The consumer is at the prey of the health care establishment, both individually and as a tax payer.
Hospitals will charge the cash paying patient around 2 ½ times what they charge a health insurance company.
Pharmacies decline to carry economical generic brands. A popular erection drug costs ten times as much at Rite Aid as the generic version available via the Internet from abroad.
Is there any wonder that the USA spends 18% of its Gross Domestic Product for health care as compared to from 8% to a high of 11% by other advanced industrial nations? Minimally, that amounts to ¾ of a trillion dollars misspent annually!
Add to that the 1/4 trillion dollars that the USA has wasted year after year carrying out a pointless and devastating war in Iraq and stupidities in conducting what should have been a short lived invasion (largely by bribes to tribal leaders) in Afghanistan to drive out al Qaeda.
Add 3/4 trillion and 1/4 trillion and we have almost the amount of the USA’s deficit in fiscal year 2010, $1.17 trillion.
Illegal drugs, health care, and the “military industrial complex” vie as to which is the nation’s biggest racket. The latter two happen to be legal.
