Mad. Just mad.

If medical bills underly 60% of bankruptcies, then how much of all debt, including outstanding debt that hasn’t yet crippled anyone, is due to medical expenses? The figure comes from a Harvard Law School/Harvard Medical School/Ohio University report (via HuffPo), which also found that

Nationally, a quarter of firms cancel coverage immediately when an employee suffers a disabling illness; another quarter do so within a year.

I’m simplifying but… basically, if you get seriously sick you have about a 50% chance of ending up with no health insurance coverage. I mean, your – by then probably former – employer *may* politely offer you COBRA coverage that you can pay for yourself (with your non-existent salary), at the rate of 110% of the monthly premium of your old coverage.

I can’t stop thinking something: the American health insurance industry is pretty much responsible for bringing down the world’s finances. If there weren’t so many bankruptcies due to healthcare expenses, there wouldn’t have been so many people unable to pay mortgages. There wouldn’t have been so many foreclosures. The world’s tremendously interconnected financial system wouldn’t be in quite as bad a shape and might have had a bit of breathing room in which to deal with some of its stupidest ideas of all time. Iceland would never have gone bankrupt. Rightwing extremism wouldn’t be as severe everywhere in the world.

(Then again, an unregulated industry so interconnected that the world’s governments are forced to hand them free money should anything go seriously wrong with their business has no incentive to fix itself so… We would probably be screwed anyway.)

But if American healthcare weren’t profit-motivated, we would see a lot of positive changes. Like routine doctor’s visits not requiring endless phone calls to get your very expensive insurance to pay for them. (This is something I spend lots of time on these days: endless phone calls to our mind-blowingly expensive insurance company because they keep trying not to pay for f*&#ing routine doctor’s visits. At this point, I’m pretty well convinced that the CEOs of health insurance companies ought to be convicted of crimes against humanity.)

Profit skews everything away from preventing people from getting sick because hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and even insurance companies can’t make money if people have no illnesses to cure, no reason to endure expensive procedures/tests/medications/interventions that then require more expensive procedures/tests/medications/interventions for the cascade of side effects they cause. I’m not saying ALL such things are unnecessary, just that a for-profit healthcare system will encourage providers to lead patients towards them because a lot more money is made that way than through the practice of long-term preventive care that would, you know, prevent patients from needing said expensive procedures/tests/medications/interventions.

Interventions don’t make you healthier and, for example, there are too many unnecessary c-sections performed that endanger the health of both mother and child. The U.S. is not actually such a great place for moms: it’s ranked 27th in the world on the latest Mother’s Index of the yearly State of the World’s Mother’s report. I think it’s fairly safe to lay part of the blame on a for-profit healthcare industry for this: many moms can’t afford health insurance at all, and too many of the ones that can have risky major surgery (like a c-section – even in cases when nature could do what it needs to) foisted upon them because the hospital makes more money that way than if nature is allowed to do what it needs to.

There are calls for government-run healthcare programs: perhaps a system like Medicare for all. It couldn’t be worse than what there is now. Except perhaps if it’s only one possible program among many: leaving the healthcare industry’s profit-motive intact, most especially that of the for-profit health insurance industry. And its CEO salaries: these 23 men together took home $14.9 billion in 2005. Imagine what you could do with just a part of that money, say 10% of each of their salaries:

10% of 14.9 billion is 1.4 billion. If basic insurance costs $8,000/year for a family then taking 10% from just these CEO salaries would insure 35,000 Americans a year for five years. That is a lot of people that can be helped just by 23 men. Looking at the companies as a whole that profit from health care, we can probably pay for every uninsured person in this country for decades to come. (CEO Compensation: Who Said Health Care is in a Financial Crisis?)

Imagine how much money would be freed up for other industries that actually produce something, if for-profit health insurance were scrapped. I know that last sentence is simplistic but I can’t help it. All this is just so, so, so very wrong.