One of the things that constantly bewilders me is the fascination people have with a fundamentally flawed “healthcare” system that exists in this country.
It’s widely known that US healthcare is unfair, unbalanced, biased, and generally not up to the level that people would like to think of it. But this isn’t a sociali[sz]ed medicine rant. I’ll save my ranting about how many poor people (including children, thanks to GWB) must suffer at the hands of the haves, because nobody wants to pay just a little bit more tax for a system that is actually fair (I believe in capitalism, but capitalism that works – i.e. everyone gets education and healthcare on some basic level without having to go begging), for another day. Nobody listens to my arguments anyway.
This is a rant about the healthcare industry. You know, the one that owns TV advertising. The one that would sell its own grandmother just to make a fast buck…”selling your own grandmother isn’t for everyone, my doctor says I should”…yada yada yada. Every ten minutes. They annoy me trying to convince me that I need medication that I don’t, then they get upset when they have to settle record lawsuits with people who bought what they said. I don’t expect them to be impartial, nor do I expect many US doctors to offer entirely impartial advice (not with how they are funded), but I would like there to be some balls to organizations supposedly overseeing this little circus, worth billions annually. It’s so frustrating.
You know what really pisses me off even more? Seeing commercials for big-pharma and how it’s helping people get more access to medication. No it’s not. Big pharma doesn’t want social medicine, or any of the alternatives, if it can ever possibly avoid having it. So they plough just enough money into (good for PR…and great for TV advertising) campaigns to plug enough of the problem that the masses will think they’re doing everyone a favor. It’s extremely disturbing. In many countries, such practices might get called out for what they really are – and certainly a lot of the TV commercials I see would likely be banned under various false-advertising legislation.
Rant over, until the next time I don’t skip over one medical commercial too many and even my PVR doesn’t save readers from hearing about it. I dearly love this country, don’t get me wrong (I don’t want to go back to the other King George), but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have opinions about how to make it better 
Jon.
“[...] nobody wants to pay just a little bit more tax for a system that is actually fair [...]“
I live in a country where the State constantly uses the “let’s charge a bit more taxes to solve this problem” technique (including but not limited to healthcare problems) and this never worked.