Autumn brings many seasonal traditions, one of which are public “walks” and “runs” to help find cures for diseases. Whether it’s lupus, breast cancer, Alzheimer’s, or other afflictions, ordinary citizens pay up for the privilege of participating in these fund raising events.
I’ve often thought these affairs were rather odd, simply because of the state of health care and how it’s delivered in this country. For example, on the Walk to End Lupus website, it states the money collected will “lead special research initiatives, fund innovative studies, and advocate for increased public and private investment in lupus research to advance the science and medicine of lupus.”
Which is indeed a noble goal, as ending human suffering in any form is. Except there is something very strange about ordinary citizens chipping in their own money to fund private investment in a cure they will unlikely be able to afford, or be bled dry consuming. And then, as is their custom, the providers of these publicly funded cures, some of it in contributions, some of it in the form of the $100 billion spent on research in the past decade by the National Institute of Health, will lobby Congress to prevent cheaper generic versions of the cures from reaching the market. That’s how we got a shortage of EpiPens right before the school year: Mylan Labs, which owned the patent that allowed them to charge $600 for what is a pair of retractable ball point pens, pretty much owned all of the production available, and prevented any competitors from entering the market they controlled. A generic version is finally on the way, but that’s our system: it puts patent squatting ahead of the public welfare, leaving our children vulnerable.
So who would be crazy enough to take their own money out of their pockets in order to be gouged later? The same ones who allowed a 501(c)3 “non-profit” to create a hospital monopoly in their own backyard, while its management showers itself with eight figure salaries, which requires them to perform all sorts of over-testing, and also has them resorting to fund raising as well. Including, wouldn’t you know it, “walks.”
Lenin famously said that the “Capitalists will sell us the rope to hang themselves with.” He didn’t count on Americans being gullible enough to supplying the rope for free, and then getting it sold back to them by capitalists along with a 10,000 percent mark-up and a patient-supplied Range Rover for every practitioner. That’s a “free market economy” for you.
Donald Davret
Searingtown
