Disease-Mongering is Making Billions for the Health Care Industry and Sending You to the Poorhouse

Health care in America is arguably the best in the world. We have the best-educated physicians, the most highly trained specialists, the hardest working underpaid nurses and access to all of this within at least an hour’s driving distance for almost all of us. Unfortunately, American health care also has one other thing that health care in most other countries don’t. An overwhelming dependence on profit to keep it going.

Only the most cynical among us would say that all doctors care about is making money. Many do, doubtlessly, but you don’t spend that much time in school and that much time in workshops and that much time keeping up with latest trends and that much time with your fingers stuck up the anuses of strangers or inside the gooey mess of gunshot victims unless you have at least a little bit of dedication. But no matter how much dedication to keeping you alive and healthy your doctors may be, the simple unpleasant fact is that health care in America is all geared toward maximizing profit.

The need for revenue to keep the whole American health care system from collapsing upon itself is the core reason why so many patients in the United States undergo unnecessary screenings, take unnecessary drugs, and constantly fear that a sniffle may turn into something serious. There is even an official term for the profit-motive behind making Americans think they have health problems that must be taken care pharmaceutically or surgically. It’s called disease-mongering. And it’s so prevalent that it even has its own Wikipedia entry. Well, okay, maybe that’s not the best indication of how subversively integral to American society disease-mongering really is, but you get my meaning.