Just a quick response to Marta Russell's post on the Disabled protests over what might seem obscure issues over Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and the Home services and Nursing home service providers.
The core issues are actually a full blown capitalist pig feast.
There is an industry in nursing homes something along the lines of gas station franchises. Giant corporations (American Hospital, for example) horizontally diversified into owning hospitals, hospital supplies (surgery to diapers), HMO's, visiting home nurses, attendant services, and nursing home franchises. These conglomerates are behind the legislation and policies that keep Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security policies directed at this service market model--they consider it Their market and Their model for healthcare. They are the reason that there is no national cradle to grave healthcare. The current wheelchair protests are one battle in this broad front war. And, it gets worse. Since government doesn't have the bureaucratic infrastructure to manage, monitor and disperse public healthcare monies they contract those vast jobs out to the private insurance industry. Of course this means thousands of poorly trained idiots at low wages on the phone denying valid claims for services and care by the bushel, all with the moral sop they are saving money, i.e. making money for the contracted companies. HICFA is supposed to monitor these folks, but that's like appointing Clinton Dean of Women at your local college.
In opposition to corporate healthcare are what remains in the Medicare and Social Security legislative provisions (along with ADA and other laws) that provide for the disabled, families with disabled children and the aged on social security to re-bill, or send vouchers to the state and fed agencies for home care and other support services provided by whomever they select and/or hire to do the work. In other words, corporate healthcare providers want their trough feed for this public money unfettered by any possibility of alternative models--such as community based service organizations (CIL's or Centers for Independent Living). These latter groups, almost exclusively run by the disabled, were developed under the last of the war on poverty legislation in the early Seventies to de-institutionalize and provide community support services to disability and aging populations as a civil rights movement. These organizations put disabled people back into the community, into the schools, jobs and government positions. That is the reason you now see people in wheelchairs driving around causing trouble, disabled kids in public schools, and community senior/disability housing and community centers. In contrast, by enforcing re-institutionalization through the privatization of healthcare services, the civil and human rights clock gets turned back on a whole segment of the population--one we will all probably join some day. The money that should go to individuals, families, and community service organizations gets channeled to these corporate entities to sell their service model--which is essentially death on the installment plan.
Seriously, Lbo'ers it is worth whatever it takes to expose the whole medicare, medicaid, HMO, Insurance, home care service, nursing home nightmare. These systems have turned healthcare into a for-profit killing, maiming, and torture machine.
I see it every hour of every day I fix wheelchairs and do home and institution service calls. I literally work at the very bottom of the poverty scale and see people diseased and dying in their own urine, feces, and bed sores. It is raw stuff, and it is all directly due to this healthcare nightmare brought to us by the gross pigs of the healthcare industry. One of Capitalism's finest hours.
The healthcare industry is the capitalisation of fear and loathing.
Chuck Grimes
PS. Sorry about the lack of concrete data. I'll have to leave that to those who can stomach it. One figure that is worth pondering. I heard one presentation that put the total expenditures and capital devoted to healthcare in all its forms at 20-30% of the GDP. I have no idea if that figure is realistic or not. But whatever it is, it is a huge chunk of resources, especially if you consider we have the worst health figures in the first world in almost all categories. In other words that money isn't keeping us healthy, it is making somebody else rich.