Preventative medicine is the one thing that provides long term financial savings that shouldn’t be in doubt and should be increased.

To put it simply insurance is, in many ways, a lot like gambling, except it actually uses the proceeds to provide a worthy service. In both cases money is pooled from a large segment of people and it is given to the winner in the case of gambling or the one who is in need of unexpected services in the case of insurance. When it comes to providing this with a minimum of bureaucracy than it helps to minimize expenses, profits, corruption and waste. Private insurance by its very nature contradicts this objective since the primary objective is to maximize profits not provide health care; although this doesn’t sound good so they provide an enormous amount of propaganda to convince the public that their primary objective is to provide good care.
The current system has essentially turned into a white collar extortion racket for health care with people’s lives on the line. There has been a lot of discussion about rationing of health care and accusations that by making it available to everyone that it would result in rationing; the exact opposite is actually far closer to the truth. By refusing to make it available it leads to rationing to those that have access; further more by allowing this massive amount of fraud and bureaucratic waste they guarantee that there will be less money available to provide actual productive health care costs which increases the rationing that goes on.

This isn’t something new; Jimmy Carter wrote about how he couldn’t get what he considered sincere health care reform passed due to what he called bribery or “legal bribery” in his White House Diaries according to the following excerpt:

I worked on hospital cost containment [bill] in the afternoon, calling the members of congress, many of whom have been bribed by the hospital industry. This is the worst example of a powerful special interest that I’ve seen since I’ve been in office.

“Legal bribed” might have been more technically accurate. But a major reason why reforming health care in our country has always been so difficult is that collectively, the health industry-pharmaceutical and insurance companies, hospitals, nursing homes, doctors- has almost unlimited funds to give to members of Congress, ostensibly in the form of campaign contributions. (Jimmy Carter “White House Diaries” 2010 p.370)

Portion in italics are his explanation more than twenty years after they were first recorded; previous portion should be as dictated into a tape during the White House years.
Carter also wrote about how Ted Kennedy, perceived champion of new health care, allegedly blocked health care when it suited his political purposes. Carter may have had some points but he also failed to inform the public about many of the flaws in the health care system which others, who don’t have the opportunity to address a large audience, have attempted to mention.

The other candidates besides Rick Santorum, including Barack Obama and Mitt Romney can’t be trusted to do much if any better than him. If Barack Obama wanted to address the problems in the health care system he could have used his access to the media during his many speeches to address the nation to educate the public about it. Mitt Romney has also had this opportunity, to some degree, and he also has close ties to the business community that makes a lot of profit through insurance and other industries; he also has close ties to the Mormon Church which has an exceptionally large holding in the insurance industry for a religious institutions; this has been researched and reported in “The Mormon Corporate Empire” by John Heinerman and Anson Shupe.

It is becoming abundantly clear that the current system can’t be trusted to do anything since the primary motivation for those that control it is to make money fro themselves and convince the public that they’re looking out for the best interest of the majority without actually doing so. This can’t be resolved as long as the current election system enables the most powerful people control the process and decide who we can choose from when we elect representatives and what information is made available to the majority of the public. The sincere researchers have little or no opportunity to address the majority of the public while the greediest have total control over the massive propaganda machine. Changing this would be much easier if we could implement Election Reform that is controlled by the people and enables them to interview the candidates and decline a spot on the ballot for those that refuse to answer questions or participate in interviews with the electorate.

For additional information on alternatives see “Single-Payer National Health Insurance” at Physicians for a National Health Program which was pointed out by Liberal Libby in her blog about “Jesus Would Be an Advocate for Single Payer” along with other links and her input on the subject.

(For more information on Blog see Blog description and table of context for most older posts.)

The following are the original replies when this was first posted on Open Salon.

On another note about the election; the Republican parties two front runners are both having serious problems in their own home states.

Mitt is losing in the polls in Michigan which is one of the states that he calls home; although he will probably win it after carpet bombing Santorum with ads and other things about Santorum come out.

More importantly Mitt will probably have a hard time carrying Massachusetts in the general assuming he gets the nomination; a representative of the Obama campaign has already said they could easily win Massachusetts; and he's probably right. Mitt lost to Kennedy in a year that was a big boost for Republican's and he abandoned a follow up attempt for Kerry's seat before it came up because his reputation was so bad. He had to repair it in Utah where he could get the help of his Mormon friends for an easy puff piece, then he took advantage of the disaster that was Jane Swift's shot when she was caught up in scandal and a weak democratic candidacy.

Santorum will probably also have a problem in Pennsylvanian, which he recently lost a senate seat by 18 %

Also while typing in "Rick Santorum can you make drugs cheaper" I noticed the Google suggestions before typing the word can and found.... well...

then I wondered why haven't I heard about this before?

Wait a minute I remember Rachel Maddow said something about Santorum's "Google problem" without explaining what it was several times.

I thought this was a cop out on her part so didn't do so.

Now I'm thinking that if she knew about this her options were to report it, ignore it, or beat around the bush with a cop out.

I have a fourth option, accusing her of copping out.

zacherydtaylor February 15, 2012 01:26 PM

[r] Zachd, sorry I have been away so much. I have to catch up with your always compelling blogs. So glad I caught this one in mid-air still!!! YES YES YES. What an idiotic exchange with Santorum trying to non-empathetically pit his talking points against a real life suffering person asking for sanity and justice!!! Patronizing and insulting.

One of the reasons I am sooooo bitter about Obama, became so bitter early on, was watching him give the old "talk to the hand" treatment to us single payer, expanded Medicare for All folk from the get-go, who were not made up of just DFH's but nurses and doctors and people from both parties and all ideologies but who got the sanity of universal health care, like every other industrial nation has grasped it. The socialism fear-mongering was a collusion of both the Dem and Repub money parties.

The insane war and insane racketeering of the insurance and medical corporations is what is breaking this country economically, not the lack of austerity among the middle and lower classes.

I also left firedoglake because the drumbeat of the public option eclipsed the single payer, expanded Medicare long and short term answer to the crisis in America. All that "perfect being the enemy of the good" bullshit, when the trojan horse public option was bullshit. And the "pragmatics" are still doing their selling-out over- compromising stuff. Never did acknowledge what they did to turn on their fellow progressives and sink universal health care for another generation, if then. But look at with Obama. That is still going on. Denial is more than a river in Egypt!

Tonight with horror I watched a woman on Democracy Now who is single living alone in NYC who had a blinding headache and taxied to a nearby reputable NY hospital. She was a freelancer and had lost her insurance providing job. 6 days later she owed the hospital $88,000 for doing what they did that took 6 days (also from their need, she was put in a private room since they were out of multiple rooms so she got charged for that, too) . No one seriously talked to her about finances. They sent her home with no pills she was required to take, not even a day's worth. She was in no shape even to get to a pharmacy the next morning. Shortly thereafter she went back to have a benign tumor removed affecting her blood pressure and had to pay $17,000 up front. Then the calls, pressure, collection stuff, attorneys descended. The hospital is suing her. They finally wanted to settle for a payment plan of $2,000 a month. She said this was a joke. She said subsequently she lost her job and could not begin to pay that. Also, now trying to get another job would be futile because a background check showed her in arrears. Another guest of Amy Goodman said that that NY hospital gets $51 million a year to take care of its indigent/financial needs/uninsured cases, but for this woman no financial aid was offered or explored. And the more indebted the people are to the hospital the more funding the hospital gets -- NOT THE PEOPLE, the government money is assumed to be used for the people in need, but not so much apparently. Twisted, huh? The expert woman said there is so little sane and just monitoring of such hospitals and the racketeering shenanigans. She also said that so many people have bank liens on their homes because of a sudden health crisis!

Thanks for this and the mention of my long ago blog, too. best, libby

libbyliberalnyc February 16, 2012 05:16 AM

Libby, I have a hard time keeping track of all the terms they use including single payer, public option, affordable care act, Obama care and much more but there are some simple things that I can understand and that is what I tried to point out. In some cases it can’t be made as simple as I would like but more can be done than the powerful do.

Those of us who try generally manage to do at least as well as the establishment due to the fact that despite all their resources they aren’t even trying.

At least they’re not trying to give us a good option; what they are trying to do clearly involves their own best interest and the profits of those that’re already rich.

Thanks for commenting.

zacherydtaylor February 16, 2012 09:39 AM

Shortly after writing this Blog I found out about an article from the Huffington Post, Rick Santorum's Wife Karen Sued Doctor For $500,000, Despite Senator's Calls For Tort Reform, that clearly indicates the hypocrisy of Rick Santorum and this is typical of most politicians who run for office and get media attention.

I have no doubt that there are many more sincere candidates available that don’t express this hypocrisy but the Mass Media ignores them since they can’t be trusted to leave the system alone with all it’s flaws.

zacherydtaylor February 16, 2012 12:56 PM

Great catch, Zachd. One more time politicians want it both ways!

libbyliberalnyc February 17, 2012 12:08 AM

I am speechless and think I am going to die anyway!

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Algis Kemezys February 20, 2012 09:50 AM





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