Noah Bonn has written a succinct summary of the five “most corrupt” industries: Banking, Energy, Agriculture/Biotech, Media and Healthcare. Fair enough. These are five deserving nominations.
Rather than focus on his nominations, though, I focused on Bonn’s “solutions.” Though they aren’t complete solutions, they are mostly good ideas: Credit unions, renewable energy, local food, independent media, and “naturopaths and homeopaths.” What? I’ve written before on the huge problems with homeopaths. But that still leaves a vaccuum. What is the solution to our out of control health care system? I’d look long and hard at the solutions proposed by the recent Time article titled “Bitter Pill.”
I agree with many of Bonn’s proposals, but I do think that the problem with this slippage into homeopathy is typical with many proposed “solutions” that fall short: they are caused by the lack of even-handed skepticism. America is a huge collection of overlapping tribes, and we need to put the magnifying glass onto those people we want to like as well as those we’ve written off. In fact, I believe this need for equal opportunity skepticism, is America’s biggest need. In short, many of our problems arise from the confirmation bias.
Thought; japan took a national health program ( thinking Europe?) . And in a couple years tweaked it to their own working and i hear its great. Why can’t we do something along that line ? Or would that be taking from the pharmacy industry and HCA pockets?
In the case of health care, the problem is not the the quality or availability of care, but that the insurance industry acts as a gatekeeper and toll taker controlling access to health care. An alternative to the publicly traded insurance companies can be found in alternatives the insurance corporations, such as mutual insurance companies and medical repricing cooperatives.
Erich, a few years ago, I was prescribed Avandamet, which seemed to be having little effect on my diabetes. After taking the pills for almost a year, the FDA and the FBI shut down the factory in Puerto Rico, and confiscated all the inventory of avandamet in the warehouse in Knoxville TN.
Apparently GSK, the company that manufactured the drug, believed in homeopathy as the pills, according to the FDA press release, did not have enough medicine in them to have a therapeutic value. ON the flip side, it later turned out that Avandia, one of the components of avandamet caused serious heart damage so maybe I dodged the bullet on that one.
Niklaus – good story. Fate works in mysterious ways.