Doctor Doom!

Medical Industrial Complex grinds forward!

So I've been going to the doctor again recently. It's been a very long time. Long enough to forget why I hate doctors and this entire industry. I'd guess I've only been to the doctor before now once or twice in over ten years. Not a great place to be for someone in their forties, but what are you gonna do amirite?

In any case I am now begrudgingly paying for insurance, which in itself is a for-profit scam designed to extract more value than it pays out, but also the way this scam operates is malicious in the sneakiest of ways. You can't just opt out of insurance and expect to save money on the average even though that's exactly how it should work mathematically.

So how do insurance companies make sure to punish everyone that doesn't have insurance? They do it indirectly through the deals they make with hospitals and Big Pharma. Pills are the most obvious example on the financial level. It costs pennies on the dollar to actually create a pill. All the real cost is the massive overhead from research, regulation, and production. Once enough pills have been sold to pay for the overhead the rest of the money generated is almost entirely profit.

Why does this matter?

Well the insurance company negotiates a lower price for basically everything that it pays for. Try to pay for the exact same medical product or service out of pocket and it will cost at least twice as much (sometimes x10 the price or more). The best example of this was when Martin Shkreli (who has made an appearance in crypto) jacked up the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 overnight. The outrage was so intense that he was heavily investigated and put in jail for completely unrelated crimes. Meanwhile everyone else gets away with these crimes because they simply aren't hated enough to be persecuted to that level.

Back to insurance discounts.

These are not normal deals or discounts for "bulk buyers". It's quite obvious the entire system, especially in America, is designed to trap people into it while charging them an arm and a leg for insurance. Because of these backdoor deals the insurance companies get, opting out is not even an option even for the most healthy citizens (after all these are the people who financially support the entire operation).

The entire idea of insurance was supposed to be a system that everyone can pay into so that unlucky individuals wouldn't be financially destroyed (or perish from lack of care). That is still kind of how it works for car insurance, but the medical industry has taken the entire concept to an entirely new level. Not so ironically it's as if health insurance specifically has been injected with steroids.

Lovely reminders of how this all works.

Over the last few weeks I've seen a couple of doctors. All of them seem to want to "solve" my problems with prescriptions and medications. Take this pill to relax those muscles. Here's an anti-inflammatory. Here's a cream for that rash etc etc. In itself none of this is bad when taken individually, but the entire vibe of the industry is a systemic money-making goblin who's primary goal is to get you hooked and their product... forever. Yeah no thanks I'd like to actually fix the problem instead of dealing with a lifetime of side effects.

If it doesn't generate profit the activity is discouraged.

There are all kinds of homeopathic remedies for specific ailments, but almost all of them are denounced by doctors as "quackery" and "lacking scientific evidence". Yes well, of course they are lacking scientific evidence. The medical industry is not going to pump money into research and development on a remedy that it can't patent and exploit for profit. Plants can't be patented.

There are dozens if not hundreds of plants that already exist that should be receiving extensive study but don't because why would anyone pump the money in when they know they can't extract value out of a successful position? It's exactly the type of thing that taxes or other forms of communal funding should be used for, but somehow aren't because the people in charge of that money figure out a way to transfer the money or power to themselves in some way.

Obviously no one is running around making the claim that using leeches to drain your own blood is a good idea anymore. Actually this practice is still employed for a very niche subset of utilities. That's exactly why these things need to be studied and categorized rather than completely thrown out.

Conclusion

In any case I get the feeling that my doctor would prescribe almost anything that I asked for. I almost considered getting some hardcore painkillers for my shoulder situation but decided against that gem of an idea. Slippery slope, that.

I'm certainly feeling a lot more "on the grid" now that I'm paying for health insurance and going to the doctor again. It's somewhat annoying but perhaps a necessary evil at this point. At least they aren't trying to shove experimental treatments down everyone's throat like they were a few years back. Silver Lining.