Editorial
Is there anything more grotesque than animals that feed on the sick and dying? Is there anything more unethical than stratospheric, sacrilegious profit sucked from those with the misfortune to become ill?
Nationalize the healthcare industry.
The moral disease that laid the foundation for the current healthcare crisis is greed. Its method of transmission is capitalism. The Covid 19 Pandemic has revealed the truth: it doesn’t matter if Harry and Louise have healthcare, if their neighbors don’t—and we are all neighbors. We are all cells in one body politic. We are all vulnerable to the sequelae of monopoly capitalism; rampant infectious disease that is the hallmark of the end of empires.
Nationalize the healthcare industry.
Even before the flowering of plague profiteering—‘in-the-know’ Senators off loading stocks just in time; a president who owns stock in a supposed cure—we had a healthcare industry whose primary mission has always been to make a profit. And it’s very good at making profit. *In 2018, the combined compensation for the five best paid healthcare insurance CEO’s was over
$98 MILLION DOLLARS.
The healthcare industry’s, other, minor mission, providing healthcare, it does badly. In spite of their filthy rewards the princes of healthcare insurance fiefdoms have not laid by enough masks, beds or ventilators to fight one of the oldest, best known, scourges on earth. The mechanics of fighting this disease are not a mystery; how the fabulously incompetent captains of the healthcare industry can believe themselves to deserve their riches, is.
Why do we not have the tools to win a winnable war?
Should we ask that stooge of the 1%, Donald Trump, to stop whining about airlines—the little fingers of big oil—long enough to say something about health care, or should we ask those in charge?
Michael Neidorff, CEO Centene, $24 million, 2018, “Why are there not enough ventilators?”
Larry Merlo, CEO CVS Health, $22 million, 2018, “Why are there not enough masks?”
David Cordani, CEO, Cigna, over $18 million, 2018, “Why are there not enough swabs?”
David Wichmann, CEO UnitedHealth, $18 million, 2018, “Why are the old people dying?”
Nationalize the healthcare industry.
Somehow, amid news broadcasts of governors bidding against governors (and the federal government) for PPE, we’ve lost sight of who we’ve paid to do this job. We thought we were paying them to provide healthcare—but insurance companies don’t provide healthcare—clinicians do, and ours are at risk.
Bruce Broussard, CEO Humana, over $16 million, 2018, “Why are clinicians at risk ?”
“Sirs, will you make more in 2020, than you did in 2019?”
A healthcare system that fails to protect against infectious disease and which is not prepared to care for those felled by infectious disease is not a healthcare system, it’s a racket. And the people who own it are parasites. The only way to cure this disease is to remove the cause: for profit healthcare and the vampires that own it.
Is it too late ?
* https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payer/health-insurance-ceos-took-home-a-hefty-pay-day-2018-how-does-compare-to-their-employees