The Trenchwalker has read several excellent books during the past year, from authors like John Grisham, Lee Child, Lisa Sweetingham, and J.L. Bass, to name a few, but perhaps the most intriguing and helpful in the real world was the informative and inspiring book End Medical Debt by Jerry Ashton, Craig Antico, and Robert Goff. Utilized were three writers with slightly different takes on the devastating American crisis of indebtedness caused by entities connected with the practice of medicine. The book provides the evolution of medicine when its mission was good health and how it step-by-step turned into a conglomeration of corporations whose mission is now good wealth – for them.
I had trouble putting down the book and would describe it as brilliant! Weirdly, while reading it I thought of a certain comparison of medicine to furniture. I suggest you watch the old black-and-white movie Executive Suite that starred William Holden, Frederic March, Barbara Stanwyck, and June Allison, among other greats. The last quarter of the movie illustrates how a particular furniture business went from providing quality items to instead marketing cheap copies while attempting to bolster stockholders’ profits, its new end-all goal, which destined the company to failure if changes were not made immediately.
Another thought that came to mind while reading End Medical Debt was in reference to a television program in the 1960s and early 70s, Gunsmoke, which starred, among others, Milburn Stone as the elderly physician in the old west township of Dodge, Doc Adams, who made both house calls and conducted in-office visits and quite often asked for little or no pay, depending upon the financial abilities of his patients. His main goal was their well-being. Then move forward to today where dollars and cents usually dictate the type of care that is given. This often results in saddling the sick or injured patient with mountainous debt and in many cases ruins their lives about as badly as the disease would have. As you throw insurance corporations, big pharma, and major medical facilities into the mix, each chaired by a profit-driven board of directors looking out for stockholders instead of patients, you have America in 2019, a far cry from the promises of the past.
The book delves into historical points such as the start of Blue Cross and Blue Shield. It explains why they were created and how this eventually impacted healthcare today, as have sign-offs by Congress and law-makers that gradually shifted medicine toward corporatism.
In an interview with The Iconoclast, co-author of End Medical Debt, Jerry Ashton, explained why he and the other authors founded a charity, RIP Medical Debt, whose mission is to raise money to purchase horrific medical debt owed by patients who cannot pay, and then to credit these parties and forgive the debt, to extinguish bill collectors’ pursuits of these individuals. Ashton said that quite often the charity pays only a penny on the dollar to collect this otherwise uncollectible debt, a system that is seeing remarkable success. He suggests that people, by reading his book, will become educated about this trillion-dollar national crisis and be given the tools to correct it – to take action.
One of the problems lies with Congress. The Iconoclast recently spoke with a higher-up at the Federal Drug Administration and learned that its mission is hampered by Congressional loopholes that demand that the agency not do its job properly, which officials there say is extremely frustrating. Congress is banishing good sense in order to silently provide money for stockholders of major drug companies by providing these loopholes. After all, drug companies fund these officeholders’ election campaigns. If you call and ask the FDA if drugs that are approved are thoroughly tested there, you will likely be told by the lower echelons that they are. But if you work your way up the chain of command, you soon learn that the FDA does not test, but that drug companies “pay” independent companies to do it for them or they do it themselves. So much for objectivity and reliance on science, which to them is coded with dollars and cents.
The mainstream media will not tell you this because, well, they depend upon pharmaceutical advertising to survive. It’s nearly impossible to watch an hour of TV without at least a dozen drug commercials, some that go so far as to, for instance, offer a drug for a skin problem, but mention at the end the potential side effects that could include death. Death, to clear up a skin problem? Drug companies base their marketing theory on the belief that millennials are not mature enough to know any better.
Pharmaceutical companies, by and large, are simply take-offs on the old snake oil, elixir, and tonic remedy hawkers of old who sold their goods atop brightly painted covered wagons. Now they prompt you to govern your doctor, as though he or she is ignorant. “Tell your doctor to prescribe our drug. Of course, you might get a dozen terrible side effects. But then, we can provide meds for those too, and so on and so on.” Ca-ching, ca-ching, ca-ching.
A recent “confidential” conversation with a pharmaceutical braggart puts it into perspective. He said, “That vial costs us less than fifty cents to manufacture and produce, including packaging, but pharmacies sell it for $180. They get a small cut. Multiply that one vial times thousands of customers and our stockholders love it. They clean up without having to lift a finger. This also gives us money to contribute to political campaigns. We own just about every Congressman. They don’t dare go against us because they know we can ruin them. And we can afford to advertise like nobody’s business. TV spots are not cheap, but we get a special deal in bulk. Best of all, it allows us to own their news departments. There’s not a reporter out there who will badmouth us, much less investigate us.”
“But what about the customers who are being ripped off?” I asked.
“We just tell them it’s for research. Besides, they are desperate. They will do anything. So I guess you could say that we own them, too.”
The Iconoclast totally agrees with Ashton that healthcare is a major crisis in the United States and we encourage you to read our feature story about this remarkable book and the charity, RIP Medical Debt.