You wait a month to get a doctor appointment, then you sit in the waiting room an hour because Dr. Incorporated is perpetually overbooked, then you’re finally rushed in for your 10-minutes with the doc… tick, tick, tick… and then you’re scooted out, uncertain whether you’re supposed to take pills or make funeral arrangements.

Welcome to corporatized, consolidized, and bureaucratized “healthcare” – a rigid system in which nurses, pharmacists, and even doctors are no longer independent health professionals driven by a moral mandate to provide their best care to patients. Instead, all are treated as cogs in a monopolistic structure driven by an imperative to provide maximum profit to Wall Street owners of the corporate-care chains. This financial hierarchy demands factory-like cost-cutting – including cutting the numbers of nurses, pharmacists, and physicians who actually provide the care.

The cutbacks leave remaining caregivers stressed to the breaking point, and “care” is regimented to such time-motion metrics as limiting doctors to only 10 minutes per patient. Next!

Even when professionals complain that corporate cutbacks are endangering patients, the hierarchy responds with irrelevant financial statistics. For example, when Walgreens’ pharmacists recently revolted against constant staff cuts, the chain’s corporate bosses coldly retorted that they were investing $400 million in new pharmacists. Sounds like a big number, but really? Walgreens is pocketing $27 billion this year in profit! So, investing under 2% of one year’s profit will not make a blip in service to patients. Instead, the bulk of the billions that consumers pay goes to enrich top executives and Wall Street investors.

This enrichment of the rich few at our expense is why health care providers are unionizing – not for themselves, but for us patients. For information and action, go to doctorscouncil.org.

Photo: Joe Piette on Flickr

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