Health care biopsy.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side

Most countries are proud to have a health care system. It's an organized way of helping the sick and infirm--a mark of genuine civilization. Not so here, alas, where the health system is rapidly becoming a health hazard. After decades of privatizing, profiteering, and insurance company-driven bureaucratization, Florence Nightingale has morphed into Vampira.

Health care costs are sucking the blood out of the economy, for one thing. Consider poor General Motors, once America's flagship corporation and now sinking under the weight of its employee health benefits which account for $1,500 of the sticker price of each new vehicle. As GM contemplates bankruptcy, other companies thrash around, frantically, trying to shed their insurance-needy American employees. They downsize and outsource--anything to escape the burden of health costs. Hence, in no small part, our "jobless recovery." Companies don't want to assume responsibility for their workers' medical bills and (this being the global temple of free enterprise) neither does the government.

Then there are the U.S. health system's toxic effects on individuals, and I'm not referring to Vioxx or the approximately 200,000 people who die each year as a result of medical mistakes. Harvard's Elizabeth Warren recently co-authored a study showing that more than half of all bankruptcies are triggered by medical costs, and it's easy enough to see how. If you lose your job--through, say, downsizing or outsourcing--you lose your health insurance, and the uninsured are routinely charged up to three times more than those who have an insurance company to negotiate their hospital bills. As for emergency rooms--which the hard-hearted or incurious imagine absorbing all the poor and uninsured well, the average visit to an ER now costs a little over $1,000.

Certainly the health system makes plenty of people rich--Big Pharma's overlords, for example, and CEOs like HealthSouth's Richard Scrushy, who received about $267 million in compensation from his company between 1996 and 2002. It makes a lot more people poor: indirectly, by inhibiting job growth, and directly, by grinding individuals down to bankruptcy (which, thanks to the new federal bankruptcy law, offers no fresh start to most of the debt-ridden). Add to this the well-known fact that poverty is a risk factor for dozens of diseases--from asthma to AIDS, from depression to diabetes--and, well, I rest my case.

Now when doctors notice a tissue growing nonstop, as...