The Healthcare Crisis for the Rest of Us
The solution is obvious: nationalize the healthcare system. Doctors and nurses should be federal employees. Hospitals should be healing centers, not for-profit corporations beholden to shareholders. If socialized medicine is too radical, however, there’s always the single-payer system. The key, in that case, is to put the insurance companies–which are squeezing doctors and patients alike–out of business.
The unbridled greed of corporatized healthcare is breathtaking. United HealthGroup, currently listed as #37 on the Fortune 500, earned $3.3 billion in net profits in 2006–up 28 percent from the year before. Wellpoint made a whopping $2.5 billion, a 157 percent increase. When is the last time you got a 28 percent raise? 157 percent? It’s blood money, pure and simple. How much profit is generated by the death of an uninsured or undertreated American?