HEALTHCARE CAPITALISM

Every American now knows that the country is currently in the throes of a horrible wave of opioid overdoses, with tens of thousands of people dying every year.  The numbers are so bad that a recent study found that the average American lifespan actually decreased in 2018, partly due to the sheer volume of overdose deaths, which stands at somewhere over seventy two thousand a year. 
While the scourge of drug use is certainly nothing new in this country, this epidemic is different because it can't be traced back to some new form of street drug like crack, instead it has its roots in corporate malfeasance.   A recent court finding found that the owners of Purdue, a pharmaceutical company, lied for years about how addictive their drug oxycontin was.  There are even internal memos detailing how former president of the company Richard Sackler wrote in an email back in 2001  that the company should deal with people addicted to their drugs by saying "We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”  This was all part of the company's plan to promote oxycontin with outright lies about the nature of its addictive qualities, and the enormous success they had in doing that is why we have such a terrible problem with opioids now.  As the New York Times recently pointed out, Since OxyContin came on the market in 1996, more than 200,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription opioids.
While corporate indifference to human life is nothing new in this country (how long did tobacco companies lie about their product?), these revelations highlight what is a serious problem in this country: the danger of healthcare and prescription drugs companies running as free market companies.   In many ways, America's healthcare problems are symptomatic of the whole country: we have some of the best medical technology and procedures available in the world, but we have to pay more to have access to them.  And while competition among pharmaceutical companies can spur innovation, they can also easily create problems like our current opioid troubles. While there is nothing wrong with the free market determining the sale of things like TVs and cars, healthcare is another thing entirely.  The fact of the matter is that for healthcare companies to please their stock holders, they need to provide as little actual service to its members as possible.  So nearly every healthcare plan is a crazy patchwork of what medical procedures are and are not covered, based entirely on the company's profitability.  And while Obamacare was a good first step (and despite Republican attempts, it's still mostly hanging in there), universal coverage to all American citizens is still necessary.

The good news is that the American public are getting wise to this terrible system, with healthcare being the number one issue for voters in the recent Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives.  (Even President Trump himself claimed during the campaign that he wanted to create some kind of universal healthcare program, although that was just another one of his may lies.) The Democratic party has cleverly created a catch phrase for future healthcare in this country:  Medicare for all, a smart way to piggyback onto one of the most popular government programs in existence.  There will be inevitable pushback from the corporate system, and the transition may be jarring (personally I think a slow approach, with an expansion of Medicaid eligibility, combined with a gradual lowering of the age for Medicare eligibility, is the way to go), but the possibility that sometime in the near future a Democratic president will finally usher a new age of universal healthcare for this country is not crazy.  It can't happen soon enough for me.