Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Elizabeth rosenthal - an american sickness
An American Sickness cut deep. 7 years later, it seems more like small potatoes. This autopsy of the US healthcare system was disturbing back then, but somehow, disturbing doesn’t seem to quite cover it now.
Physician and journalist Elizabeth Rosenthal starts with the 1847 founding of the American Medical Association. Once, America’s strongest union. Initially, 250 MDs interested in medical standards and scientific advancement. Now, not only a gatekeeper of building new medical schools which contribute to our misattributed chagrin at the current physician shortage, but the copyright owners of the CPT procedure codes, our third largest lobby spender backed by insurance corporations, and ultimately the vetoer of common sense single payment care system compromises.
Private health insurance grew out of the need for post WWII boom in healthcare needs, ushering in a before-unseen amount of coverage for US citizens. If they didn’t go by the same name, you might be hard pressed to recognize that same body today: a pseudo-market, high-cost system netting ever-larger profits to the private sector with no political will to reform.
Given its propagandized messaging of avoiding socialism via a “free market,” a lot of people tend to agree, even as they watch their affordable promised insulin prices rocket back up. Even as they watch Medicaid go dark nationwide at the stroke of a spray tan-stained pen stroke. Even as they watch the monopolization of private insurers. Even as they watch, dying, from having less covered than ever before.
Behold the great America. You can’t come here anymore, but picking industrialized countries out of a lineup, seeing the US with some of the worst health outcomes, the highest rate of infant mortality and avoidable deaths, seeing medicine denialists get installed into positions that will surely worsen those same stats, all while gobbling a whopping 20% of its GDP as 10s of millions still unsuccessfully seek care the elite no longer claim they’re afforded, why would you even want to?