Sorry, don't know which forum this belongs in, other than it doesn't belong in the Treatments forum where I usually post.

This is not a partisan diatribe against President Obama, a fellow about whom I have no strong feelings one way or the other. It's about what "Obamacare" reveals about the close connections between the USA medical industry and the impending financial failure of the USA.

* * * * * OBAMACARE * * * * * * *

As a patient, you are not the customer when you walk into the doctor's office or the hospital. The medical insurance company is the customer. The question is not "what can we do for the patient?" but "how much can we soak the insurance company for?" There have been moments in history where insurance companies resisted this maneuver, but there was more money to be made by gaining control of insurance companies to use them to soak employers and government, than by knuckling under to insurance companies' desire to control costs. So insurance companies aren't really in that business any more, other than through their own mechanisms for ripping off providers and patients alike. Having to deal with insurance in real life is a quick way to learn how the system works firsthand.

The Democronkies were into this egalitarian "nobody should be denied access" thing. Republiphants would have been expected to simply say "bullsnort", putting the whole thing to rest, but for some reason enough Republiphants went along with the deal that it became law. Someone in the Democronkey leadership should have asked "why are Republiphants voting for this?" but they were too schittin' happy to ask tough questions.

The Republiphants (this is national level, not local voters I'm talking about) loved Obamacare because in their view, it was just another way to tax the middle class to support the rich, using poor people as pawns in the money transfer game. Not much different from voting for war: use soldiers drawn from the lower classes to provide the money flow path that pays off the military-industrial complex. The Party National Committee regards their voter base as stupid fools. (The Democronky National Committee on the other hand, is arguably too disorganized to formulate an opinion regarding their voting constituency.)

So, for their different reasons, the Republiphants and Democronkies in Washington DC work together to keep their money stream going. Tax money and employer costs buy medical insurance, the medical insurance promises to cover darn near anything no questions asked, in practice it does not ask tough questions about what it paid for but only about whom it can burn with impunity, and the massive amounts of money thus directed into "the system" from employers and government insurance programs leave enough left over to buy the US federal government's support of "the system" by which the party apparatchiks and federal bureaucrats are themselves kept on the dole.

I don't have exact numbers handy. The numbers usually bandied about are that the USA spends twice as much per capita as other developed nations on medical care, and what we get for our money is the bottom of the barrel of the developed world. In other words, supposing the better nations of the developed world to be the standard of healthcare cost and benefit (independently of the question of how efficient that particular standard is), here in the USA we spend two bucks for corruption for every buck we spend on modern medical care.

Since medical care is an important chunk of a modern nation's economy, two bucks we spend for corruption that other nations don't spend is the difference between a vibrant economy and a declining economy.

What you see happening with ALS therapeutics is not an anomaly. It's just another example of business as usual. That business will come to an end when the USA government itself comes to an end. I don't know what will replace it, what comes next could be a lot worse rather than a lot better. We'll see...... or maybe we won't.

--Dave J.