Michael Jackson, For Profit Medicine, and You

Last night I watched Dr. Arnie Klein on Larry King and the way he was slurrily speaking and rambling makes me wonder if he was "on" something....?

I understand that he must be very stressed because he's certainly under a microscope but there was also something else I noticed. The doctors that had no association with Michael Jackson like Sanja Gupta and anesthesiologists I've seen talking about Diprivan have all been adamant about how it would be madness to see Diprivan used outside a monitored setting like hospital OR. But the way Dr. Klein danced around the issue dismissing his culpability was simply crazy. Sadly Dr. Klein also seemed to keep going off message and spent a lot of the interview being self congratulatory about his achievements in the field of aesthetics and his feelings about things not related to the interview topic. Dr. Klein came off as someone trying to be slick but really not pulling it off.

For someone under such scrutiny it would come off a lot better to admit some culpability rather than talking about what best buddies they were and nonsense like he and his whole crew slept in the same room as Michael one night because he couldn't get to sleep.....but at the same time he had no knowledge of Michael having any sleep problems. I don't know about you but I'm not asleep in all of this, it seems rather clear he's trying to confuse the audience.

Another aspect of the interview I thought rather horrifying was how freely Dr. Klein was talking about Michael's symptoms and health problems. Excuse me but even after I die I want my doctors to keep all of my medical information confidential as specified by law.

The point of this post is to bring up the one of the 2 reasons that Michael Jackson died related to his treatment by doctors. One reason is that doctors want to be associated with celebrities so they can feel pumped up and feel important, the other is money, really big money.

Obviously none of us can provide the kind of compensation that MJ could but any of us seeking medical care are paying way more than we should. Recently I've been given prescriptions for skin cream for inflammation. When I went to get the first one filled they told me it was $300! SHEESH is it made from ground up diamonds? This is for something that's been on the market for decades, clearly long enough for research and development costs to be re-couped. I ended up getting it filled in Canada for $61 including shipping. The second one had to be changed by my doctor to something that would be covered by my plan because it also was nearly $300.

13% of your drug costs go to research and development, some variable percentage goes for new drug development but a whopping 51% goes to marketing, administration and profits. PLUUEASE can we stop with the drug pushing TV commercials???? I truly believe that doctors should make GREAT money and not have to work so hard, so much of their work now goes into administrative paper work that less of their time can go to listening and caring for us the patients.

A lot of the money that doctors bring in goes to paying their staff of paper pushers and insurance plan un-tanglers. True doctors started this problem way back in the 1900s because the AMA didn't want to stop the way doctors billed back then, the rich paid more because they could and the poor paid what they were able. The AMA also has been one of the biggest forces along with big Pharma in preventing the implementation of universal medical coverage.

It's always blown my mind that you would never be able to find out what your hospital bill for an operation would be before hand but at the same time would you buy a car without knowing how much it was going to cost? True there are incidental expenses in a hospital stay but in not having uniformity in billing for procedures it's a great and sneaky and well used way for hospitals to bilk more money out of us via insurance companies while those companies use the added expenses as a way to raise rates and deny coverage.

Insurance companies are for profit so they need to make money but they want to make big huge enormous money and so does big Pharma. As our employment has changed over decades from people going to work for a company their entire life and retiring with a pension to people enjoying many different career choices over a lifetime the pension theory has become muddled. With some people covered here, some there, and some not at all it's given insurance companies a lot of rein to set their costs depending on so many variables.

Isn't it strikingly sad how horrible it is to be sick but at the same time so many people are making huge huge money out of your suffering?

Everyone has a right to their own opinion but mine is that medical care is a basic human right that's being denied to many of us. At the same time people who can afford whatever care they want are being given sub-standard care like Michael Jackson received because he was able to make a number of doctors very rich. Like I've been saying since I started this Michael Jackson series, he could have felt and looked a lot healthier, he could have suffered less and not died had he been treated with "wellness" in mind instead of giving him dangerous medications and treatments. This obviously isn't going away for a long time and the consequences for the doctors involved in Michael's continual suffering and his death remain to be seen. In the mean time I'll keep you posted on what I think!