The Medical Industrial Complex

Commentary By Ron Beasley

We have all heard of the of the military industrial complex.  Almost 50 years after Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about it we still have wars that are more about defense industry oligarchs making money than defending the nation and nothing has changed on Obama's watch.  But what about the medical industrial complex.  Obama's health care reform is little more than health insurance reform and little is being done to reduce the costs of health care.  The medical industry is just as powerful as the the military industry.  The fight over the "public option" is like fighting over how many aspirins to give to a brain cancer patient.  While the insurance companies play a part in the high cost of health care in this country they are far from the only problem.  While the talk has been about "rationing" health care there has been little discussion about procedures that should not have been performed, tests that should not have been run or drugs that should not have been prescribed.  Why? Because the oligarchs of the medical industrial complex are making lots of money and like things just the way they are.

Why 60% of all surgeries are medically unjustified and how surgeons exploit patients to generate profits

An estimated 7.5 million unnecessary medical and surgical procedures are performed each year, writes Gary Null, PhD., in Death by Medicine. Rather than reverse the problems they purport to fix, these unwarranted procedures can often lead to greater health problems and even death. A 1995 report by Milliman & Robertson, Inc. concluded that nearly 60 percent of all surgeries performed are medically unnecessary, according to Under The Influence of Modern Medicine by Terry A. Rondberg. Some of the most major and frequently performed unnecessary surgeries include hysterectomies, Cesarean sections and coronary artery bypass surgeries.

Coronary bypasses are the most common unnecessary surgeries in America

In a nation plagued by heart disease, it often seems that the knee-jerk reaction of American doctors is to treat heart problems with surgery. However, many of the heart surgeries performed each year are unnecessary procedures that could be putting the patients' lives at greater risk. "(W)hen faced with heart disease, doctors recommend a bypass. By so doing, we think, they bypass the real problem. Bypasses are the single most commonly performed unnecessary surgery in the country," write Dr. Mark Hyman and Dr. Mark Liponis in Ultraprevention. In fact, according to Burton Goldberg, author of Heart Disease, most coronary artery bypass surgeries and angioplasties produce no real benefit to the patient and dangerous side effects like stroke or brain damage may result from the operations. "Coronary artery bypass surgery is called an 'overprescribed and unnecessary surgery' by many leading authorities," Goldberg writes. "Complications from such treatments are common and the expense to the health care system is extraordinarily high. In 1994, an estimated 501,000 bypass surgeries at $44,000 each were performed on Americans, 47 percent of which were done on men.”

I told the story of my 87 year old mother who has a bad heart valve.  The cardiologist was ready to crack her chest open and replace the valve.  I asked a lot of questions and got the following answers: 

1. There was at least a 25% chance she would not survive the surgery
2. She would suffer memory loss as a result of being on a heart-lung machine
3. She would never be as good after the surgery as she was before
4. The surgeon would not recommend the surgery for his own mother

Needless to say we chose not to have the surgery but they were ready to do it because Medicare would pay.

Billions are spent each year on chemotherapy.  We have this from The Moss Reports.

Increasingly sophisticated and expensive cellular poisons are being given to seriously ill patients with colon, breast, lung and prostate cancer. Now an epidemiologist has analyzed the actual rate of life extension in such patients. His findings are that despite all the alleged progress, patients do not actually live a day longer.

[.....]

Epidemiologist Dieter Hoelzel, 62, says that "as far as survival with metastatic cancer of the colon, breast, lung and prostate goes, there has been no progress in the past 25 years." He has documented the outcome of patients treated since 1978 in and around Munich, according to the standard methods of oncology. These are people suffering from the advanced stages of one of the four major internal cancers, which annually claim about 100,000 victims in Germany alone. These tumors are the big killers.

If a tumor has metastasized, and can no longer be reached by surgery or X rays, then chemotherapy is considered the treatment of last resort. For decades, a series of new cellular poisons have been used. Often drug manufacturers have also demanded astronomically high prices. In exchange, they promise a longer life.

So we are spending billions to give people false hope and fat profits for the drug manufacturers.  It should be noted that unlike other physicians oncologists are allowed to act as their own pharmacists and make money on these cellular poisons themselves.

It would seem that some "rationing" might be in order as part of real reform of health care.