Civilized Healthcare

We enjoyed excellent healthcare as missionaries in Brazil. The mission board was self-insured and covered whatever the doctors determined to be the best care for their patients. Any oversight of care was done by a couple of medical doctors who worked for the board in the US, making recommendations and looking at medical practices worldwide. A visit to my cardiologist cost $50. The same for our pediatrician, OB/GYN, or any other doctor we needed to see. Each one of them was a professor at the medical school in Porto Alegre. My cardiologist made two trips a year to the US for the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association meetings. Our pediatric surgeon lectured in Canada. A visit to any of them meant spending a full half-hour face-to-face with the physician who took their own notes and ran any in-office tests personally. We had cell-phone, beeper, and email access to them otherwise. The only other person we encountered in their offices was a receptionist.

My parents received great care in their latter years, thanks to an insurance policy covering their long-term care. When I sold such policies, I could not touch the premiums they had paid, as costs had risen exorbitantly, and the insurers had shifted to new actuary models for predicting the costs of care.

A parishioner has been receiving substandard care at a nice facility in town. It's not the fault of the workers on the floor. I watched a young gal carefully and lovingly feeding him, speaking with him, and encouraging him while visiting one afternoon. It was a touching visit to witness the depth of care he was receiving from her. On the other hand, he was developing bed sores, as the facility did not have adequate staffing to change his position in bed every two hours as they were supposed to do. There are signs up at the road that they are hiring, but we have a great shortage of workers, as the industry has been demeaning their work and undervaluing them in terms of livable wages, while asking more and more of them. The problem is that he was a means of profit to the corporation owning the facility. The corporate concern is not giving him and others the best care possible and seeking the best health outcomes. The concern driving the business is profit – greed.

It's the same in our hospital systems. The doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals are not allowed to care for patients as they did when my mother worked the hospital floors as a nurse. A nurse today is a computer data entry specialist who sees and cares for patients as a side gig to the workday. My medical doctors are only allowed 7 minutes with me by insurance company rules. That is often not enough time to determine the best course of treatment. When they determine what course they should take, that has to be submitted to insurance company guidelines so that a non-licensed, non-medically trained, employee can look up what the company has decided is the most economical way to treat the maximum number of patients, despite what the medical professionals determine to be the best practice for a particular patient.

That is not a healthcare system. It is not a system that places the people under its care at the top of its concerns. It is a profit system that happens to operate in a medical field.

Margaret Mead told us that the first sign of civilization was a healed femur. It meant that the social group was caring for their injured and nursing them through recovery back to health. We are forgetting that most basic building block of civilization in our quest for wealth and power.

It's way past time we abolished for-profit medical practice. The CEOs of pharmaceutical, hospital, elder-care, and medical equipment suppliers answer to share-holders and their interests in making ever-greater profits. It's not a healthy system. It is not a health system. It does not mind kicking someone to the curb, as long as its profit motives are satisfied.



— ©Copyright 2024, Christopher B. Harbin 



http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/

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