Ready for a whole lot of nothing? Here comes “Healthcare Reform”.

Reuters reported this morning “Obama has invited several large trade groups, including the American Medical Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the American Hospital Association, to discuss wringing savings from the health system”.

And do you know what every one of these groups is discussing on their way to this meeting?   They’re each deriving ways they can come away from Washington and maintain or increase their profit levels.  All they care about is making sure that revenue stays the same or increases.  The AMA wants the health insurers to pay more, they will no doubt fall to the malpractice insurance argument.  The health insurers will argue that the hospital associations need to reduce operating expenses and the hospitals will want to pay less to Doctors and increase the payouts by insurers to cover their “operating expenses” (that’s code for shareholder return).

Capitalist, Socialist… whatever you want to call yourself, know this: As long as taking care of shareholders is the primary focus of these organizations the one thing that will not come up in the conversation as a point of concern is care for the sick, injured and dying.  Patient care and patient monetary expense is an afterthought in the Wall Street bureaucracy that is the American health care system.

So despite Obama’s nice little gesture only the most naive of the hopeful among us could possibly believe any meeting involving these organizations will evolve into less expensive or better care.  Wishful thinking without the guts to stand up to corporatism is nothing more than pandering to the whims of big business.  That’s what Obama is doing.  When it comes to health care in America you either stand on the side of corporate revenue or patient care.  There is no in between.  Patient care lost a long time ago.  You are a number in a process.  Stay healthy.   But even that concept once promoted by a few health insurers (wellness programs) were cut when they realized it costs money to promote wellness.  Some highly paid think tank ran the math and figured out it was cheaper to let people get sick and deny the claims.