“We are now treating medicine as an industrial product.”

Listening to this “podcast”:http://www.pbs.org/moyers/rss/media/BMJ-1320.mp3 that line stuck out as just a pretty apt definition of what is wrong with our attitude towards the LSU/VA hospital. The lack of planning and transparency is on a par with the lack of transparency when it comes to health care.

The audio is part of a documentary called “Money Driven Medicine”:http://www.moneydrivenmedicine.org/ and while there are a lot of extreme examples of the disconnect between health and health care let me leave you with this example:

While being treated for breast cancer I was eligible for medicade. The afternoon that I was given my last herceptin infusion I was no longer eligible. A treatment that cost about $78,00.00 a “year”:http://www.assertivepatient.com/2007/03/the_true_cost_o.html was allowed under the plan but the post chemo therapy drug “tamoxifen”:http://www.lightparty.com/Health/Tamoxifen.html was not allowed. The cost of tamoxifen is fairly inexpensice compared to herceptin but the ability to get a prescription is far more difficult.

The system now invests heavily in keeping us from dying but little to nothing to keep us living healthily.

The fight over Charity best exemplifies our fetishistic obsession in New Orleans with someone or something to ride in and save us. Everyone waits for a hospital to provide us with prosperity instead of wondering when we will demand compassionate and realistic care. So we wait for the hospital to be built to house the sick we are creating today. Our new economic development model.

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