PRESIDENT, PANDEMIC AND PHYSICIANS
By: Suri Davis
There is an uptick in Covid positive results locally and around the globe. We watched, cringingly, at the presidential debates, and we wonder, whose fault is it anyway? This pandemic seems to have a beat of its own, and fear has returned about illness and death. Fear which hearkens back to the original outbreak at the beginning of the year. I have read a lot over these past few months about the progress of the pandemic. Republicans are not paternalistic beings, they believe in corporate America and capitalism, but one major point is absent, and that is regulation.
When capitalism believes in survival of the fittest and profit uber alles, it is up to regulation to ensure there is no insider trading, that the profiteering isn’t at other people’s expense, and doesn’t unduly encroach on other corporate rights, e.g., intellectual property, and anti-trust/monopoly concerns on crushing the competition to the detriment of the markets. Republicans don’t believe in regulations. In fact, President Trump appointed heads of regulatory agencies for the specific purpose of emasculating them, disemboweling them, and letting profits and investors control industry, public and private.
In comes big Med organizations that have swallowed up our local doctor offices and hospitals, Northwell, Mt. Sinai and Prohealth to name a few. Last year, Northwell had $12b in revenues and Mt. Sinai $8b in revenues. Their net incomes are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In the early twentieth century, the majority of the hospitals were not-for-profit hospitals connected to a religious organization, but that is no longer the case. Hospitals, by and large, are very much money-making factories, looking at any hospital or doctor bill will reveal the same to be true.
The doctors and scientists at these hospitals had early warning of the spread of the coronavirus in China, and that it was a matter of time until it would reach our shores. It was up to the hospitals then to determine how best to prepare for the pandemic. At the early stages, they should have been purchasing more PPEs, looking for more staff, converting their hospital wards, getting more ventilators etc. This is America. This is capitalism. This was not the responsibility of our President to buy supplies for very profitable companies.
The companies were simply greedy. We all know hospital personnel who had insufficient PPE gear, who were traumatized by their working conditions, which were beyond what any doctor or nurse should be asked to do, ultimately their Hippocratic oath pushed them to do their utmost to save the bombardment of patients arriving at their doors.
It is not a new opinion I voice at my thoughts that doctors have abdicated their responsibilities to health insurers and to the Big Med companies they sold out to, and are now indentured to Big Med bosses. Medicine has lost its soul, and we have suffered great losses in lives because of Big Med greed.
There were 29,000 bed, staff and equipment set up at the Jacob Javits Center in New York, the naval ship SS Comfort had an additional 3,000 beds, and there were beds set up locally at Shor Yoshuv. They sat mostly idle. Why?
Greed, and Governor Cuomos edict that hospitals would be free from Medical Malpractice claims. We understand that to induce hospitals to take on the pandemic, which no one knew how to treat, Cuomo had to remove the threat of mass lawsuits to ensure that patients were admitted and treated.
Why weren’t patients sent to the Javits center or to the SS Comfort or Shor Yoshuv? Greed. The hospitals could no longer take elective surgery cases and non-pandemic cases, so they took every single body that entered their hospital, knowing they would get reimbursement whether the person was treated, lived or died. Without relatives permitted in the hospitals, we don’t know really what happened to patients treated in the spike of the pandemic, but many were elderly and needed advocates to ensure they received their necessary daily medications and assist with feeding and care. Even in good times, patients need advocates to ensure they receive meds, food, toileting and care. In the pandemic, many died of neglect.
Big Med, like Big Pharm is a greedy machine. Rather than give up the revenue of these patients to a facility that was better equipped and prepared to receive and care for them, they took on all patients who entered, and stripped of the threat of malpractice, left many to languish in neglect.
I have been waiting to see if there is a doctor/nurse uprising, to hear whether these professionals will take their bosses to task for a failure of PPE, ventilators and additional staff. Thus far silence. Do they feel hopeless to take their bosses to task? If there was a strong union, it might represent these workers. Do the doctors and nurses feel that the pandemic was unforeseeable, unplannable that they don’t allocate rightful blame to Big Med for not heeding the warnings from China and Italy until the first cases started hitting New York. Not true. Big Med is myopic. Big Med is apathetic. Big Med is on this earth for one reason, to make money for its stock holders.
With the death of the powerful unions and with the death of essential regulation, capitalism quickly and easily morphs into greed. Pensions of the old blue chip companies, were a means of taking the profits of the company and sharing it with the employees who helped make the company profitable. It was an incentive along with fully paid health insurance. 401(k)s, HSAs and FSAs have been marketed to the public as wonderful vehicles for self-saving, but they obfuscate the fact that these essential benefits were stolen from America’s employees over the last decades, since the 80’s.
Many died in the pandemic because of greed. The under utilization of available resources, which could have saved many, remained unused, because Big Med wanted to grab every available body for its coffers, rather than permitting them a fighting chance at other facilities.
It is not up to government to shore up profitable companies or tell them what they already know: a pandemic is coming within months, gear up supplies and professionals to handle it. Big Med knew, but they didn’t want to eat into their profits to buy the necessary equipment and staff, and refer clients to empty facilities rather than tax their own personnel and hospitals. Woe onto Big Med and woe on to us who lost family and friends to greed.
The lawyers who have policed corporate American when government did not should look into class action suits against Big Med not for their failure to cure Covid patients, but their failure to take proper intakes, provide medicine and food and care for the patients who came en masse, and for not referring these patients to empty facilities for proper care.
There is an uptick in our local communities. At the very least, family members should be permitted to visit their sick relatives to ensure proper care, so it does not turn into another round of medical neglect at the hands of greedy Big Med.