LIFESTYLE - Chapter 2 - The Problem: Fractured Healthcare

Double Negatives Show-up as Fourfold Improvement

We reduced today’s healthcare crisis down to one primary thing: Fractured Healthcare.

We give the example of obese patients tended to by Blue Cross, Aetna, or Medicaid. Their patients are mere fractions of the 200 MILLION Americans dealing with overweight and outright obesity. The healthcare budget for obesity runs a whopping $2 trillion a decade. This $2 trillion is divvied up between hundreds of different providers. They lay scattered across hundreds of small bit agencies and disjointed programs. It’s a jumble of budgets, bureaucracy, bottlenecks and bumbling. 

We refer to this scattered service as ‘Fractured Healthcare.’ It’s the net result of niche markets crafted by special-interest superpowers. Pharmaceutical price-gauging is an obvious example. Mass doping of our kids (in the name of A.D.D.) maybe the saddest. Money is never an issue for these well-connected programs. Vast public resource used on isolated markets as a hand-out to corporate interest. 

On the other side, we have private insurance with this growing industry geared around collecting money based upon how much service can be refused later. Bait-and-switch seems the official biz model. A shrinking middle class is losing ever larger portions and access to quality care as it makes it way to the privilege of the rich. 

These corporate distortions are placed on top today’s conflict politics and their ideologies-of-mutual-destruction. This leaves gov’t with a jumble of programs at cross purpose to each other. 

Example: Democrats give us healthcare programs for the poor. Republicans cut the budgets. We end up with struggling services – neither strong, nor dead. Republicans give us lower taxes. Democrats add in lots of penalties. One side pressing the gas pedal, the other hitting the breaks. This kind of political sabotage is reflected throughout gov’t programs.