Getting Sick and Going Broke – CVS, Credit Cards, and Crippling Medical Debt

BY MIKE MAGEE The Medical-Industrial Complex is swarming with grifters. This is to be expected when you build a purposefully complex system designed to advance profitability for small and large players alike. The $4T operation payrolling 1 in 5 American workers is, in large part, a hidden economy, one built by professional tricksters, designed by Fortune 100 firms with mountains of lobbyists, but reinforced as well by friendly doctors and hospitals engaged in petty and small scale swindling who justify their predatory actions as entrepreneurial, innovative, and purposeful means of necessary financial survival. When lobbyists for high-priced stakeholders get called before Congress, as they did on March 29, 2022 before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, they make it sound like Americans should embrace the privilege of being screwed over by MIC elite. But as former Kaiser Permanente CEO, George Halvorson, recently reminded, “People are getting bankrupted when they get care, even if they have insurance.” It’s enough to draw a person back to the early 1950’s when Arthur Sackler helped launch the Medical-Industrial Complex. In fact, our modern day willingness to mask health care cruelty in high-minded language and miscarry  justice is extreme enough to draw one back to June 9, 1954, when Boston attorney, Joseph Welch, hired by the U.S. Army to defend it against accusations of Communist infiltration, said to Sen. Joe McCarthy, “Little did I drea...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Policy CVS Medical Industrial Complex PBMs Source Type: blogs