Full Moon Edition June 2026
Do you hold your doctor in high esteem? There once was a time when healthcare professionals, and especially those exalted physicians among them, were ranked by us at the very top of the order among professionals. That was back in the days when they actually made the decision about the care you needed to receive, before the insurance industry took over and doctors were stripped of that power. Now they’ve become little more than functionaries for the industry and pill pushers for Big Pharma.
The cost of that care continues to rise and what we get for it continues to decline (HERE). So too the status of healthcare professionals. Like the mare, that old gray doctor ain’t what it used to be. One wonders why young people continue to enter the profession. Of course, the pay ain’t bad – ever met a poor doctor? – and a substantial increase in women at medical schools is a balancing factor. But if you ask docs these days whether they’d recommend medicine as a career, mostly the answer is “no!”
The Hippocratic Oath may be a vestige of better days and in fact it is likely impossible to adhere to for even the most dedicated and honorable physician. How does one Do No Harm when your ability to act is superseded by higher authority, whose guidance is cost rather than benefit? This would seem less onerous perhaps were we in the United States not the only developed country in the world where good health and medical care are seen not as a right but rather a matter of what you can afford.
That particularly U.S. sense of superiority too often supposes that our healthcare is the best that, well, the best that money can buy. Dead wrong, so to speak, and in fact, not even close. Ironically, not only is our medical care inferior, we also spend far more per capita for it. Worse still, that gap between our healthcare and the actually great care that comparable nations enjoy is increasing rather dramatically and has for the last forty years. One wonders how long industry can continue to tell us otherwise?
Life expectancy, infant mortality, general well-being and good health, all of them are better in developed nations with Universal Healthcare. That concept, which in several different variations has proven to be not only doable, and not only less expensive, but considerably so on both counts, is in the United States traditionally and resoundingly labeled socialized medicine. And we’ve been told repeatedly for many generations now that any version of socialist or socialized in any context is bad. Like BAD bad!
Huge amounts of money can be counted on to oppose legislative initiatives that might dare to make obvious improvements to our shameful medical system. The Pay To Play healthcare insurance industry and its lobbyists know whose ox will be gored if health care reform is achieved. The question we should ask shouldn’t be what calamity might befall industry but rather what benefit might accrue to patients. By that measure there is no reason other than duplicity to forego Universal Healthcare.
Those public servants in Congress and state legislatures are savvy enough to know where their bread is buttered. Their public posture, grandiose and sanctimonious proclamations, and deeply held convictions pale in the light of political reality. Their first and foremost consideration is keeping their jobs, and money, lots of money, is what fuels campaigns. The healthcare industry spends freely on lobbying and its interests rather than yours are what our elected officials support. Quid pro quo is.
If those same legislators really were defending public well-being, if they actually cared about oversight of the public coffers, they might need no more evidence of the need for change than the stark reality the charts on this page illuminate. We in America are paying more and getting less healthcare. And considering that the U.S gross domestic product is quite large, the chart above would look even worse if we measured it as expenditure per person. There is no way to spin the results as any other than bad.
Healthcare in the United States is a vivid example of systems we protect absolutely, absent any good reason other than the industry trope we’ve long been fed and the acquiescence of our elected officials who are supported by those special interests. At the Center for the New Northwest, we support systemic change that delivers needed solutions. We believe an inflection point is coming and fundamental change will reshape many of our failing systems. May healthcare be a resounding manifestation.