The health "insurance" industry as it exists in this country needs to be abolished. We can't afford it and people are dying to keep it, and its wildly overpaid executives and shareholders, rich on the pain-wracked, debilitated bodies-and eventual corpses--of those denied healthcare for inability to pay. Or to put it in shorter terms, the American system amounts to Murder By Spreadsheet.

Oh, and according to today's WaPo, a "consensus" is forming that the solution to our problem is more of what's presently killing us, aka Mandatory Insurance for All. Putting us all on the spreadsheet, as it were, but not changing the system at all. Why is this a bad thing? Go read.

"Murder by Spreadsheet" is a truly great diary over at dKos by their go-to expert on the subject, nyceve. Some of the great framing of all time is in this description. The comments are good--many of them from doctors and other actual providers of healthcare who are as fed up with the current mess as we are. Here's one I particularly liked:

Another potential interesting frame is "Diversion of critical drug research dollars into excessive executive compensation and shareholder returns jeopardizes research into new and improved medicines over time."

Ain't gonna see this in Forbes any time soon...

by dallasdave

Check that WaPo story to see if you find any mention of this indelicate subject. Lots of "oh, we can't even negotiate drug prices because that would KILL people by cutting the income of Big Pharma!" but nothing about them saving the difference by abolishing direct-to-"consumer" TV advertising and executive compensation.

And what the fuck good is it to have new drugs when only the very rich can afford to use them? How about we declare a 10-year moratorium on drug research and use the money that would have been spent on that to get the drugs already in existence to everybody who needs them?

*yeah, yeah, I know biomedical research doesn't work that way. Stopping and starting programs like that is what killed the space program. That particular sentence was intended as satire, also known as "snark", so don't leave rude comments or call the Big Pharma's chief enforcement officer to work over my typing fingers with a baseball bat, okay?