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RE: This History Of Vaccines Series
This is happening here as well @hassanben. People that have no money to pay for their hospitalization are dumped on the sidewalk, sick, confused, many times mental ill and elderly. In the past doctors, religious institutions, community centers and hospitals had charity pools and give their free time to the poor. Now with our for profit system the poor are suffering as they had in the past before insurance and modern medical and pharmaceutical practices.
This is an extremely important point. Nowadays with the insurance companies practical total control over medical practioners, they are not able to donate their services, nor to accept lesser fees.
Prior to the mandate of Congress in 1974 that employers provide health insurance, there was a free market in the US, and the US had the best medical system in the world, bar none. Doctors could say 'Sure Clem, I'll take a couple chickens to set your broke leg.'
Ever since the quality of medical care has declined, and the costs have spiraled out of control, until the US now barely makes the top 50 countries in infant survival. Doctors no longer have any flexibility in choosing to accept less, or no, payment for their services, or even to choose their patients--nor patients their doctors.
Back then the rich from around the world would come to the USA for treatment that just couldn't be matched elsewhere. Nowadays Americans fly to India, or Mexico, to get better care at lower prices.
Insurance and pharmaceutical company profits, OTOH, have outpaced almost every other investment.
I look forward to the swift demise of both those industries when 3D desktop printing of organs, drugs, and medical devices, coupled with CRISPR, DNA, and epigenetic technology leaves them in the dust of history with the industrial age of child labor in factories and slave labor on plantations--grim cautionary tales of barbarism.
After all, the poor are the most affected