On Thursday, as I was perusing some of the social media commentary regarding Susan Monarez’s ouster from the CDC, I noticed a whole lot of posts from people who just couldn’t trust doctors or medical experts of any kind because of how badly they had been betrayed during the pandemic, by the greedy Big Pharma execs and all of the medical experts forcing them to do lockdowns and wear masks and take free vaccines.
Sure, they trusted them when they were pricing Epi-Pens at $725, they have no problem with thousands of people having to turn to GoFundMe to cover healthcare costs that their private insurers won’t — but paper masks? Clearly, that was the real goldmine. After all, who among us had a better time during the pandemic than healthcare workers? Maybe the Tiger King, I don’t know.
As someone who has been annoying the absolute shit out of people about single payer healthcare since childhood, I have to tell you — I am going to need all of these people to fuck right off into the sea. Why? Not just because they’re factually incorrect on multiple levels, but because they are largely the cause of all of the real problems with the healthcare industry and “Big Pharma.”
They’re the ones who “love their private health insurance companies.”
They’re the ones who voted for people who would get rid of “regulations.”
They the ones who voted for George Bush, whose 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act barred Medicare from negotiating the prices of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and other treatments. Remember when Medicare penis pumps cost the government $360 a pop? How, from 2006 to 2011 we spent 172.4 million tax dollars on penis pumps alone? That is because Republicans were opposed to negotiating prices and wanted to allow pharmaceutical and medical device companies to be able to charge the US government whatever they wanted, with zero pushback whatsoever.
They’re the ones who voted for people who supported these companies charging Americans exorbitant fees, because they supposedly needed the money for “innovation” (innovation that much of the time had already been done with US tax dollars).
Medicare was barred from negotiating these prices until Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was passed — no thanks to (checks notes) literally every single Republican in Congress, as they all voted against it.
They’re the primary reason we can’t have nice things like single payer, and why we can’t enjoy the low-cost healthcare enjoyed by people in every other high-income nation on earth, because they’re scawed of sociawism!
They’re the ones who voted for Donald Trump, whose 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act gave pharmaceutical companies a $46.8 billion tax break, and whose “Big, Beautiful Bill” provided a multi-billion-dollar handout to pharmaceutical companies by exempting medications like the cancer drug Keytruda from Medicare negotiations, passing that cost onto consumers.
Pharmaceutical companies make a hell of a lot more money from these tax cuts and bans on medication negotiations than they do from the vaccines. Vaccines actually have a very low profit margin compared to other kinds of medications and are nowhere near the “cash cow” the Right likes to pretend they are. They’re also not even remotely profitable for doctors themselves, who usually break even or even lose money on them, due to high overhead costs and low reimbursement rates, particularly for Medicaid patients.
You know what costs more than the hepatitis vaccine? Treating hepatitis. You know what costs more than Gardasil? Treating cervical cancer. There would be a hell of a lot more money for the medical establishment to make not vaccinating people than vaccinating people.
Yes, some companies did turn a profit due to the government buying their COVID vaccines, but not nearly as much profit as they’ve made over the years with the help of the GOP.
No one — and let’s be clear, absolutely no one — made any kind of serious profit or gained anything at all from recommending that people wear masks to reduce the amount the virus spread … except for what they gained by their friends and neighbors not dying.
Now, I have no problem admitting that a lot of Democrats have not been perfect when it comes to healthcare and pharmaceutical companies — there’s a whole lot of room for improvement — but the overwhelming majority of pharma-friendly legislation has come from the Right. That is something that has, actually, harmed all of us. You will also notice that while there are a whole lot of people like me on the Left who advocate for the idea that healthcare should not be a for-profit industry to begin with, who want to put people before profits, there is not really a contingent for that on the Right. They are fine with the healthcare industry being wholly corrupt, charging exorbitant amounts of money for medications they can make for pennies, just so long as no one asks them to do something that remotely inconveniences them.
So I don’t want to hear even a whisper about how these creeps can never trust medical experts again, how they were so terribly “betrayed” during the pandemic (especially because they were not), because they have done nothing their entire lives other than vote to make everything worse for the rest of us, particularly as it concerns getting screwed by “Big Pharma.”
What I will say, however, is that I do believe the fact that we have allowed healthcare to be a major for-profit industry in the first place — whether these folks care about the real corruption or not — has left a ton of room for people to be “skeptical” about the wrong things. I think the high cost of care, of pharmaceuticals, the inability of many to see a doctor, etc. has pushed people into the open arms of the health woo and shady supplement industry. They’re reaching the wrong conclusions, obviously, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not an underlying problem. It’s never going to be easy for people to fully trust the healthcare industry, even those who are right, even those with the best intentions, while there is so much money to be made off of our suffering.
So maybe it’s time to finally eliminate that problem.
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