By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

Just when you thought it was safe to come in from the Swine Flu (which has actually reached my own neighborhood in suburban Seattle), it seems that corporate America is determined, at all costs—as usual to be borne by you and me, the consumers—to shutdown the healthcare reform, whether by hook or by crook.

Both of those methods will be in use this weekend when corporate media conglomerate NBC will air an infomercial designed to convince the public, a la those Harry and Louise misinfomercials (also now being revived) that sank Clinton’s health plan, that universal healthcare is somehow bad for your health. It’s like saying that curbing executive compensation is taking money out of your wallet (they have actually very successfully convinced a majority of Americans that this is so—it’s the Joe the Plumber Syndrome).

Come again? Isn’t robbing the taxpayers with tax breaks and bailouts that only serve to line certain corporate pockets taking money out of the rest of our wallets? And isn’t refusing prevention or treatment to millions of Americans pretty bad for their health? At least fiscally speaking? And you say that preventing you from picking my pocket and looting our treasury is going to cost money so you should just go ahead and keep doing it? As John McEnroe used to say, Are you serious? Next thing they will be charging us for our air and water and telling us our breathing causes pollution. Wait, didn’t a Republican senator actually say that, recently?

Yep. No doubt right there on NBC. Because, apart from the military-industrial-oil cartel, and of course Wall Street, healthcare is where the big government money is, and thus the biggest profits are to be made, these days. And despite all those hail-fellow-well-met handshakes in the White House recently for that photo-op, those same people getting rich on your shrinking health nickel want to keep it that way, hell or high water (they have plans for profiteering from both of those as well, but that’s another story for another day).

It’s this simple: healthcare is so profitable for so many big corporations, no one dares to even nudge, let alone kill that golden goose. Not even Obama, it seems. Which is a shame. Why else would he take the single payer option off the table before the guests have even arrived? And they made a huge deal out of agreeing to curb future profits from cost increases by a whole 3%? This means they are going to lower their price hikes by 3% and we’re supposed to celebrate? And we, the people bought that sack of medical waste lock, stock and barrel, it seems.

Senator Max Baucus, who is calling the shots in the Senate, is at least honest about his dishonesty. He works exclusively for the insurance companies and Big Pharma and is pretty open about it. They bought and paid for his elections, and expect results, and they are getting them. That’s why thirteen unlucky doctors and nurses went to jail for protesting his so-called hearings on healthcare reform when he vehemently and violently refused to even allow a single advocate of a single payer option to even speak at the hearing. Because it’s not going to be healthcare reform at all. It’s going to be a healthcare Las Vegas re-shuffle of a stacked and marked deck.

There are four levels of profits to be made in our current healthcare system, which, much like our military, is the world’s largest, and, when it comes to who gets all those trillions, the most corrupt and also least efficient. You, the sick consumer, must pay all of the following through the nose (if it isn’t plugged up) before they’ll even look at you. First, there’s the doctor. Then, if you’re really ill, the hospital. Then, regardless, the pharmaceutical conglomerates for your inevitable prescriptions. And finally (it really begins with them, of course), the insurers, who are huge, bloated, and dedicated solely and exclusively to making a profit at your expense, be it health-wise, or otherwise. And you must pay all of these folks, plus their legions of bureaucrats (more than the government and far less efficient) they employ just to refuse your claims, plus all their millionaire accountants, consultants, marketers (such as NBC, who gets another cut tonight), not to mention all those people pretending to be Harry and Louise and TV doctors, like Rick Scott, who got rich playing a doctor on TV and opposing healthcare reform (get this, he is not a doctor, as he even says in a fast low voice at the end of his spiel, as required, but barely, by law).

So you have to pay for all of this profiteering before getting so much as an aspirin for your pains (and dollars). How do they get away with this? By buying misinformercials on NBC, for one thing. But mostly by buying elections, controlling Congress, controlling the media, and therefore controlling the dialogue, and thus what people think they know, in the process.

America is 38th in the civilized world in terms of quality of healthcare delivery, overall. We are number one only in cost, and in that regard we’re light years ahead of the pack. We have the best doctors, the best research, best hospitals, and the best technology. No one questions that. But we only get 38th in actually delivery of care. Despite blatant misinformation to the contrary, to be further fueled this weekend, even the AMA now acknowledges that the only effective way to provide real healthcare for all the people, all the time, is a single payer system as exists in virtually the entire civilized world. Except in the care-for-profit-only US of A. Everyone living anywhere other than in the Third World, gets better and more healthcare per capita than us. 49 million Americans have no health insurance, and this number continues to grow. And when Bush said anyone can go to the ER, he was speaking as someone who’s never been there. Plus, they will hire a collection agency to come after you for your triple-weighted bill, as has happened to me.

Millions of Americans are losing their savings and their homes to pay catastrophic medical bills, which continue to rise unchecked. Congress has effectively prevented bankruptcy from removing these debts, as yet another nod to the Industry.

It is not just a travesty that it is more profitable (to them) for you to die than to be healed, let alone kept healthy. It is a crime. Or should be.

Back in the ‘70s, when I wrote for Consumer Survival Kit for PBS, I uncovered an interesting story that resonates loudly today. As it happens, one of the loudest leaders of the anti-healthcare-reform movement, himself a doctor, is Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. This is a state in which, for much of its history, it was very literally more profitable for the patient to die. In Kentucky, at least until recently, it was legal for EMS (ambulance) services to be owned, operated, and driven by funeral directors (morticians) and/or their employees. This practice still exists, to this day, in Florida, Georgia, and other states as well (I couldn’t confirm about Kentucky, but wouldn’t doubt it). They use the same vehicles for both “services,” in fact, which make it very convenient to skip the hospital and go directly to the mortuary. Thus eliminating the middleman, i.e. doctor, which you’d think would be to Dr. McConnell’s disadvantage. Yet for reasons having nothing to do with their large contributions or that he owns a for-profit chain of hospitals, Dr. McConnell has been trying ever since his first election to nationalize that very practice, by allowing huge industries to profit from not providing healthcare to those who need it most. Go figure.

(Full disclosure: this writer used to write for NBC, albeit in the entertainment division.)

Gene Ayres is a career writer, author and freelance journalist. His latest book is A Billion to One: An American Insider in the New China. He can be found at: www.geneayres.org.