DON’T NEED NO DOCTOR/DOCTOR CAN’T DO ME NO GOOD

So the death of Michael Jackson has been deemed a homicide and, if this was a movie, all the telltale signs point to the doctor, who seems to have been feeding the poor boy enough drugs to make Elvis look positively abstemious. Although doctors are popularly represented as selfless angels of mercy, but I’ve never been totally convinced. Too many of the doctors that I’ve encountered in the USA (and a few Brits for that matter) have seemed judgmental and lamentably out of touch with the culture in which they operate. And worse. Count all the worthless plastic surgeons, while the fictional Dr Benway is in the lifeboat with the women and children. Or remember the real-life Dr Brody sitting in the cruel neon of a 24-hour pharmacy, writing scripts for methamphetamine. And, on a more general level, consider all the physicians in comfortable and lucrative cahoots with the pharm corps and HMOs, and how they buttress a system that has killed at least one of my nearest and dearest and may break a few more before it’s reformed

On Truthdig Chris Hedges elaborates on a related theme…
“Capitalists, as my friend Father Michael Doyle says, should never be allowed near a health care system. They hold sick children hostage as they force parents to bankrupt themselves in the desperate scramble to pay for medical care. The sick do not have a choice. Medical care is not a consumable good. We can choose to buy a used car or a new car, shop at a boutique or a thrift store, but there is no choice between illness and health. And any debate about health care must acknowledge that the for-profit health care industry is the problem and must be destroyed. This is an industry that hires doctors and analysts to deny care to patients in order to increase profits. It is an industry that causes half of all bankruptcies. And the 20,000 Americans who died last year because they did not receive adequate care condemn these corporations as complicit in murder.
The current health care debate in Congress has nothing to do with death panels or public options or socialized medicine. The real debate, the only one that counts, is how much money our blood-sucking insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health services are going to be able to siphon off from new health care legislation. The proposed plans rattling around Congress all ensure that the profits for these corporations will increase and the misery for ordinary Americans will be compounded. The corporate state, enabled by both Democrats and Republicans, is yet again cannibalizing the Treasury. It is yet again pushing Americans, especially the poor and the working class, into levels of despair and rage that will continue to fuel the violent, proto-fascist movements leaping up around the edges of American society. And the traditional watchdogs—those in public office, the press and citizens groups—are as useless as the perfumed fops of another era who busied their days with court intrigue at Versailles. Canada never looked so good.” (Click here for the whole rant)

The secret word is Malpractice