Profit From Illness.

       Capitalism is stateless, capitalism doesn't recognise borders, capitalism has no morality, capitalism is raw selfish greed, nothing more nothing less. Capitalism is also extremely inefficient, as the present pandemic is now proving, capitalism can't cope with large emergencies, its solutions always leave out large swaths of the public, who suffer because of this inefficiency and on many occasions die. Why do we tolerate this greed driven system to rule our lives? There are alternatives, just think about it.

Some truths from Not Buying Anything: 

 

      When corporate bigwigs raise the prices of things for no reason other than greed, they are doing their jobs. That is the system we live in, and no one says much about it since it increases the GDP, and makes billionaires like clouds make raindrops.
      A common business adage is that a good capitalist will charge as much for a product as the consumer will bear.
    However, when one of the little people feels like being enterprising and taking advantage of the "freedom of the marketplace" and "supply and demand economics", all hell breaks loose.
      $400.00 dollar hand sanitizer is likely to get a small business person scathing judgements and death threats, even though customers may still be buying at that price.
       Price gouging is considered unethical, and for good reasons. But only when the little people do it.
     Drug companies are only one area notorious for unethical practices. Reading the following list it is obvious that price gouging is taking place, and people are paying with their lives.

      The cost of Bavencio, a new cancer drug approved in March, is about $156,000 a year per patient.

       A new muscular dystrophy drug came on the market late last year for an eye-popping price of $300,000 annually.

      In 2016, the FDA appproved Tecentriq, a new bladder cancer treatment that costs $12,500 a month, or $150,000 a year.

     Even older drugs that have long been on the market are not immune: The cost of insulin tripled between 2002 and 2013, despite no notable changes in the formulation or manufacturing process.

    The four-decade-old EpiPen, a lifesaving allergy medication, has seen a price hike of 500 percent since 2007. - AARP Bulletin

       If Handwash Guy can't get away with earning a few thousand reselling his product, how does Big Drug get away with it?
      “The simple answer is because there’s nothing stopping them,” said Leigh Purvis, a health services researcher.
      So what other price gouging is taking place, since in the land of extreme capitalism there is nothing, legislation or morals, to stop them?
       Gas? Housing? Food? Internet access? Health care?
Everything?
     And isn't capitalism itself about to price gouge all of us to the tune of several trillion dollars over the next few days?
    It is obvious who the real price gougers are.

Get ready to be gouged again.

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Profit From Illness.

        We keep hearing our prancing political ballerinas spouting about how the National Health Service is safe in their hands, and that there are no plans to privatise the NHS. What utter bullshit, the NHS has been getting privatised slice by slice for years and it is still continuing.

From Kings Fund:

         The Department of Health and Social Care’s accounts also show that NHS providers spent £1.3 billion2 on services from non-NHS organisations in 2018/19. Data from NHS Improvement shows that NHS providers spent £271 million on outsourcing services to other providers, including the private sector, in 2018/19 – up from £221 million in 2017/18. This includes outsourcing elective hospital treatment in order to deliver waiting times targets.
         If spending on primary care services – including GPs, pharmacy, optical and dental services – is included, some have estimated that approximately 25 per cent of NHS spending goes on the private sector.

        Anybody that holds any illusions that this creeping privatising of the NHS will some how be reversed under a capitalist system is naive in the extreme. With the engineered problems in the NHS it is likely to become a galloping privatisation, with governments seeing private capital as the white knight that will rescue our struggling NHS, but also making lots of money from people's health problems, for the financial Mafia. A system of profit governing your treatment, not your needs.

       Then there is this talk of opening up the NHS to the American market, which of course will lead to an American style Health Service. The following is just one example of how the American Health Service works.

This from the Guardian: 

 'I live on the street now': how Americans fall into medical bankruptcy 

        It’s been over a dozen years since Susanne LeClair of West Palm Beach, Florida was first diagnosed with cancer and she’s been fighting ever since. Now she, like many other Americans facing life-threatening illness, is bankrupt despite having health insurance.
       Before her first cancer-related surgery, LeClair was told by the hospital they accepted her employer-based health insurance.
      “I paid my $300 copay. After the surgery, I started receiving all these invoices and came to find out the only thing covered was my bed because the hospital was out of network,” said LeClair. “My bills were hundreds of thousands of dollars, so I had no choice but to file bankruptcy.”
        LeClair is on the verge of having to file for bankruptcy a second time due to the mounting medical debt she has accrued for additional cancer-related surgeries, regular appointments, medications and supplies related to her recovery, despite having health insurance and paying as much as she can out of pocket for copays, deductibles and premiums to maintain insurance.
       “My medical bills are at $52,000. I’ve done everything from credit cards to consolidation loans, I just keep simply paying one credit card with another interest-free one until I can pay the next one,” LeClair added. “It’s the side of cancer most people don’t understand or know about and it’s never-ending. It just keeps adding up and adding up and before you know it you’re back in debt that you can’t believe again.”
       Bankruptcy can also make it difficult to find employment given that many employers will disqualify a candidate with a bankruptcy filing found from a background check.
        According to a study published in February 2019, about 530,000 bankruptcies filed annually are because of debt accrued due to a medical illness. The study found that even the Obama administration’s landmark Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare) has failed to change the proportion of bankruptcies caused by medical debts, with poor health insurance cited as one of the main culprits.

Read the full article HERE:

Visit ann arky's home home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

You're Not Sick, You're A Malingerer.

       We all know, or should know, that the system of capitalism wants to dismantle the welfare system. We all know, or should know, that they are being aided and abetted by the various governments, especially the cabal of millionaires, who at present, are sitting with their hands on the control levers in the Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption. The proof keeps popping up as the National Health Service is sliced and diced up in bite size pieces for the corporate world to gobble up, and benefits are slashed and re-worked to be unavailable to those who need them.
      So it is encouraging when a book exposing this pushing of the ideology of corporatism controlling everything for profit, gets a bit of publicity. Perhaps the exposure will prompt more people to act and take action against this ever increasing drive to corporatism, and away from caring and compassion. What I mean by that is, bring about the end of capitalism.

This from Disabled News Service: 

       A string of activists, academics, politicians and journalists have welcomed the publication of a new book by a disabled researcher which exposes how successive governments have planned the “demolition of the welfare state”.
        Mo Stewart has spent eight years researching the influence of the US insurance giant Unum over successive UK governments, and how it led to the introduction of the “totally bogus” work capability assessment (WCA), which she says was designed to make it harder for sick and disabled people to claim out-of-work disability benefits.

        We all know, or should know, what comes out of politicians' mouths is not what is discussed behind closed doors. Their devious plans are for their partners in crime, platitudes are for public consumption.
Quote from her book:

       She describes in her book how Peter Lilley, secretary of state for social security in John Major’s Conservative government, hired senior Unum executive John LoCascio to advise the UK government on how to cut the number of claimants of long-term sickness benefits.
       She says that Mansel Aylward (pictured), the chief medical adviser in Lilley’s department – which was later to be renamed the Department for Work and Pensions – went on to co-author an academic paper with LoCascio in 1995 which argued that GPs should be side-lined from advising on claimants’ fitness for work.
       Both Aylward and LoCascio went on to contribute to a conference held at Woodstock, near Oxford, in November 2001, which examined so-called “malingering and illness deception”.
        The conference papers were later published, says Stewart, and argued that “malingering” was a lifestyle choice for many claimants of long-term sickness benefits.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

 

     

CORPORATE HEALTH SERVICE!!!

         

       As all the establishment figures debate the NHS “reforms” all the arguments are around, too much, too fast and too deep. None of the notables entering the debate even hint at the real problem with these “reforms”. What is actually happening is the privatisation of the health service. GPs control the finance, they will have to select services from a variety of “providers” among these will be the big corporations, who no doubt will work hard at undercutting here and there, just to get their feet in the door, and then the usual corporate rip-off. Hospitals will be obliged to open their doors to private “providers” and those hospitals that don't make a profit will have no alternative but to close. Competing ambulance services all trying to make a profit, instead of one efficient ambulance service properly funded. The GPs will be bound to get what is normally called “best value for money”, after all they can't be seen to be wasting money by buying care from a dearer source when big brother corporate world is there offering a cheaper version. By the time of the next election there will be no NHS as we know it, it will be a complete free market affair similar to the American system. If you have the money you'll get the care you need, if you have good insurance, well you'll be OK. However if you fall into the category of the ordinary person and have a long term illness, well you'll simply be away down the list. After all what profit making concern wants a load of people that need expensive long term treatment, there's no profit in that. Perhaps the charities will help out. Welcome to 21 century Victorian Britain.

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