Corporate Healthcare Pirates
On the sea of suffering
I understand that business is how we get most things done. Usually it works pretty well.
I know that people have to be paid for products made, delivered and sold.
I realize that people have to be paid for services rendered.
Furthermore, I’m not convinced that government-run healthcare is ever going to be any more compassionate or efficient than the private sector.
But when I see what transpires in healthcare today… when I see the way it devours economies, the way it ravages everyone and especially the poor, when I see that even simple life-saving interventions like insulin are beyond the financial capacity of all too many people, when I see the riches that flow to those who work at the top of the corporate world and have the temerity to call themselves ‘non-profit,’ then an image comes to mind.
Corporate healthcare today is like this. It is a great, gold-laden pirate ship on the vast sea of human suffering, attacking small boats already about to be sunk by the waves of illness and injury, to which survivors barely cling for life.
And every day they hoist the Jolly Roger a little higher.
(To be more historically accurate, since most of them do it with the full knowledge of the government and government payers, the term privateers may be more accurate…but less of a poignant image…history nerd, sorry.)
The image of the corporate health pirate yacht riding and raiding on the great sea of morbidity is an ingenious and well-deserved metaphor.
As an ER doctor, you don't have the option of jumping ship and going Direct Primary Care, as far as I know.. But I wish more physicians would entertain Direct Primary Care as a practice alternative to being owned by corporate medicine. At least the public would have some choice then, and not be locked into the horrible sink hole corporate medicine is today. The U.S. is the only developed country without universal healthcare and has a maternal death rate on a par with Colombia. The only way to decrease this rate in the U.S. is to provide universal healthcare to families without access to care for pregnant women and their families.