The cancer epidemic - Part III

In my earlier post (this morning) I mentioned that expenditure on so-called "health" (that is, on ill-health, sickness and disease) had reached an astronomical USD$1.6 trillion 2002, an increase of 9.3% on the figure for 2001. What makes this figure so obscene is that its beneficiaries are executives and other employees of multinational corporations, in particular, drug companies, with whom politicians, administrators, senior executives and employees of the US government and its agencies (FDA, CDC, NIH and so on) have (often substantial) financial ties. It may be difficult to believe, but expentiture on "health" greatly exceeds that on arms, in spite of the fact that military spending is itself obscene [As I pointed out in the post on the economics of war and terror on 16 November 2005, worldwide military spending during 2004 amounted to USD$1.035 trillion during 2004. I also mentioned that President Bush had said, in March 2003, that the war in Iraq would cost around USD$60 billion but that, as at March 2005 it had already cost USD$135.3 billion. SBS TV reported last month that the figure had reached $300 billion, although the report did not specify whether this figure was in US or Australian Dollars. Today's Age newspaper, however, has the following headline: "Iraq war may top $2.65 trillion (USD$2 trillion)"This estimate comes from none other than Nobel Prize winning economist and former advisor to Bill Clinton, Joseph Stiglitz, author of "Globalization and its discontents"(2002) and "The roaring nineties (2003)].

If the figure of USD$1.6 trillion (2002 "health spending") sounds frightening you may not want to read on, because, according to a report from US government actuaries issued on 12 March 2002 "healthcare" spending is expected to top USD$2.8 trillion by 2011 (see www.mercola.com Issue 311, 30 March 2002, citing an article in Health Affairs for March/April 2002, Volume 21, Pages 207-217; the same issue of mercola.com reports that retail pharmacies filled three billion prescriptions during 2000)! As a result of these unsustainable costs - something now universally being acknowledged - the cost of family insurance in the US is rapidly approaching the gross earnings of a full-time minimum wage-earner (Washington Post, 28 September 2004). The average American family was paying USD$10,000 per annum for health insurance. "By most financial measures, the health care system is broken, agreed Robert E Moffit, director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the conservativeHeritage foundation" (ibid).

This brings us back to the question we started with. What are we getting for this huge and clearly unsustainable expenditure, expenditure which is making senior executives of corporate America and their allies in the US Congress wealthy beyond their wildest dreams? (To be continued)