Health care ‘parasite’

Dear editor:

Seems the U.K.’s national health insurance system is under attack and being slowly transitioned toward a U.S.style insurance-based system, which we switched to in the 1970s. The idea was launched under Maggie Thatcher in the 1980s, so this has been a slow and systematic takeover by corporate health insurance corporations such as United Healthcare and Kaiser Permanente, per a U.K. doctor.

The NHS is currently in the process of being defunded in order to erode quality of service and public confidence and sell them on the insurance-based system. Health insurance corporations are like a parasite in our health care, extracting billions of dollars over time that could be better spent in administering actual patient health care. No other industry has continuously seen an annual double digit rise in costs for the past 40 years, that I’m aware of.

A for-profit system of doctors and hospitals leads to over prescribing, over medicating and over charging, which should sound familiar to Americans by now. While many in the U.S. would like to move away from this system, the very profitable, parasitic insurance industry is spreading their poison worldwide.

The tactic of defunding a government program or agency is not new to the U.S. in efforts to erode public confidence in our government. Those we elect to “serve” us are instead doing their best to destroy “our” government and hand it over to corporations. They are called neocons and their hate and fear is being spread worldwide and people everywhere are pushing back, including here. Judith Zitko Hot Springs Village