The Politics Of Health Care

The Politics of Health Care

CAPITALISM OPERATES ON YOU

You're sick. You're really sick. You don't have a personal doctor. You go to the hospital. You don't know your way around. And you're sick. You follow a line. You find the clinic. They make you fill out forms. They don't tell you what you're signing. You wait an hour...two hours. Someone calls you into a little room. You wait 15 minutes. A man comes in. He pokes at you. He tells you to undress. Is he a doctor? He never says. He leaves. You wait another 15 minutes. He comes back with a paper. You look at it. You don't understand it. Be sure to take every one of them... Later, outside, you feel better. You're going home. He said it would go away. You're glad you're out. That was horrible. But, you're sick. Maybe...maybe it was all a bad dream...

Almost everyone has some complaint or dire story to tell about his/her experiences within the health care system. Medical costs are outrageous, you have to wait weeks for appointments, health insurance costs more than you can afford, doctors are often too rushed, or too professionally haughty to treat you like a human being.

MEDICAL MEDIATORS is a new project of the Free People's Clinic, organized to begin to attack the injustices and abuses of the health care system. Until now, people have had nowhere to turn with complaints about the quality of their health care. MEDICAL MEDIATORS is a health care consumers' advocacy project that operates a phone line at 761-5079, Mon.-Wed., 5-8 p.m.

MEDICAL MEDIATORS has two primary objectives. First, we will help individual patients obtain satisfaction whenever that is possible. For instance, we have been able to clarify problems with health insurance policies and rates. One of our calls prompted a Washtenaw County Health Dept. official to work on changing U Hospital's handling of VD cases. Also, our lawyer, is prepared to subpoena patient records, and to represent patients in malpractice or other suits for FREE. Second, the affidavits we gather will be compiled into a set of quality-of-health-care statistics, which will expose the injustices and inadequacies of the health care system where they exist, and be based on documented evidence. We see our statistics as a powerful weapon in the struggle to force the health care system to be responsible to the needs of patients.

So far, the calls we have received can be classed under two major headings: fee complaints, and complaints about insensitive and/or incompetent health care. Here are some examples of fees that callers reported they were charged:

--$25 for a five-minute office visit where the woman was told nothing was wrong with her.

--$50 to drain an infected foot, a procedure that took 15 minutes.

--$77 for three stitches at U Hospital's Emergency Room.

--$45 for one X-ray and drugs for shoulder pain.

--$42.50 cash in advance at U Hospital for one woman before they would give her an electroencephalogram.

--$400 total for a woman with back pains who was referred from one specialist to another until one doctor finally told her that nothing could be done for her problem.

Here are some examples of reported incompetent and/or insensitive care:

--a woman was told at UM Health Service that her rectal irritation was caused by perspiration and her clothing. Three days later, her rectal abscess had to be drained surgically at U Hospital Emergency Room

--one woman had problems being seen by any doctor in the hospital due to the impressions of her that previous doctors had written into her chart. She does not even know what they wrote. The hospitals do not allow patients to see their own medical charts. If she wants to see it, she can only obtain it with a court-ordered subpoena.

--a woman had a severe reaction to a medication which her doctor had prescribed. She was vomiting, became dizzy, and couldn't walk or keep her eyes open. She went to Beyer Memorial Hospital Emergency Room where she had to wait over an hour while the nurse and clerk accused her of lying about the type of drug she had taken. When she finally saw a doctor, he accused her of being a "chicken" for having come in, and told her to go home and sleep it off without even examining her. The cost of this "advice" was $24.

--one woman complained of long waiting times for outpatient appointments. The earliest appointment she could get for a vaginal infection was almost two weeks away. Harmful damage could have been done in that time.

--an eighty year old woman was ill for a month but was too weak to travel to a hospital or doctor's office. Her daughter could not find one physician in Ann Arbor who was willing to make a house call.

Why are these abuses going on? Because of capitalism. Under a capitalist economic system, the main goal of every industry is to reap maximum profits, and not to produce and deliver high quality goods and services. In fact, as is well-known in the notorious case of the automobile, often in the industry's profit interests, products are designed specifically to be cheap and shoddy, to fall apart in a short time, thus forcing the helpless consumer to buy another one, and spend more money.

Though few people think of it this way, the health care system is an industry like any other. In fact, it is one of the fastest growing, most profitable industries in the country! Hospitals should be understood not as places where legions of revered Marcus Welby's spend infinite time curing and reassuring patients they helped bring into the world, but as factories, with the workers: the orderlies, janitors, clerks, aides, nurses and doctors staffing positions along an endless assembly line of health care that moves as fast as possible to insure maximum profits for the mammoth medical centers, health insurance companies, hospital equipment companies and drug companies that control national health care priorities.

MEDICAL MEDIATORS, at first glance may look like an organization set up to attack doctors as a group: the doctor overcharged, the doctor made me wait an hour, the doctor was insensitive to gayness, the doctor was a bastard. But, it isn't. MEDICAL MEDIATORS is a tool for bringing a community of outraged patients together to force change in the priorities of the health care system, by whatever means necessary. However, the fact that doctors specifically are the target of so many of our MEDICAL MEDIATORS phone calls raises issues that should be explored further.

Doctors occupy a unique position in the health care system. Twenty-five years ago, most doctors worked as individual practitioners, occasionally referring patients to hospitals that were for the most part, hotels for the sick. Now, however, with the influx of billions and billions of tax dollars in the form of Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, hospitals have engulfed the entire medical care system. More and more doctors find themselves employees of these gigantic ever-expanding medical centers. They have gone the way of other groups of craftspeople and artisans of the last hundred years--into the factories. Many doctors are understandably upset by their rather sudden loss of autonomy. They are angry about it. Unfortunately, they usually wind up taking this anger out on their patients, their co-workers, their families and themselves. Doctors as a profession have shockingly high rates of suicide, divorce, alcoholism and drug dependence. And even phenomenal salaries like $30,000 a year lose some of their appeal when you're on call three nights a week, and work 55 hours. Most doctors die young.

Patients often feel like the doctor is in a rush to get rid of them, that the doctor doesn't care about them, or explain anything to them, that they dare not ask a question about what he/she is doing or why, that the doctor is angry with them for being ill. These outrages are common, and whenever complaints come in to MEDICAL MEDIATORS concerning a doctor's inhumane behaviour, the MEDICAL MEDIATORS will act promptly, and if possible, try to obtain satisfaction for the offended patient. However, it is important to understand that doctors are not the real enemy of patients. In reality, the position of a doctor in the modern, complex, highly technological medical center is similar to that of a foreman in a factory: he may scowl a lot, and order everyone around, and expect everyone to worship him, but in fact he is only a pawn in the hands of the increasingly powerful hospital administrators, and their allies in the health insurance, hospital equipment and drug conglomerates.

While we compile our statistics, and help individual patients obtain humane medical care, MEDICAL MEDIATORS is trying to bring patients together, to prove that people are not alone in their criticisms of the health care system. MEDICAL MEDIATORS is an attempt to build a broad based People's Health Movement by focusing patient outrage on the profit motivations of the health care providers. MEDICAL MEDIATORS publishes a newsletter periodically to keep concerned patients informed about what we are doing. This newsletter is available on request. In the future, we hope to take more visible public action against the injustices which are built into our capitalist system of health care. But before we have the strength to do that, we need a larger constituency. If you have any complaints about the health care system, or the health care you have received locally, call:

MEDICAL MEDIATORS
761-5079
Monday through Wednesday, 5-8 p.m.

Medical Mediators is an attempt to build a people's health movement by focusing patient outrage on the profit motivations of the health care providers.

(ZNS)--When a woman goes to the doctor, she's likely to be drugged, rather than treated for her illness. A man, on the other hand, is usually treated.

According to psychologist Doctor Linda Fidell of California State University at Northridge, women are given mood-modifying drugs twice as often as men. Doctor Fidell said that physicians tend to take their male patients' symptoms of illness more seriously than those of their female patients. Women, says Doctor Fidell, often explain their emotions as well as their symptoms to their doctors--whereas men tend to describe their symptoms only. As a result, doctors are more likely to prescribe such drugs as barbiturates, sedatives and anti-depressants to women than to men.

Doctor Fidell also charges that doctors tend to see women as hypochondriacs. A study of drug advertisements in such publications as the Journal of the American Psychiatric Association shows that women generally appear in ads for mood-changing drugs, while men appear in ads for drugs given for specific diseases.

"Don't Need No Doctor"

Hal Bennett and Dr. Michael Samuels, M.D., The Well Body Book, Random House/Bookworks

Have you ever come away angry and frustrated from a visit to the doctor's still not knowing what's happening inside your body? Or ignorant of what the medicine you're taking? Or how it works? Or its possible side effects? Well, for starters, The Well Body Book can put you on the road to gaining greater self-determination and knowledge of your body as well as what the doctor's up to when it comes down to your health.

Written by a doctor-turned-freek on the staff of the Bolinas Headlands Clinic, an experimental health service in northern California, this home medical handbook contains almost all the standard medical information that you would normally seek from a doctor. It provides a practical, wholistic approach to life, health, and disease, blending eastern and western thought to re-introduce the ancient concepts of inner awareness and human energy as healing tools.

The book is simply written and clearly illustrated and teaches you step by step how to do a complete physical exam as well as diagnose and treat common diseases such as scabies, lice, and sore throats to name a few. The chapters on preventive medicine are especially good, covering techniques on how to prevent disease by getting in touch with your body's needs: rest-work cycles (bio-rhythms), food, relaxation, sleep, dreams, and environments. The mind dynamics and relaxation techniques are invaluable if practiced, and have been used to actually cure cancer.

In a recent letter to the SUN, Blues & Jazz Festival acupuncturist Marty Rossman, M.D., laid out the relevance of new approaches to the medical scene this way.

"Nineteenth and early twentieth century medical breakthroughs (surgical anesthesia, technique, and antibiotics) developed to combat the major killer of the day--trauma and infectious diseases. The major killers of our day are different--heart disease, cancer, suicide--and they require new approaches. The one thing they have in common is that they are diseases of stress, and the reality you live in. We have fooled ourselves into believing that in drugs lay the cure--we have taken the ritual as reality and have forgotten the meaning and context of their use, that is as aids to the real healing power which is in each of us."

"Fortunately, sanity appears to be attempting a comeback in what I consider the medical vanguard of the new age. Alternative methods of healing (yoga, mind control and meditative techniques, bio-feedback, acupuncture, etc.) are now being investigated by the really top level scientists in the world and are beginning to trickle into the medical community. The big lag now is in education of not only doctors but of all people as to what their lives and bodies really are, how they work, why they break down, and how to fix them."

The point is: nobody but you yourself determines your relative degree of health or disease. By remaining ignorant of your body's needs and of the way psychic stress creates the climate for disease, you lose the ability to consciously determine the path of your life.

Basic medical information as provided in The Well Body Book should be common knowledge taught in elementary schools. Instead, the information is mystified and monopolized by a medical industry more focused on profit and power than on people's health. It's in their interest to keep you going to the doctor!

For those regrettably necessary trips to the doctor, The Well Body Book includes a chapter on how to counteract the often negative experience of visiting today's rushed businessman/doctor. It tells you how to use the doctor as a resource as well as how to deal with the doctor about long waits, poor waiting rooms, impersonal attention, and uncomfortable exams. And especially what questions to ask the doctor who may be all too prone to prescribe pills in order to get patients out the door, feet first or otherwise!

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And picking up The Well Body Book is definitely well worth the $5.95 it's set you back. Check it out at some of the bookstores around town, and find out a bit more about your inner workings.

--Tom Kuzma
M2, U of M Medical School