Failing Health continued

Hard on the heels of the Harvard study linking health care costs to bankruptcies, even for the insured, comes a Boston University study that finds fully half of the nearly $1.9 trillion spent on health care is unnecessary waste, paying for nothing more than excessively high profits, over-the-top drug and hospital prices, unnecessary administrative costs mandated by insurance companies, plus a healthy dollop of fraud and theft.

By the way, in the spirit of our colleague's essay on numbers at Blue Voice, we will spell that out for you: the amount wasted per year is $950 billion, which is 950x1000x1,000,000. Nine hundred fifty one thousand millions.

This study follows another Harvard study which determined that bureaucratic inefficiencies in medical insurance, hospitals, nursing homes and doctors' practices in 2003 cost the U.S. nearly $400 billion.

So put them together and what have you got? Half the annual bankruptcies in America are caused by medical costs that are twice as high as they should be.

Excessive medical expenses / Study finds that half of health care dollars are wasted

None of this is all that surprising, given the sheer size of these industries and their nature as profit-making corporations whose purpose is accumulating wealth, not health. How can anyone be surprised at the excessive profits, when these corporations buy off scientists and government agencies, while growing to enormous sizes by killing off or buying out smaller businesses and swallowing up their markets? Anybody who believed that costs rising so fast for so long was unfortunately due to the cost of new technology, just hasn't been getting wined and dined enough by health insurance companies.

Healthcare in the U.S. is about as good for your health as taking a bath with ravenous piranas. The condition of the healthcare system is terminal and everyone knows it. Yet nobody responds to the flatlining whine, because everybody is busy filling out forms, or munching on the tax-flesh of soon-to-be-poor people at the White House.