MUDGE’s Musings
The dysfunction of the medical system in the U.S. is a cliché by now.
20% of the population uninsured, forced to use the trauma centers of hospitals as their first-aid clinics.
Doctors chased out of the business due to the impossible costs of malpractice insurance.
And most egregiously, the practice of medicine, until recently under the control of highly educated scientists, i.e., medical doctors whose guiding principle for more than two millennia has been “first, do no harm,” is now constrained by the U.S. health insurance industry whose guiding principle is “maximize return to the stockholders, come what may.”
In search of that return, insurers, who charge fortunes to individuals and their employers for the privilege of providing medical “care” at haggled piecework rates, continue to cheerfully leave millions of Americans uninsured while forcing practitioners to drive medical considerations financially, rather than medically.
So, what’s new? Not much, of course. The presidential candidates of both parties recognize that health insurance remains one of the hot buttons of this electoral season, although nobody has revealed a solution that makes complete medical, as well as financial sense. But all seem to recognize that business as usual, i.e., the business of excessively rewarding the executives and officers and stockholders of health insurers at the expense of un- or under-treated citizens must change.
And Exhibit No. 3,023,670 stands before us for your edification:
Posted by mudge 
Left-handed Complement 