Top Signs Your Healthcare System Is Broken

5- SPAM e-mail for cheap pharmaceuticals from Canada. Don’t suppose people in Canada get those, do ya? Long ago I wrote about buying a $6 prescription in Norway. With drugs that cheap, it kinda makes spamming people for cheap drugs pointless.

4- Tip jars and fundraisers to pay medical bills. Note to Americans: they don’t have to go begging from friends and neighbors in countries with a functioning healthcare delivery system.

3- This. Note that virtually all of the buyers are connected to healthcare in some way, either as doctors or executives. And we wonder why our healthcare costs keep rising!

2- Medical Tourism. The very existence of an “industry” which exploits the low healthcare costs overseas (and which basically outsources our healthcare) tells you the system is broken. If our system functioned we wouldn’t need to go to Indonesia or Thailand, would we?

(Note the irony that Arthur Laffer, inventor of the infamous “Laffer Curve,” is on the board of one such company.)

1- The Revolving Door. Healthcare executives becoming politicians who then enact public policies that benefit their healthcare companies. Nothing to see here, folks, move along .... it’s true that this fish rots from the head down, which is why there’s such push back on even modest reforms.

Here’s the Tennessee version.

Too many people are getting far too rich off of our current system. American healthcare no longer serves the majority of its customers. Which is precisely why nothing will change without a huge fight.

Capitalism is good for some things, it's good for a lot of things, but it's not good for healthcare and it's not good for prisons. The result is more sick people and more people locked away for no reason. That's just not right.