Thursday, May 17, 2012

You Want Fries with That?: The Junk Food Nature of Managed Health Care

Fast Food Nation is an expose on the "McDonaldification" of the American food industry, but it may as well had been the health care industry.  Your humble ruminator, TheYangZhu, can't help but wince anachronistically at the commingling of those two words, "health" and "industry," but the reality is in our midst.  The reasons are multitudinous, but we really need look no further than industry itself, its insuperable appetite for profit, pretty much for its own sake and with all manner of duplicity and connivance.  This has left a dispirited and alienated populace, which is nevertheless required to "burger-up" to whatever actuarians and "mammonologists" decide.

We all fully understand that only souls given to vanity would look askance at a McDonald's job, but even an honest employee might have modest preferences for something a tad removed from the front-lines, something decidedly more managerial.  Thence was born the doctor-administrator, the prototype for genetic modification, which we know is not only perfectly safe but also worthy of foisting upon the public by stealth, legislation, and stealth-legislation.  Industry basically demands it because industry is progress, which is profit.

The McDonald's Health Care Matrix is a french fry model of profit generation, where patients and doctors get cooked in the lard of administrative oversight, bureaucracy, and subterfuge.   Yet, the clamor to cover more people continues unmeasured against the pre-existing condition of individuals currently insured but receiving fast-food quality service.  Of course, most everyone knows that fast food is perfectly good for you; they even include the nutrition information to prove it.

The industry trend toward proprietary, metrics-based, actuarial medicine has little to do with the actual treating of patients.  But don't take TheYangZhu's word for it, just check out this Forbes article

   

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