Yes, I know, this is supposed to be a blog by a foreigner living in America and I’m not supposed to comment on British subjects that Americans know nothing about. But the only reason they know nothing about anything outside their own borders is because the bloody US media ignore it – unless, in some way, US citizens are involved.
Actually, British life – and particularly political life – is so similar to the US way, that ‘not knowing’ really doesn’t matter too much. So, US citizens, just assume I’m discussing Washington, and replace the name of Cameron with Obama, and you won’t go far wrong.
It’s just so typical of the man. He wants to celebrate the centenary of the First World War. Now, I appreciate that this could prove confusing for my American readers. Why, they ask, is this relevant when the centenary of WW1 is still four years away?
(NOTE: for American readers, WW1 actually began in 1914. You were just a bit late arriving).
Yes, Cameron, apparently wants to see a:
“…commemoration that, like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, says something about who we are as a people.”
Or, put another way, he’d like the British to be viewed as the sort of people who compare the suffering and deaths of twenty million slaughtered individuals with our monarch’s glorious sixty year reign.
Why it is that the British people insist on voting into office a load of rich public school (that’s ‘private school’ for our US readers) wallahs who’ve never done a day’s work in their lives and have no clue what it means to be ‘working class’ – (I did say British life is becoming closer to the US way, didn’t I?) – is quite beyond me.
David Cameron has no more qualification to lead a government than the Archbishop of Canterbury had to organize the Welsh national rugby team’s victory piss-up after winning the Triple Crown last year.
The man is a total jackass. So much so that one of the BBC’s oldest and most revered news presenters, Jeremy Paxman…
…took umbrage over Cameron’s comparison and told the BBC that:
…not to acknowledge the war’s significance would be wilful myopia”, but that “the whole catastrophe has been overlain with myth and legend”…
…the [Diamond] Jubilee was “an excuse for a knees-up in the rain to celebrate the happy fact that our national identity is expressed through a family rather than some politician who wants the job to gratify his vanity”.
“A number of distinguished fellow citizens, like the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and the thoughtful musician Brian Eno, are worried that the events will turn into a celebration of war. Only a moron would ‘celebrate’ the war,” he added.
Thank you, Jeremy, for those few words of common sense. It’s nice to know I’m not the only human being alive who considers David Cameron to be a complete and utter moron. It seems the British media can still speak its mind occasionally.
Which is, of course, one area where Britain and America continue to remain dissimilar.
Since I came to America ten years ago the cost of healthcare has appalled me. Every doctor visit, every hospital outpatient appointment, not to leave out the horrendous bills for in-patient procedures, results in insurance co-pays amounting to thousands of dollars a year, even for those “well insured”.
You wait with dread for the insurance company’s form to arrive stating the total cost of the medical bill, the amount the company will pay, and the amount outstanding (the co-pay) that is your responsibility. Inevitably, this is closely followed by the hospital/doctor bill demanding payment forthwith.
It’s always been my habit to check the medical bill with the insurance form to ensure the figures coincide, before stapling both together and instructing our bank to pay the outstanding amount.
The Marquette General Health Service, our local provider, has always given good service. Then it sold out. Duke Lifepoint was a relatively small operator when it bought MGHS in September 2012 for $132.7 million. Not a bad bargain for a 276 bed hospital with a host of ancillary departments, including a number of doctor’s offices and a pristine medical center.[1]
At that time the Tennessee-based Duke Lifepoint, financed by hedge funds, had purchased three other hospitals: the 102-bed Maria Parham Medical Center in Henderson, N.C., an even smaller 50-bed Person Memorial Hospital in Roxboro, N.C., and the 86-bed Twin County Regional Healthcare in Galax, Va..
But it was, according to ‘Modern Healthcare’:
…the July deal for 276-bed Marquette General that was a turning point for the joint venture—signaling its intention to be not only a regional health network, but also a national one, where potentially every region of the country is ripe with targets.
Leif Murphy, executive vice president and chief development officer at LifePoint, said the joint venture has a list of 50 “perfect candidates” to pursue, which he described as having a reputation for quality but in need of additional capital to meet the demands for technology and clinical upgrades. Duke LifePoint, he said, is focusing on hospitals in the southeast region stretching as far as eastern Tennessee and South Carolina, but also major acute-care hospitals that could be located anywhere…”[2]
That was twelve months ago. Shortly after the takeover my wife developed a serious condition in her right eye. It was the weekend. We rushed to the emergency room. Eventually, she was seen by a doctor, given treatment, and we went to leave. Our passage was blocked by a woman behind a desk in the foyer.
“You have a co-pay of $250,” she rasped, somewhat abruptly.
Rather taken aback, I responded, “We’ll pay it when the bill arrives.”
“You have to pay it now!” she snapped, “It’s expected that you pay before you leave.”
To be brief, I told the good lady we wouldn’t be paying ‘now’, and that we’d await confirmation of the co-pay from the insurance company before handing over a penny. With that, we left.
When the insurance documents eventually arrived, the co-pay was $175, not $250 as she’d stipulated.
Some months later I made a routine visit to our doctor’s office. As I was about to leave, the receptionist informed me I was expected to pay a $20 co-pay. On querying this, she told me “they” wanted co-pays to be paid before the patient left the office.
“Then ‘THEY’ need to learn a hard lesson,” I said, “that ‘THEY’ don’t always get what they want in life.” I left, keeping my credit card in my pocket.
Since this incident I’ve spoken to some of the staff at the Marquette General Hospital. While Duke Lifepoint’s website is smothered in images of ecstatically happy doctors and nurses, on balance, I found those at Marquette were somewhat unhappy. It seems Duke Lifepoint is cutting lots of corners to save money. Equipment is being replaced with inferior quality products; staff morale is sinking fast.
Perhaps the most disturbing comment I heard was that credit card readers were being taken around the wards and sick patients coerced into paying co-pays even before they were discharged.
Of course, its only hearsay. But I doubt nurses and medical professionals would have any reason to state this if it were not true. Duke Lifepoint, it seems, despite the sickly sweet rhetoric of its website, has only one thing on its mind: money. Not that Lifepoint’s CEO has to worry too much on that score. His annual income last year was just under $9,000,000.[3]
Patients; caring quality healthcare; basic humanity, are all way down Duke Lifepoint’s list, if they’re on it at all.
‘Modern Healthcare’, again:
Durham, N.C.-based Duke [University Medical Center] launched its joint venture with publicly traded LifePoint Hospitals, Brentwood, Tenn., in January 2011 with the acquisition of 102-bed Maria Parham Medical Center, Henderson, N.C…Duke LifePoint marked the start of an aggressive, nationwide expansion strategy for the two-year-old joint venture when it clinched a deal to acquire a hospital on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
The addition of Marquette (Mich.) General Health System, 1,100 miles from Duke University Medical Center— which holds a small stake and brings its name and clinical expertise to the venture — also will test whether a university health system could play on the same turf as its investor-owned peers.
Partnerships among for-profit and not-for-profit systems are nothing new — nor is it unusual for an academic medical center to forge clinical affiliations with hospitals hundreds of miles away. But groups such as the Mayo Clinic Care Network, which was launched in 2011 and now has 12 members, are about extending expertise on clinical matters, not ownership…
…LifePoint CEO Bill Carpenter declined to quantify how many deals he expects to pursue this year, but noted that LifePoint has acquired $500 million in new revenue from the joint venture’s four buys with the potential to continue on that scale…”
Is this the bleak future for US healthcare? How long before the doctor’s office receptionist is replaced by a card reader and computer screen on the waiting room wall? Insert your credit card, pay your money, or, sorry, the doctor won’t be available to you this morning.
My last post dealt with the corporate takeover of government. What we, in Marquette, are seeing is the early result of that takeover.
In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.” ~ US President Dwight D Eisenhower, January 17th 1961.
The internet is abuzz with comment on the closure of the US government. Much of the feedback relates to the immaturity of those responsible: “Stop playing childish games”; “Grow up and get back to work”; “Wise up and sort out your differences”, are just a few of the public reactions encapsulated by the US media, for once not too removed from public opinion.
Unfortunately, the public are wrong. The events leading up to this week’s government closure have nothing to do with childish bickering between parties. Put simply, the issue is a war between government and corporate America.
Those members of what is colloquially known as the Tea Party, are basically corporate infiltrators into government, working (often unwittingly) to bring down the system on behalf of their corporate masters. It’s common knowledge that the Koch brothers gave birth to the Tea Party and that funding comes primarily from health professionals, the real estate industry, and oil and gas.
Obamacare, while not of itself a major threat to corporate America, is a step in the wrong direction for those who would see corporate government control as the future for this country – if not the world.
In its present form, the ‘Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’ will probably benefit the health industry, but the fear for corporate capitalists is that it will prove a mere rung on the ladder towards a more social welfare form of health service, and that’s definitely not the way Messrs Koch and associates view the future. After all, they’re working hard behind the scenes to cripple social healthcare services in other countries – particularly Britain, where the right-wing Minister of Health, Jeremy Hunt, has stated publicly that he favors “…the American system of healthcare.”
Already, the British Health Service is in disarray; deliberately starved of funding by the government, reduced to skeleton staffing levels, publicly maligned by the right-wing press in an effort to poison public opinion, while a sudden influx of advertising extols the benefits of private healthcare on British TV screens in a manner never before seen on UK television.
It’s hardly surprising that most of the private health companies now available in Britain are American infiltrators.
This quote, from Pinnacle Care, LLC, a Baltimore company that calls itself a ‘patient advocate service’, with a foothold not only in the US, but also Canada and Britain:
..a growing demand by patients for quality management of health care, more information and personalized attention, and a true partnership with health care providers has sparked explosive growth in the field of patient advocate services not just in the United States, but in Canada and the U.K. as well.”[1]
It comes as no surprise then that Jeremy Hunt has recently released the UK’s ‘Care Quality Commission’ from parliamentary control. The CQC was a government body responsible for vetting all aspects of health service care, and Hunt’s announcement is surely a first step towards privatizing the commission.
Accompanying Hunt’s announcement, Leader Cameron dropped a bombshell on GPs (family doctors) by informing his party conference this week that doctor’s surgeries will soon open seven days a week, from 8am to 8pm. Dr Chaand Nagpaul of the British Medical Association responded that:
“These additional hours amount to around a 58% increase on current levels and we really don’t have the GPs to meet current demands, let alone an additional 58% increase in hours.”[2]
No doubt Mr Cameron will be happy to call in the US private sector to assist.
Most Tea Party politicians are likely blissfully unaware of their enslavement to corporate America – as, indeed, are their supporters, happily brainwashed twenty-four hours a day by media advertising, perverted news programs, dip-stick radio-jocks, and the well-paid boot-lickers of Rupert Murdoch on his Fox News TV cable channel.
It begs the question as to why the less depraved members of the US Republican party, otherwise known as the majority – don’t simply vote the Tea Party out of the picture?
The only obvious answer is that they, too, find it advantageous to bow the knee to their corporate masters. After all, they’re not fools, and they’re certainly not children. Their power, as well as that of the Tea Party, is dependent on those who financially support them.
