THIS IS JIM HIGHTOWER SAYING . . .
DON'T DIAL 911--DIAL HMO
Let's say you're at home one evening, sitting there in your La-Z-Boy, maybe with a cool one in your hand, when suddenly you feel a sharp pain in your chest, your left arm is tingly and sort of numb. Heart attack! Or at least it could be one. You go for the phone to get emergency help . . . but you don't call 9-1-1 . . . instead you call H-M-O.
What?! Yes, it's the latest "advance" in the wonderful world of managed health care--instead of calling 911, you've got to call your HMO, and its corporate bureaucrats will decide whether you get an EMS to come help you.
"USA Today" reports that Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest HMOs in the country, is the first to impose this new layer of corporate bureaucracy between you and the medical service you need--a bureaucratic step that could waste precious minutes as you explain to some Kaiser clerk sitting in a cubicle way out in Wisconsin what your symptoms are and why you think you need an ambulance pronto, PDQ, post haste, and, like, right now!
You'll be pleased to know that the HMO clerk at the other end of the phone has received a good four weeks of training for the job, so of course he or she is perfectly qualified to diagnose you from afar. If the clerk decides you need an ambulance, one is then dispatched to you. But--get this--the HMO will send an ambulance from a firm that it contracts with, even though another company's ambulance is closer to you.
Kaiser says it's doing a favor for the whole society because, according to its emergency medical services director, "there's a finite number of ambulances. We want to reserve them for those who really need them." Great. A corporation with a bottom-line incentive NOT to send an ambulance is going to be the arbiter of whether you get one. And if the HMO makes a boo-boo, leaving you dead at the other end of the phone, remember--the Republicans in Congress continue to give HMOs immunity from lawsuits.
Welcome to the cold world of corporatized medicine.
STOP DRUG PRICE-GOUGING
Time for Hightower Radio's Hog Report. Mmmm...These porkers are some of the fattest barons in the corporate world--the drug companies. There's Schering-Plough, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer, and others. These pharmaceutical giants haul off the largest profits of any other legal industry and feed the biggest paychecks to their CEOs. For example, Schering-Plough's top hog got $29 million in pay last year, Pfizer's took $38 million, and Bristol-Myers Squibb paid its CEO $56 million.
How can drug makers pay such salaries and reap such profits? By gouging you and me. These are companies that get their basic research done by us taxpayers through national health institutes and universities, who get monopoly patents on the products the public developed, who spend billions on advertising and deduct all of that from their taxes--then reward us by charging American consumers two, three, and four times what they charge consumers in other countries.
These include drugs that millions of people, especially the elderly, must have to maintain their health and even to stay alive. Check out the difference in what we Americans pay for some of these drugs and what people in Canada pay:
·Prilosec--$116 for a prescription here, only $54 in Canada.
·Zocor--$109 here, $44 in Canada.
·Ticlid--$122 here, $52 in Canada.
"USA Today" wrote about Lucille Danyow of St. Albans, Vermont-just 12 miles from the Canadian border. She has breast cancer and is taking Tamoxifen to survive. In Canada, Tamoxifen would cost her only $62, but in Vermont the same drug sold by the same drug maker is $242.
US Rep. Tom Allen has a bill to stop this gouging. To join his fight, call (202) 225-6116.
GOING GENTLY INTO THE NIGHT
Death . . .it's the ultimate consumer experience! Also, the most unpleasant. Have you had to contend with (how shall we put it?) the disposal of a deceased loved one? Nothing nice about it. Most families are unprepared, so they have to make a large expenditure on short notice with no real consumer information. To add to the burden, the once-comforting idea that there's a local, friendly, family-owned funeral parlor to help you in this time of special need is largely a thing of the past. Oh, the funeral home probably still bears the old family name, and the cemetery still is called something like Forest Lawn or Evermore Gardens--but the owner is likely to be SCI Incorporated, Loewen Inc., or Stewart Enterprises, the Big Three of America's funeral industry.
The result is a ripoff. These conglomerates, dealing in what has been called "the commerce of corpses," have jacked-up the costs to where the average funeral and cemetery price is $9,000! And as more people are turning to cremation to avoid the ripoff, the conglomerates have bought up crematoriums and jacked up those prices, too.
The good news is that people are taking the matter of death into their own hands, with "green burial" services, gentle and easy home preparation of the loved one, simple pine caskets, and many other ways not only to cut the exorbitant costs drastically, but just as important to restore an element of dignity and family closure to this final act.
This self-help movement is so important that I have three sources for you to check out: first, a book by Lisa Carlson called "Caring for Your Own Dead," available through bookstores; second, a group called The Natural Death Care Project, reachable through (707) 824-0268; and, third, the Home Funeral Ministry, offering a full range of services, reachable at (707) 952-6666.
THE NAFTA RIPOFF
The use of statistics has been called the art of drawing a straight line from a wrong assumption to a foregone conclusion. Well, the Picasso of Statistics is the US Commerce Department, which keeps telling us how good NAFTA is for our country. For example, we're told that our exports to Mexico are up! Never mind that our imports from Mexico are waaaay up, creating the third worst trade deficit that we have with any country in the world. But let's peek into that export number that officials are so proud of. It turns out that four out of every ten products that we ship to Mexico are not sold to the people there, but are parts sold to US factories located in Mexico. We're "exporting" to ourselves. Then, General Electric and the rest use these parts in their Mexican factories to make appliances, and what-not, shipping the finished product back here to sell to us. So the "export" becomes an import.
If that's too confusing, don't worry, because corporations like GE are going to simplify the process, by getting the suppliers of parts to move to Mexico, too! The "Wall Street Journal" reports that 40% of the electric ranges that GE sells in the US are coming from Mexico, and now a US company that makes glass doors and tops for the stoves has moved there, as has a maker of burners, and regulators. US Steel, which sells 100 tons of sheet metal every day to GE's Mexico factory, also has built a steel plant, just 50 yards from the GE factory.
The bottom line is that America's chief export is jobs. Thanks to NAFTA, US corporations can eliminate middle-class jobs here, move the factory to Mexico, pay subsistence wages to people there, then send their stoves and other products back to the US without paying a dime in tariffs, selling the products for the same high price they've always charged. The wage difference is pocketed by the corporation.
What a ripoff! I say it's time to repeal NAFTA.
COHEN WANTS US TROOPS ON US SOIL
No need to worry about our liberties being taken from us by a foreign military invasion--our own military can invade us and do the job without having a shot being fired against them!
This might sound like some thriller movie like "Enemy of the State," where secret forces are deployed to eliminate citizens who are politically inconvenient, but this time it's not fiction. Secretary of Defense William Cohen is establishing a new military command that will direct troops for domestic law enforcement. Never mind that this is in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which bars the deployment of military forces against our own people on our own soil. Cohen brusquely brushes aside any such niceties, saying: "The American people should not be concerned about it. They should welcome it."
Holy Paul Revere! Welcome it? Not only is this illegal . . . it's stupid. First, the military is not trained to be police; soldiers are trained to shoot what moves and ask questions later. Ask Zeke Hernandez. But you can't-this 18-year-old US citizen living on the Texas border with Mexico was gunned down in 1997 by three marines who were deployed to help the border patrol stop Mexican drug traffickers. Zeke was a goat herder, not a drug dealer. Second, soldiers are trained to fight "enemies," so putting them on domestic patrol makes us citizens the enemy. Plus, it pits them against their own people, which has got to be ethically confusing and a morale bummer for the troops. Third, if there is a need for a massive force beyond the abilities of local, state, and national police--we already have the National Guard, which can be called out by state governors. This is all being done to "fight terrorism," but who are the terrorists? Putting a permanent military force in our back yards makes us the suspects.
This is Jim Hightower saying . . . . Our liberties are less endangered by foreign madmen than by some of our own authorities.
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