What To Do About Big Pharma And The “Sick Care” Industry

Retire World

Written By admin
January 2011

This post reflects our ideology at Retire Worldwide that the so-called “health care” industry run by Big Pharma is at least as damaging to the physical health of our society as the Banksters on Wall Street are to our personal finances.

We also believe the banking and “health-care” (a.k.a. “sick care) industries have pockets so deep, they are able to significantly influence the decisions made by law makers in Washington to “pretend and extend” the current system, all the while enriching themselves.

At its core, we have a health care system designed to treat symptoms and ignore prevention.  Our food, air and water supplies are inundated with damaging chemicals (antibiotics, fertilizers, pesticides, etc) but our health care industry seeks only to treat symptoms.  In other words symptoms = profits, not cures.  Who in the current health care industry would profit from a cure or a successful preventative strategy?  The eventual costs, both in terms of money and poor health, are born by tax payers and the general public while top executives live lavish lives sustained by seven figure paychecks.  The same executives are protected by the corporate structure from personal liabilities.

As a tribute to how obviously broken our health care system is, we still can’t believe the ads for prescription drugs we see on TV actually work, but they must, because we see them over and over again.  We simply can’t believe there are drug ads that show pictures of happy, healthy people, while the voice narration spews sentence after sentence of potentially sever side affects, increased health risks, and even death from taking that particular drug.  The ads always end with “ask your doctor” and that’s how Big Pharma passes the liability over to the doctors, who are protected by law from malpractice related to FDA approved drugs.

Since we are encouraged from birth to always trust our doctor, people figure their doctor must have the answers but in many cases the “answer” is not black or white, so doctors end up prescribing the drugs promoted by big drug companies as a matter of course.  And it’s no secret any more that Big Pharma uses all kinds of financial incentives to encourage doctors to prescribe their drugs.  Doctors receive everything from fancy vacations to cash bonuses for cooperation that relates to the overall promotion of a drug to the medical industry.

In fact, from the patient’s perspective, defying your doctor’s recommendations can often void your health  and/or life insurance policy, which discourages people from attempting alternatives to doctor-prescribed drug treatments.  The health and life insurance industries also profit from the broken health care system, and are among the biggest winners to emerge from the ObamaCare health plan which illegally forces Americans to have private health insurance.

And it turns out our “savior”, the Food and Drug Administration, who our government funds to protect our health interests, is loaded with former Big Pharma executives.  The FDA is heavily influenced by scientific “evidence” presented by Big Pharma that certain drugs do work “some of the time”, yet how many of these studies follow the affects of prescription drugs over the entire life of the user?

So here is what the broken “sick care” system looks like:

Chemicals added to food, air and water = symptoms of health problems = doctor visits = expensive doctor bill = health insurance = prescription drugs = big profits to Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Food companies = lobbyists funded by those companies = laws that keep the system going = laws, subsidies, and pet projects that work against natural solutions, preventative education, and alternative treatments

Does anyone else see a viscous circle here?

But the public is slowly waking up.

It’s always nice to see someone from the mainstream “health care industry” venture out of the box and acknowledge the “alternative” side of health care, as David H. Klein does in this article as president and chief executive officer of Excellus BlueCross BlueShield in Rochester, New York.

Read Full Article….