Recently I watched Frontline's Sick Around the World, and was once-again reminded how our various "industrial complexes" have gridlocked the US into at best mediocre economic performance relative to other economies around the world. At worst we Americans face a painful "day of reckoning".
Noteworthy is how Frontline's Sick Around the World helps us see that to fix the Medical Industrial Complex problem requires that we confront not only the American Medical Association's long-recognized power base and physicians (particularly "specialists") outrageous pay scales, but also the insurance industry, big medical consortiums, the pharmaceutical industry, and trail lawyers all feeding at the same trough. No small task. But a worthy, timely cause.
It will prove interesting to see how an incoming American president begins to confront the medical industrial complex, along with the petrochemical industrial complex, financial industrial complex, and military industrial complex. Wikipedia on Military Industrial Complex.
It will also prove interesting to see whether or not mainstream American media will ever begin to explore recent war profiteering and connections to American political power bases linked to Bush and Cheney. A military industrial complex that we have been forewarned against since the late 1950s. Here is Counterpunch, Bush Family War Profiteering, April 12, 2007. For more see Sourcewatch on this-round War Profiteering.
{Update, May 25}:
More on Bush Administration's War Profiteering, from Capital Gains and Games: The Bush Administration's Teapot Dome
The book, Equal Health Care For All, challenges the medical-industrial complex at its most basic level, the dollar bill. While championing the "medicine" of medicine as opposed to the business of medicine, it details an overhaul of our health care system designed to lead to clear and equal access to vital, comprehensive health care for everyone living in America.
R. Garth Kirkwood MD
http://www.equalhealthcareforall.com
doctork@equalhealthcareforall.com
Posted by: R. Garth Kirkwood MD | May 23, 2008 at 03:52 PM