Why American capitalism is not sustainable Part 2: Healthcare

First off, Health care vendors are not "health care providers". If they are, then supermarkets are food providers, and prostitutes are sexual providers. A provider doesn't ask reimbursement. Which is why, as corporations took over the health industry, they changed the name to "providers" so that as they captured a market that has no alternative--no competition--they would be insulated from criticism.

But let's look at it from a purely capitalistic point of view. There is no better market for capitalism than one that the consumer must have, or they will die. Much like Kenney Lay showed us, and his good friend George W. Bush, back in the 1990s, privatizing the public utilities in California was a great idea. Not necessarily for the country, or even for capitalism in a pure theoretical sense, but in a profit sense. He showed us that if we abandon all shame and ethics, and take over a market that people need and have no alternative for, then accuse them of being wasteful and want for, then cut the supply so that the cost triples, this is a good thing. And Lay built his own bubble, and it was good, of course until it popped.

Now American capitalism has latched onto health care. If you look at the forces, we have a huge market in the United States. People need some medications, and some care. They are relentlessly told with billions of dollars in advertising that they need other drugs and care. And thanks to a strange belief that the same drugs and care are ordained better since they are American, that this market should pay more than anyone else on the planet. But the cost of the services are suppressed by cutting insurance premiums and cutting nurses' numbers and salaries, to name a few.

Why is this a problem? It would seem that this is a truly great capitalistic utopia. A monopoly. The problem is that the market is not a bottomless pit. Particularly when wages are stagnant, the housing bubble pops, and jobs are being outsourced to cheaper labor markets. The huge market in America can provide the capital for a while, but when the quest for profit is not contained, there is a mass-balance problem, and this is not sustainable.

And keep in mind that this is also a large train that will most likely not be stopped before sailing off the unfinished bridge. With all of the attacks on federal spending--thinly veiled ideological battles from the right--there is zero--fucking none!--attacks on the cost of health care that is driving the structural debt nightmare that is MediCare. Why not? Because the forces driving the GOP and many Dems are from the behemoths of the health care industry, which benefit greatly--and exist outside the rules of free-market capitalism.