Editor’s note: This commentary is by Vicki Harrison MSN of Barnard, retired from 45 years in social work and community health nursing, with a subspecialty in mental health and substance abuse.
Do you remember when you went to a hospital and the people who worked there were nurses, doctors, a hospital administrator and a unit clerk per unit? Do you remember when, prior to the 1990s, if you went to a U.S. hospital and you were injured or sick, you would be cared for, without fear of bankruptcy or excessive bills? Prior to the 1990s, when you went to a U.S. hospital, most of the people had complete medical coverage from their work insurance, the rest had Medicare or were eligible for Medicaid or free care.
Why did we have free care? Because our tax dollars had paid for every brick and mortar, much of the medical training of the physicians, the science advancements of medical treatments, the new ideas prompted by space exploration, etc., and because we had not yet become a country run by folks who worshipped money and power and decided to “take it all.”
Who fills our hospitals and medical centers now, since the physicians in the 1990s, under the disguise of “controlling health care costs” brought in business folk, social workers, typists, and all manner of non-health care providers to ballast their system of excessive payments? We are supposed to pay these people 5%-10% more every year for health care, according to their own calculations, presented to a puppet board (Green Mountain Care Board), which rubber stamps the increases passed on to us, whose wages are stagnant at a pre-1979 level. And most of our employment lacks health insurance, such that the federal government created Obamacare to provide some health care to some folks who no longer had access.
The question this begs is: “Is health care a human right, or a cash cow?” Currently, the cash cow keeps bridges from being rebuilt that are ready to fall apart and roads from being repaved to feed the incessant demands of the so-named medical industrial complex. We live on wages so low, that with the stress of a pandemic virus, many have fallen into impoverishment as there is no buffer afforded. About one third of folks are OK, with 10% doing very well. When you could go to the hospital and be cared for without fear or bankruptcy prior to the 1990s, the gap between rich and poor was tiny compared to how this gap has multiplied exponentially in the last decades.
Additionally, the Vermont medical industrial complex (called OneCare) has created a prepayment option for health care, where all the doctors were paid in the pandemic, despite having few or no patients over the preceding nine months. Imagine, if you could be paid in your work, as unions might protect, if you were only “on the ready” for nine months? The newly protected are all the high wage earners.
The gap between rich and poor grows every wider. We, the middle and lower middle economic classes, are required to pay their exorbitant fees. The sucking sound you hear is the money being sucked out of your wallets. This will not stop until an entirely new U.S. health care system is brought into being. It will not come by the wealthy and well-paid giving up their privilege and money. It will come when enough of us stop being willing to be soaked in the slavery of the current demands.
Most of these facilities call themselves “nonprofit.” Nonprofit used to actually mean not for profit. These facilities gain enormous tax breaks. (By the way, did you get a six-figure check to reimburse your portion of this tax payer medical infrastructure? I didn’t.)
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October 21, 2020 at 05:55AM
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Vicki Harrison: Is health care a human right or cash cow? - vtdigger.org
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