The flaws that exist within our healthcare system become more prevalent each day — and you know it.
Once a system entrusted by the American people has transformed into a system working against the needs of Americans and meeting those of huge corporate entities. This is a long overdue conversation; the clock is ticking for us to rise and return health and well-being to the American people. Why? Because we don’t deserve to live in a sickness care system.
In the 1980s, before Ronald Reagan’s presidency, pharmaceutical advertisements were not permitted. A part of what the ‘Reagan Revolution’ represented was a mix of deregulation, denoted as “job-killing” regulations — eliminating any barrier to what the corporation would feel was its capacity to make more money for its stockholders. It came to the idea of an economic paradigm, meaning if it increases financial value for the stockholders then that is somehow beneficial for the betterment of society, going to the lengths to get rid of safety regulations, squashing unions — anything.
We pay billions of tax dollars in corporate subsidies to not only Big Pharma, but all kinds of industries already making billions of dollars in profit — if not more. They’ll garner our taxpayer money, indirectly subsidize pharmaceutical companies and create a product to price gouge. The point is we’re paying for our own price gouging.
“After decades of progress, life expectancy — long regarded as a singular benchmark of a nation’s success — peaked in 2014 at 78.9 years,” self-help author Marianne Williamson, wrote about the malfunction in our healthcare system. It then drifted downward, even before the
(COVID-19) pandemic, and it’s an extreme manifestation of an underlying deterioration of health and failure of our health system to respond.”
She notes how our problems in healthcare are not long-term effects of COVID; rather, they began way before the dawn of this deadly pandemic. The U.S. spends far less than peer countries on preventative medicine and social welfare, highlighting the calamity of how chronic disease is a “not-so-silent” pandemic.
What is Big Pharma doing? Helping? No. Profiting? Yes.
There are carcinogenic materials and unnecessary additives in some of the everyday foods we consume, which Americans are completely unaware of, ranging from the dyes in Fruit Loops to seed oils in chicken nuggets. Thank the big villain in the mix: Generally Recognized as Safe. The Food and Drug Administration, which was captured by Big Food, began enlarging GRAS standards to apply to everything; that’s why we have 10,000 ingredients in our food and other countries have only 400 in theirs.
And what is Big Food doing? Helping? No. Profiting. Absolutely.
Big Food and Big Pharma are part of a larger matrix though — right in the alley with big insurance companies, big chemical companies, gun manufacturers, Big Oil, defense contractors and more corporations that perpetuate the corruption that exists in our country. There’s been a corporate capture of agencies, such as the FDA (as discussed previously), that had been set up to advocate for the people. Instead, they have turned into a dual-function where so many corporate entities use them as puppets — they have been so dejuiced.
Not only does corruption lie in the industries that “serve us” or in agencies that are supposed to “support us,” but in our very government as well. Some of America’s elected officials will vote in ways that do more to increase profits for their donors than to serve us and even bypass regulations to earn more profit.
$220 billion. That’s how gargantuan our medical debt is in this country. But, if you think that number is outrageous, I’ve got a much bigger one for you: $247.7 billion. That’s the last recorded annual profit of the top five pharmaceutical companies in our country.
There’s simply no competition in the pharmaceutical industry. This paves the way for patents to grant monopolies to companies for their drugs, allowing them to set extremely high prices and make no room for undercuts. While their pocket linings are growing, we as Americans are paying with our lives.
This issue fails to be fully expressed in a singular piece. I hope you’ll join me for the second part of my opinion series, “Corporate Overreach in the Healthcare System,” as we uncover the flaws and corporate influence in the healthcare industry — together.
Ashton Lamberth is a senior at Benjamin Russell High School and a regular columnist for Tallapoosa Publishers Inc.
