MEDICAL CARE IN GEORGE BUSH'S AMERICA-- AND WHY MORE AND MORE AMERICANS ARE FORCED TO SEEK IT ELSEWHERE

My friend L works very hard. A single mom, she's raised her daughter on her own and she's lived the life of a conscious and loving being, active in her church and coaching at the local schools long after her daughter had graduated. She is self-employed and a severe knee injury is threatening her livelihood. Thanks to the utter corporatization of the American health care system-- thanks Bill Frist and the rubber stamp Congress-- both doctors and patients, or would-be patients, are royally screwed. HMOs are all about middlemen raking off dollars from both sides. They have no function except to enrich themselves. Their only role in the health care system is to prevent both health and care.

Today CNN ran a story by Krysten Crawford on how more and more Americans are being forced to seek serious health care overseas. My friend L is trying prayer now. If that doesn't work, she'll be forced to go to England. She's not alone. In 2006 over half a million Americans will go abroad not to see the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids or bask on the beaches of Koh Samui but to seek affordable health care. The best health care system in the world? Maybe-- if you're a member of Congress or a multimillionaire.

Rush Limbaugh thinks of the Dominican Republic as a place to pack up the viagra and do a little walk on the wild side for a weekend with his pals in a country known for impoverished, underaged prostitutes. The Dominican Republic is one of several unlikely countries where thousands of Americans go to get medical care they can't afford in George Bush's America. How about Costa Rica, the Philippines, Thailand, India? Nope, not sex tourism... medical tourism! And by 2010 medical tourism, according to David Hancock, author of The Complete Medical Tourist will be a $40 billion a year industry.

Ted Mohr is an American running the Adventist Hospital in Penang, Malaysia. "I see the market exploding, he says. "American health care is getting too expensive for too many people." Foreign national make up almost a third of their $32 million annual business.

I've spent a lot of years abroad and not just living in places like Amsterdam, Berlin and London. I spent a couple years in places like Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Morocco, Nepal. My experience with medical facilities in the Third World, while perhaps dated, is not as rosy as the picture painted by the businesses selling Americans on the wonderful medical treatment overseas. I remember a hospital in Agadir with cigarette butts all over the operating room. But Ken Erickson toured India and found all sorts of "first-rate private hospitals" with U.S.-trained doctors. "My God," he thought, "this is the perfect arbitrage situation. Buy below market and sell below market." And he does. Last May he started GlobalChoice Healthcare in Albuquerque and he sends his clients to Costa Rica, Panama, India, and Panama.

"In June, GlobalChoice sent a patient to Punjab for a hip replacement that cost about $13,000, including airfare and a 20-day hotel stay. The estimated cost in the United States for the surgery alone? $40,000."

Better solutions, in my opinion, are offered in David Sirota's brilliant new book, Hostile Takeover: How Big Money & Corruption Conquered Our Government-- And How We Take It Back. Chapter 6 of this must-read is dedicated to how Bush and the rubber stamp Congress have sold out our entire health care system for massive legalized bribes from Big Pharma and HMOs. From blatant money grubbing political whores like Marc Racicot (ex-Bush lawyer and campaign chairman, ex-Enron lobbyist, ex-Republican national Committee Chairman, currently head of the unscrupulous American Insurance Association) and Newt Gingrich (head of a medical industry front group) to crooks and rip-off artists like Wal-Mart, the system has been rigged against patients (and doctors) to benefit corporations (and the crooked politicians who enable them). I've written about Mike Rogers (R-MI) before; he's affordable health care's worst enemy in the entire Congress. If his hapless constituents had any inkling of what he's been up to to destroy any attempts to provide ordinary Americans with affordable health care, no one would vote for him. After collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bribes (nice when you can make your own rules!) from the health care industry he's supposed to be regulating, Rogers routinely-- and shrilly-- portrays any proposal for government-backed health care as a dangerous precursor to "rationing." Conrad Burns is his mirror image in the Senate, a hack who stuffs all the money he can in his pockets-- and this guy hasn't even limited himself to just "legalized" bribes, either-- and then tells his constituents that people who are uninsured "elect to be uninsured." People who vote to re-elect shills like Burns and Rogers deserve a health care system that makes them and their families go to India and the Dominican Republic for medical care. But what about the rest of us?

Sirota has tangible solutions. He advocates extending traditional Medicare to all citizens (which is similar to what Dr. Victoria Wulsin, the brilliant public health policy expert who's running against Mean Jean Schmidt in OH-02, told me this morning she'd like to explore). Short of a universal, single-payer health care system, Sirota says "our government must create minimum health care standards that Big Business must meet, the same way we have minimum wage standards." He also firmly advocates regulating health care insurance prices like any other utility, a concept Howard Dean originally introduced me to.