Doctors Speak Out: Healthcare Has Been Reduced to a Making Money Factory

'Two doctors from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard's teaching hospital, have taken an unusual step for the medical profession. These courageous physicians are speaking out about today's healthcare system which emphasizes money over individualized patient care. 

In an article just published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Pamela Hartzband, MD, and Jerome Groopman,MD, are blunt about their frustration with a system that has "reduced medicine to economics." 

In fact, they go so far as to say hospitals have been turned into "factories" that reduce clinical encounters between a patient and doctor into simply "economic transactions." '

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U.S. Ranks 49th in Life Expectancy, First in Health Care Costs

 By Dr. Mercola

'America ranks 49th in life expectancy worldwide, putting it lower than a dozen other developed nations. 

 

However, researchers determined that obesity, traffic accidents and a high murder rate may not be the main causes -- the U.S. didn't stand out as doing any worse in these areas than any of the other countries studied.

Instead, poor health care may be to blame. Factors such as costly specialized and fragmented care are likely playing a large role in the nation's poor performance'

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Commenting on the study in Salon, Glenn Greenwald noted:

"It's easy to say and easy to document, but quite difficult to really internalize, that the United States is in the process of imperial collapse. Every now and then, however, one encounters certain facts which compellingly and viscerally highlight how real that is."

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Top 50 Psychiatrists Paid by Pharmaceutical Companies

'Who were the top 50 psychiatrists in the U.S. paid by the top seven pharmaceutical companies? This past week, ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest, recently decided to answer that question by compiling a list of 384 physicians and health care providers who earned more than $100,000 total from one or more of the seven companies that have disclosed payments in 2009 and early 2010. Click here for the full list of 384 physicians. We combed that list and found the top 50 psychiatry earners for the past two years (2009-2010). You can click on any name below to learn more about the physician.'


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EXPLOSIVE CONFLICT OF INTEREST: WHO PROFITS FROM THE NATIONAL HEALTH PLAN? AND FROM OTHER INVESTMENTS…

By Jon Rappoport


I have to begin by saying you need to know about Walter Burien. http://CAFR1.com

Walter curls people’s hair. For many years, he has been investigating the investments made by governments. The what? I know. This sounds like a non-sequitur. Governments aren’t businesses, are they?

It turns out they are. Well, when you think about it, it’s obvious. They run, for example, retirement funds for their employees, and those funds make investments, they don’t just store money in shoe boxes.

Recently, Walter provided a link to the New York State Retirement Fund Asset Listing (March 31, 2006). You can find it at: http://cafr1.com/STATES/NEWYORK/RETIREMENT/NYRINV2006.PDF

This document shows the investments this fund makes, and the value of each stock holding. The implications are enormous. For example, when you pinpoint the many pharmaceutical stocks, you realize New York State government will be a primary beneficiary of any national health plan. Why? Because drug companies, under such a plan, will be selling far more drugs as millions of new, previously uninsured people come under the federal umbrella.

Any piece of news that makes the pharma landscape glow tends to shoot up stock values.

From a financial point of view, it would be ridiculous to assume New York State government would oppose national health insurance. It’s good for business. The business of, yes, New York State government.

And by the way, to the extent that some of these drug companies manufacture vaccines (and they do), the New York State government would be a big-time supporter of the mass vaccinations that accompany each new phony epidemic, such as Swine Flu. Again, for business reasons. In fact, we may now understand a new reason why, until huge protests derailed it, New York tried to make the H1N1 vaccine mandatory for all state health workers.

Here are some of the pharmaceutical listings in the New York Retirement Fund. The value of each stock holding is as of Mar.31, 2006.

Schering-Plough: $138,013,129
Barr: $39,152, 525
Baxter: $105,606, 745
Gilead: $127,348,101
Roche: $87,762,875
MedImmune: $46,942, 968
Sanofi-Aventis:$153,887,891
Bayer: $39,318,918
Bristol-Myers Squibb: $195,807,422
GlaxoSmithKline: $137,729,350
Pfizer: $834,756,329
Novartis: $131,221,033
Merck: $344,768,742
Eli Lilly: $249,409,636
Vertex: $17,947,395

Drug companies. $2.5 billion and change. One retirement fund in one state.

Walter Burien goes much further—and here you would have to consult his site for supporting evidence. He states that, when you look at the various investment funds of the 50 state governments, and when you consider the possibility that many of these funds act (invest) in concert, governments turn out to be controlling stockholders in some of the biggest corporations in America.

Turn that thought over in your mind a few times.

Here’s another explosion: To what degree did the federal bailout bail out the New York State government? Well, among the 2006 NY Retirement Fund listings, we have:

Goldman Sachs: $268,770,613
Bank of America: $896,993,638
Citigroup: $1,036,682,080.

This gives another perspective on what a fed bailout means. It functions as profit protection. For a state government.

Imagine state legislators and other state officials consulting THE INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO of their state government before they vote for or against legislation.

The hits keep coming.

“As governor of your state, my friends, I am taking every action I can to assure the profits of this administration continue to rise. As taxpayers, you are the stakeholders. What you pay us, we invest. Of course, we never show you the balance sheet, and we never indicate whether we need your taxes, or whether our profits alone are sufficient for running the state. But that’s the way the game works. You stay in the dark. When we raise your taxes, we give you reasons—which may be accurate or sheer nonsense. The point is, we keep taking your money and investing it…”

JON RAPPOPORT
www.insolutions.info
www.nomorefakenews.com

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