Jim Hightower: The health care industry's medical debt rip-off

While our doctors, nurses and technicians are among the best in the world, our health care system itself is not even designed for care, but for the constant expansion of profits for insurance giants, drug-makers, hospital chains, system managers, financiers and other voracious components of the medical industry. As one doctor angrily said of industrial health care: “Debt is no longer just a bug in our system. It is one of the main products. We have a health care system almost perfectly designed to create debt.” How sick is that?

For starters, ponder the term “medical industry.” The ethical essence of health care is that it’s a human right, essential to every person and to the common good. But corporate elites now claim to “own” our health by shriveling the concept of care to just another industrial product available to those able to pay whatever the monopolistic industrialists demand.

But this rationing of care meant the industry was leaving a mass market of millions of patients untapped, so the industry bean counters made a critical adjustment. Lower prices? Ha — don’t be silly! Instead, the industrywide system has been encouraging medical debt as the ticket to care. So, you come in sick or injured, scared and maybe incoherent or confused... and suddenly you’re hooked up to a long-term medical payment plan.

If it has happened to you, you’re hardly alone. In a startling finding, a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that Americans — including 41% of all adults — are in hock because of the so-called “care-industry.” This includes bills from the system itself, plus money borrowed from family or friends and medical debt that patients put on credit cards. An analysis three years ago estimated that families were being hit with at least $195 billion in payments for medical borrowing — a number driven dramatically higher since the pandemic.

https://magicvalley.com/opinion/columnists/jim-hightower-the-health-care-industrys-medical-debt-rip-off/article_6f192bd6-f8a2-11ec-ac10-03bd240a83dc.html