Capitalism is failing medical field -- Need to nationalize or make public medicine

The following is my comment in response to above video:

By Glen Wallace

It wouldn't have to be a public company. I often compare the idea of public manufacture and distribution of pharmaceuticals to the longstanding US Government Printing Office, AKA Government Publishing Office, that for many decades has manufactured and sold printed materials from pamphlets to books and sells those materials to the public. So we could potentially open a US Government Pharmaceuticals & Medical Devices Office that researches, develops, manufactures and distributes meds and medical devices at cost or no cost to patients according to need. But yes, regardless of what it is called, we need a public pharma that is patient need based instead of the current Big Pharma medical system that is market profit based. The current US medical system relies on the unsafe assumption that what is good for the corporation is also going to be good for the patient and the general public. We need only look at the price gouging with insulin to prove wrong that assumption of a symbiotic relationship between capitalism and good medicine. Insulin prices show there is often an antagonistic relationship between capitalism and good medicine. And yet most of the medical field mindset is in the monkey trap that traps the monkey by putting a sweet nut inside a cage, monkey puts its hand into a small hole to grab the nut but finds it can't get its hand out while its hand is clenched on the nut and is thus trapped by the cage tethered to the ground because it doesn't occur to the monkey to just let go of the nut. Similarly it doesn't occur to the vast majority of the members of the U.S. medical field and the politicians governing the field to just let go of the nut requiring meds and medical devices only be delivered by way of the capitalist market -- they remain fixated on the idea that they must have med products go through this Rube Goldberg device of capitalism first before the products can possibly get to the patients. And a public pharma shouldn't have to limit itself to just generic drugs. Laws could be passed exempting the public sector from patent restrictions for meds and medical devices. Any complaint that such an exemption would disincentivise research & development with private pharma, could be countered by nationalizing the research & development of medicine and medical devices also. Most of the scientists go into the field with the goal of finding cures and helping people anyways; making their research part of the public sphere would just give them the resources to find those cures along with allowing them to better direct the research according to public need instead of current private for-profit research that is directed by the corporate bean counters that will veto any research if it doesn't have good promise of big profits regardless of how much promise the research may have at finding a cure.

Why hasn't Congresswoman Betty McCollum yet cosponsored H.R. 676 Medicare for all single payer act?

I just discovered that Democratic Party congresswoman Betty McCollum has not yet signed on as a co-sponsor of  H.R. 676 Medicare for All bill that has already garnered 112 cosponsors.  Here is the official listing of the co-sponsors.  I thought about this after watching a Jimmy Dore youtube video where he interviews a guy who is primarying against Nancy Pelosi -- Pelosi also not yet a cosponsor and has said words to the effect that she is against single payer.  This makes me wonder if maybe I should primary against McCollum, even though she doesn't represent my residential district.  That would be a little ironic because Represents congressman Jason Lewis 'represents' my district, but resides in McCollum's district.

Democratic constituents, in these congressional districts that lean so heavily Democratic that the Dem candidate is all but guaranteed to get elected, should see the primaries as brass ring opportunities to get the most progressive candidate possible.  By that I mean there isn’t much of a need in those districts for a candidate to compromise in order to acquire the moderate fence sitters that might get put off by the far left progressive positions of a candidate.  But instead, it seems more so that the opposite has occurred, whereby the constituents of perennial House Democrats settle for progressive mediocrity in electing very conventional neoliberal, corporate friendly candidates.

VA problems are no reason to abandon single payer idea

by Glen Wallace

While some may like to point out how the VA has supposedly done such a bad job, as a reason why the government shouldn't take over health care, they are ignoring some important counter arguments or reasons supporting government takeover.  For one, the negative accounts about the VA that people tend to refer to, are to a large extent brought to you by private, for profit, news media that gets a substantial portion of ad revenue from private insurers that have a vested interest in retaining the private health insurance system.  As a result I believe the private news programs are highlighting, focusing and magnifying the VA's problems, while largely ignoring similar issues and problems that plague the private health insurance system.  One need only look at the online reviews of private insurers to find a plethora of examples that make those insurer's look even worse than the VA.  And if a single payer system were implemented, then it would be more of an expansion of Medicare than an expansion of the the VA.

Before Obamacare was implemented, while listening to an NPR feature about individuals having problems with private insurers, if I remember correctly, I believe they quoted a statistic that two thirds of all individuals that declare medical bankruptcy, already had health insurance at the time of their bankruptcy.  And the reasons for such bankruptcies wasn't just due to high deductibles, many were the result of disagreements between insurers and providers about what procedures are, or should have been covered.  As a result, a patient ends up being responsible for for medical bills they thought were covered.  Sometimes the patients can end up getting such bills lowered or covered by the insurer, but getting to that point often turns into a full time job for the patient in the form of phone calls, and negotiations with a hospital and insurer.  Hearing such stories one has to wonder "There has to be a better way!"  Well there is a better way and there also is no need to reinvent the wheel -- that better way is already being used successfully in most of Europe in the form of a government run single payer health care system.

Let's Take Back the Democratic Party

by Glen Wallace

The recent election of Trump should be a clarion call and rallying cry not just to revive the Democratic Party but to bring it back to its original progressive values.  Too many progressive commentators act as apologists for the non progressive actions of Democratic Party members in and out of office.  A prime example is the time period soon after Obama took office when the Democrats had the brass ring of the Presidency and both houses of Congress but dropped the progressive ball of opportunity.  Instead of using that opportunity to enact a single payer program like Medicare for everyone, they enact a healthcare program, Obamacare, that, Thom Hartmann rightly pointed out, is nearly identical to the program proposed by President Nixon and enacted by then Governor Romney.  Let's call it like it is -- Obamacare is a Republican Party designed gift to health insurance companies and Big Pharma.  And don't try to tell me that during that 'brass ring' period any serious effort was made to institute a single payer program.  I remember that period when the Democrats could have 'run the tables' and I don't recall any speeches before congress or interviews on the Networks where members of congress and the President championed a single payer program.  That's because no effort was made -- no effort was made because the Democratic Party has been taken over by neoliberals  that value regressive laissez faire economic values over the progressive socialist values that the Democratic Party is supposed to be founded on.

Before the 2018 elections, coming up in two short years, we progressives need to make some decisions.  First, we need to boldly attempt to gain Democratic nominations for both local and national offices.  Second, we need to run for those nominations under a boldly socialist progressive platform that meets and even surpasses the progressive platform that nearly got Sanders the Democratic nominations for President.  Third, we need to decide, if, like in the 2016 Presidential Democratic nomination race, the neoliberal candidate still wins the nominations, will it be warranted for the progressive socialist candidate to turn around and run as a third party candidate.  The 2018 race will be coming before we know it and we shouldn't be delaying in at least thinking over what race will we be running for, what our platform will be and what to do if we don't get the nomination.

I'm already thinking about running for U.S. Congress in the District where I live and plan to be living in 2018.  I voted for the Democrat, Angie Craig, in the 2016 election, even though I consider her a neoliberal.  I think she has too close ties to the medical device industry being a former executive for a medical device manufacturer.  I'm not sure I'd have much better luck pitching my idea to her than the winner of the 2016 election, right wing regressive former talk radio host Jason Lewis, of the Government taking over the manufacture and distribution of drugs and medical devices in cases of price gouging such is the case with the Epipen.  Actually, I think the Government should take over the research, manufacture and distribution of medical devices and pharmaceuticals in any case where a need exists and the market is not meeting the need.  Such a plan is very socialist, some would say communist, but I say so be it, and I think the electorate would support the idea -- health is very important to the people.  Health is a value that transcends party politics and the electorate knows political labels are useless when facing a health crisis.  Even so, I don't see much hope for the government owning the means of production for medicine and medical devices so long as either Republicans or neoliberal Democrats are in charge of this country.    

In Spain workers now have to sacrifice their labor for the sake of the banksters

By Glen Wallace

The New York Times article For Spaniards, Having a Job No Longer Guarantees a Paycheck , seems to be describing a situation in Spain that is more dire than how it appears in the mainstream media here in the U.S.   Apparently there is a fairly widespread problem over there of people with jobs getting paid either very irregularly in small amounts or not at all.  Often the workers not getting a paycheck see few options since they think they will have even less chance of finding another job at all if they leave there current  employer.  But on the other hand if they try to hold their employers publicly accountable for the non or slow payment of wages, the workers are afraid that will hurt the business they work for so much that it will tip over into bankruptcy. 

I had no idea this was going on over there.  I imagine many will blame their plight on socialism.  I would tend to disagree and if anything lay the blame in the opposite direction on the capitalist bankers that encouraged and profited from the indebtedness that has lead to the current European crisis.

The economic systems that we all live under exist not because it grew out of nature or as some law of physics, but out of the decisions of fallible humans.  None of the people featured in the article had any goal or expectation of living lavish lifestyles off of the income they were assured of from their employment.  Rather they just wanted to live a simple modest life from the fruit of their hard work in their jobs.  But now even though they are working and many more in their country are willing and desirous to work and be productive, they are struggling just to keep a roof over their heads by keeping up with the mortgage payments.  Isn't that kind of a funny expression -- 'keep the roof over our heads' -- I mean, where is roof going?  Is it blowing away and you're trying to hold onto it?  Of course not, but economics is supposed to be fundamentally about the relationship between humans and the material world that makes up modern civilization.  Those of us who are satisfied with a modest standard of living should demand an economic system that supports a symbiotic relationship between our participation in that system and an adequate maintenance of its supportive economic structure.  The roof is not going anywhere,  it is the bank that is deciding that the people living underneath the roof must go and the law enforcement that is supposed to be advocates for the people show that in reality they are advocates for the banks when they use force or the threat of force to evict the people living underneath the roof.

 It doesn't have to be this way -- remember, the laws that govern our economic system are not laws of physics but are rather malleable rules created by humans.  One of the individuals featured in the story, who is owed $13,000 in back pay, is a woman working in a factory hand rolling paint onto tiles.  I wonder how many square feet of wall space in houses all those tiles she has painted could fill?  I ask that question because I wonder how much labor is really needed to support a smoothly running modern civilization where most citizens simply want to live a modest life with a modest roof over their heads.  What if we were to forget about the big banks and debt?  Could we create a system that functioned solely with the goal of first meeting the basic needs of food, shelter, water, sewage, heat, electricity as the top priority and look to how that goal can be met given the available resources of labor and land.  If, and only if the basic needs for modest living are met, then those that are especially ambitious can be allowed to pursue a few extra niceties and comforts of life - but only if doing so in no way depletes or takes away from society meeting the first priority of basic needs.   Instead, in our current bankcentric economic model, I'd be willing to bet that tile painter is, in effect, through no choice of her own, sacrificing her labor in order to make sure debt obligations are met that keep the banksters living in luxury.  What kind of economic system allows that sort of injustice?  Clearly a rotten one that needs to be tossed into the compost bin.  And from the lessons we have learned we can grow a new fruitful society nourished by the soil fertilized by the mistakes we now know to avoid.  

Socialism and Regimenarchies

 By Glen Wallace


Sure, socialism as it has been practiced may not be the answer but there are many different forms of political systems that can be referred to as socialist.  And I am not about to abandon a plan that looks and sounds good just because it might be labeled socialist.  As a matter of fact many of the socialist systems of the past might better be labeled oligarchies due to the special privileges granted to the government officials running those systems.  Although 'oligarchy' might not be appropriate since so many government officials tend to benefit from their positions in those so-called socialist regimes -- perhaps we need a new term here.  Well, the Latin word for government is 'regimen' so I'll call the political form where the government and some of its enforcement and intelligence employees becomes unwieldy and oppressive to the people it is supposed to support, a 'regimenarchy.'  So, wouldn't it at least be possible to create a socialist system with all its nice safety nets and useful and pleasant services that is not a regimenarchy?

Why capitalism can be a disincentive to good medicine

By Glen Wallace

There have recently been some prominent news stories featured on the mainstream media about shortages of certain drugs faced by hospitals and emergency rooms.  In addition to shortages there has also been problems with price gouging by pharmaceutical manufacturers of certain prescription drugs.  And one more problem that I recently saw featured on the mainstream network national news was about the growing problem of antibiotic drug resistant bacteria. What all those problems have in common is an inability of the drug companies to adequately respond to the needs of the public using those drugs.  The drug companies are not responding to the public's needs because they are not directed by those needs but are instead being driven and directed solely by the profit motive. Drug companies price gouge because they can get away with it because the drug patents can provide a total monopoly in cases where there are no comparable alternatives.  New antibiotics are not being developed at the rate that is needed to respond to drug resistance because there is not enough money to be made off of any new antibiotics to justify the enormous cost necessary to bring them to market.  And shortages are occurring because production capacity may be more profitably utilized by some other drugs. Once they are done making their money makers then if they have time maybe they will make more of the less profitable drugs for which there is a shortage. All this is recognized by the media and the medical field but few seem to put two and two together and realize that capitalism has been an abject failure at promoting good medicine.

So far I've only discussed the problems between capitalism and medicine that are already readily recognized by mainstream media and medicine.  But if one turns to alternative medicine one sees further evidence of the antagonism between Capitalism and good medicine.


The problem is that drug companies will not spend money at all on research that they cannot see a potential return on.  The only goal of the big pharmaceutical corporations is to make a profit, not benefit mankind.  Therefore, if there is already some research showing promise on an herb or compound that cannot be patented then there is no incentive to spend all the money on further research to bring the product to market.  Additionally, keep in mind that most big pharmaceutical companies are publicly traded corporations and therefore have a legal obligation to act in the financial interests of shareholders and not in the medical interests of the users of the pharmaceuticals that those corporations produce.

For instance I heard of a study of mice where their Alzheimer's disease was halted and reversed when the mice consumed caffeine in an amount that was the human equivalent of 5 cups of caffeinated coffee per day. 
 I have also read anecdotal reports of Alzheimer's patients improving just through the consumption of coconut oil.  Currently pharmaceutical corporations are enjoying a nice gravy train of profits from drugs for Alzheimer's that are not a cure but a treatment where the patient continually takes the medicine and therefore pays for the medicine over a period of time that will likely amount to years.  Why would the for-profit pharmaceutical corporations want to spend money to research something like caffeine or coconut oil that they wouldn't be able to patent, but instead if the caffeine was found to be as useful in humans as it is in mice for Alzheimers, or if the anecdotal reports about coconut oil and Alzheimers were scientifically verified, the drug companies would  be facing an elimination of the currently reliable long-term revenue stream that they already enjoy with their prescription Alzheimer meds?

As another example, there is an alternative medicine doctor by the name of Dr. Tullio Simoncini from Italy, that is using ordinary baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to treat cancer with what he claims is very successful results.  Currently the cancer treatment industry is very profitable as is; but if drug companies were to explore and find baking soda is indeed superior to any of their current chemotherapy meds, then billions in revenue would be eliminated if cancer patients were to be prescribed a non-patentable product like baking soda that can be had for fifty cents a pound.

There is a great deal of collusion and cronyism between such organizations as the FDA, the AMA, University research facilities, the mainstream media and congress.  Any close examination of those organizations reveals that they are clearly working together with the goal of maximizing the profits of big pharmaceutical corporations.

Have you ever watched the commercials during the breaks on the big network national TV news?  Those commercials are filled with ads for prescription pharmaceuticals still under patent protection that offer huge monopolistic profits to the big pharma companies buying the expensive ad space from the large TV networks.  The networks want to keep their largest sponsors happy so you'll regularly see features on the national news badmouthing any alternative medicine that would replace big pharma's monopoly profits if those 'supplements' became 'replacements'.

Anyone trying to bring a non-patentable drug to the mainstream medical market with FDA approval,  will be going against the collusion of cronies mentioned above.  Just to get a drug approved by the FDA requires investments of 100's of millions of dollars by an organization that is already set up to do the research.  Much more if you're not already a drug company or University that has the facilities and know-how to do the enormous research required for FDA approval.  As for universities, they are either already getting grant money from big pharma or they are already enjoying profits from patent medicines.  Universities get a lot of their funding from patents for medicines they own. 

There is a widespread assumption that there is always a synergistic relationship between capitalism and good medicine.  But the evidence indicates that the opposite is true; there is an antagonistic relationship between capitalism and good medicine.  If only the medical field would apply the same testing standards to the for-profit medical paradigm as they do to individual drugs, they would soon discover widespread refutations of the belief in the necessarily benevolent nature of the overall for-profit capitalistic setup of the mainstream medical system.

The only solution as I see it is to eliminate medical patents and nationalize most medical research.  There already are plenty of people that go into medical research with the highest of ideals, but only their ideas that have the potential to profit the company they work for, will be supported.  Instead, we need to set up a system that eliminates the profit variable and allows those idealistic individuals to act as both the researchers and executives in the medical development field, whose decision making control of what avenues to pursue is only measured by other members of the medical field and the citizens observing and funding their work.

The NIH has already set up a division to study alternative medicines, but even though I've seen promising results from at least one of their studies, it seems like we only hear about the the results on the mainstream media that are not so promising.  In Germany they've set up a government run organization called the E commission, that studies and gives rulings on herbal medicines and what they can be prescribed for.  Those are a couple of examples of the nationalization of medical research that are good starts in that direction.  But to achieve the ideal of  good medicine, the profit motive from patent monopolies needs to be completely eliminated.  The allure of those patent monopolies is too corrupting because there is just too much money that can be made with them. 

Obamacare is Not Socialized Medicine, But I Wish it Were

By Glen Wallace

While I have no doubt that they have the best of intentions, I think it is unfortunate that the progressive set has now seen it as their duty to rally in support and defend Obamacare as thought it were this great compassionate improvement in the current state of affairs.  I think the only solution that progressive minded folk should see as acceptable is a single payer government run universal plan that is modeled after the best run plans of northern Europe.

The Hillarycare plan would have been much more like the European single payer model, and therefore I really wish it would have succeeded.   With hindsight they should have been able to come up with a better way to sell the plan to the public.  What they could do now is have their own 'there's got to be a better way' commercial like the insurance companies put out against the plan, but this time the government could put out their own commercials supporting the plan using real people recounting their health insurance horror stories from dealing with medical debt they incurred from either high deductibles or cases where the insurance company has weaseled out of paying for hospital bills.  At the end of the commercial they would say "there's got to be a better way..... but wait, there is, and they're already doing it over in Europe and Canada."

I heard on public radio that two thirds of all American's with medical debt had health insurance when they incurred the debt.  One person that they had featured on the radio program with medical debt, who had health insurance, was battling with the billing hospital and health insurance company because the insurance company claimed some of the billed care he received from the hospital was not covered.  Trying to get either the hospital to remove the charges or get the insurance company to pay for them, had become a full time job for this guy who was still recovering from the motorcycle accident that caused the very costly hospital stay where the bills got run up in the first place.  Not only would all these problems go away for the individual with a universal single payer plan, but implementing such a plan would remove a huge costly burden from employers that would likely free up some money to hire more employees and expand a business.  It seems like the single payer plan is such a win-win that it should practically sell itself.  Perhaps we as a country need to get over our aversion to particular terms such as 'socialism' and become more pragmatic and simply choose the ideal solution regardless of what label applies to it.

The Theft of America's Natural Resources

By Glen Wallace

When natural resources are obtained from federal land, the same financial relationship that exists between a private land owner and a business obtaining the resources from private land, should also exist when a business removes natural resources from federal land. That is, the US citizens should be treated from a financial perspective as the group that owns federal lands in the same way that an individual or business that owns private land.

Our legislative representatives, then, should be acting as just that, our representatives acting in our, the citizens, best financial interests in much the same way that a lawyer should, if retained to handle someone's financial affairs. But to the best of my knowledge, our best financial interests are not being looked after by our so called representatives. Instead, to my understanding, if, for instance, a lumbar company wants to do some logging on federal land, all the lumbar company has to do is pay a small fee for the logging rights to a particular parcel of land and in return gets to keep the entire bounty of the logging companies logging operation in that parcel. But if it were private land that the owner wanted to harvest the trees for lumbar, the owner would seek out bids to log it. Eventually the winning bid by the private logging company would be the amount that the private land owner would be paid and be an amount commensurate with the value of the timber minus the cost to cut and clear the timber from the land. If I am correct in the preceding analysis of how logging works, then this country and its citizens could be losing out on a large scale from the profiteering off of citizen owned federal lands. I'm sure some people would come up with arguments why it might be impractical to treat federal lands financially the same as private lands. I would counter that for every reason someone would give why it couldn't work I would ask then why does the system work just fine for private lands -- I would essentially turn their arguments around and try to use the same argument but replace the words 'federal' with 'private' and show that their argument makes just as much sense that the current system dealing with private land transactions shouldn't work then either, but of course it does work just fine and therefore should work just as well with federal lands.

An added benefit to contracting out federal land resource extraction in the same manner as done with private lands, is that the logging operation would be scrutinized more carefully due to the desire to be sure the people get their money's worth. That extra scrutiny could help insure that loggers do not remove more than what is allowed in the contract. As it stands, with the current system of paying small fees and being let loose on federal lands there is little scrutiny and a lot of incentive to exceed the limits of the specific logging rights, and remove trees that may be protected, such as some old growth forests. Or perhaps an even better system to protect protected lands is to set up a system where the US Forest service does the selling of the felled trees on the open market, selling them for whatever the market will bear. And then for the logging itself the bidding would be for what we would pay the logger to fell, clear and stack the logs. Then if the contractor extracts more resources than contracted they would just be doing more work than that they were paid for -- it wouldn't make any sense! Doing so would be akin to a builder that had been contracted to build an office tower and then, just for fun, decides to add a few extra floors to what they had been contracted to build.

I've focused mostly on logging with this essay but I believe we are being cheated out on most all of the resources being extracted from federal lands in the US. As it stands, it seems like we have a sort of wild west approach to private profiteering on public lands even though all the land has been carefully and specifically plotted as far as ownership rights are concerned. This no longer is the wild west and insofar as we do allow natural resources to be extracted from the peoples lands, we should be taking full advantage and reaping the financial windfall from doing so. But instead just a few large companies are reaping the benefits from our land while left with just the shaft.

The amount that the citizens are losing out with this, what could only be called a scam, is hard to calculate. But not only would our taxes most certainly would go down, the return from the natural resources from this bountiful land that are supposed to belong to us, could be significant enough that we could have all citizen taxation eliminated along with receiving a dividend check every year just for being a citizen.

Another possible area of lost revenue for the US citizen is in the area of communication airwaves.  To the best of my knowledge, a given block of bandwidth is first owned by the federal government and then is sold to a private company.  If that is how it works, then I don't believe our best interests are being looked after.  A much more fiscally prudent method would be for the federal government to retain ownership and simply rent out the airwaves for whatever the market will bear.  After all, the airwaves would present all the benefits for the owner of renting out without any of the usual hassles of maintenance and repair; no calls in the middle of the night by a tenant with a broken radiator or furnace.  Airwaves just don't suffer from wear and tear with use like regular material property usually does.  Additionally when renting out, the rental rates can keep pace with inflation and with the increased demand that the modern computer age is likely to continue to bring.  Couple that increased demand with a very limited supply of usable bandwidth, and an investment owner of that property, the US citizens, should be presented with a dream scenario that they will want to have the price structure nimbleness that renting out affords.