Imagine kicking over a rotting log and finding all manner of centipedes running to escape the sunlight when darkness is their life. This is how I have come to view the healthcare industry we’re living with today. Just, it’s become an industry rather than one of the elements committed to creating good health and promoting well-being.
For more than a dozen years, beginning in 1982, I worked in sales and marketing for several health insurance companies. When I ran the risk of becoming just another centipede, I left.
In 1989, after I resigned, I sat down and wrote about every disturbing episode I had participated in or witnessed and sent it to a literary agent. He thought it was well done, but advised that if it were published I’d best have a lawyer – “you’ll need one.”
Later, still wanting to alert readers about what was happening, I turned my notes into a thinly disguised novel—with made-up people and representative events. An agent who read the first fifty pages asked me, “Is this a medical thriller?”
“Never stand between a dollar and a doctor,” my high-flying boss said on more than one occasion after a meeting. He was still raking in the dough and annoyed at my weak-tea altruism. “You’re always on the side of our members and against management,” he said. “Do you think it’s any different in, say, the auto industry? They do whatever they can get away with too.”
“Automakers only get to kill a certain number of people before a nationwide recall kicks in,” I said. “It’s not the same. We’re the Corvair equivalent without Ralph Nader and betray our plan members every chance we get.”
There is no dearth of policy wonks, professors, doctors, and others who have written about our medical system and related industries. Too often they finish with what we as patients can do to change the system. These authors are mainly focused on medical and economic issues, and rarely on the lack of political will at the governmental level to make health care an essential, sacred human right.
Every form of media has daily stories on how our health is being sacrificed in the name of profits, scams, executive salaries, and investors. Every now and again they have a good news story—some Samaritan who steps up to help.
We are told that fixing our broken healthcare system is too costly, too complicated, and would be too disruptive. We go along—me included—hoping that surprise bills and bankruptcies we read about or see on social media don’t happen to our families, to our friends, or to us.
On occasion when I’ve offered to create a universal healthcare system for Americans, I’m told “just look at Canada and the UK’s NHS. They have long waits, etc.” From what I’ve experienced and heard from others, long waits here are now common as well. My reply to all these “what abouts” is this – What? We’re not a smart enough country to create a system of our own, insurance-free, affordable, and with health rather than profits as the goal? Never mind that our trust in the government these days is at an all-time low. Only collective, ardent pressure from the people (the bottom they like to call us) will bring about the changes we desperately need.
Until I take my last breath, my heart will be beating for either divine Intervention or something more practical like Congress getting off their butts to make an American Health Plan a reality. It’s long overdue and the right thing to do. In the meantime, I’m doing all I know to do – giving you the information you need in order to pressure your representatives (or toss them aside at the next opportunity) as well as others to create a healthy America and a greatly reformed medical industry that puts patients first.