Heroic Medicine

When it comes to America's health care costs, many claim the problem begins with “the 5%.”

In 2008 and 2009, just 5% of Americans were responsible for 50% of the country's medical spending.

Besides such a tiny fraction being responsible for so much expense, high spenders often repeat from year to year.

Drill even deeper and health care has its own “1% crisis.”

In 2009, the top 1% of patients accounted for 21.8% of all medical expenditures.

Who ARE these 1%ers?

Those chronically ill patients skewed white, and old, and republican!

This is well depicted by the “Mr. Creosote” episode in Monty Python.



Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R) at a healthcare reform meeting in New Port Richey, Florida. His false claim of 'death panels' in the ACA was PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" in 2009.



When it comes to America's health care costs, the real problem is parasitic capitalism. (Where wealthy profit first from your medical insurance AND then from your medical care thereafter).

Is it any wonder that Medical Tourism is a rapidly growing industry?

Eight CEOs at the largest publicly traded insurance companies got a pay raise last year. Combined, those eight executives made $171.8 million in total compensation in 2016 -- enough to cover the average annual premium for about 59,150 people enrolled in the most popular ObamaCare plan (on the HealthCare.gov federal marketplace). (Data from a Modern Healthcare analysis of company proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)

These included (in alphabetical order) Aetna, Anthem, Centene Corp., Cigna Corp., Humana, Molina Healthcare, UnitedHealth Group, and WellCare Health Plans.

And, folks that OWN STOCK in health insurance companies (and for-profit hospitals) demand their pound of flesh (dividends).

I once spoke to "an investor" who felt that there should be a law against any hospital that is NOT for-profit! Health care profits are A TAX paid to the rich by the poor! (Or, in the case of corporate profits, undistributed wages that are withheld from the workers to compensate the "jobs creators.")

Before ObamaCare, people let their medical issues worsen until a preventable condition became an expensive medical issue.

Classical Example: Steve Jobs died regretting that he had spent so long attempting to treat his cancer with alternative medicine before agreeing to undergo surgery.

I never knew Steve Jobs had a medical education!

Monty Python's Flying Circus - Frontiers in Medicine