Health Care Deaths

by Don McCormick

Recently, USA Today published an article by Rita Rubin that said, “...15,000 Medicare patients die each year in part because of care they receive in the hospital.”  This kind of report was first published in 1999. It was called “Death By Medicine” but it included the whole population and not only Medicare patients. The death rate then was 66,000 per month of which 15,000 were Medicare patients.    The Department of Health and Human Services is very concerned.  We who call ourselves Catholic Workers should also be concerned.  Some Catholic Workers who are brave enough to go to jail over “War Deaths,” should turn their attention to these “Health Care Deaths” and occupy the steps of the hospitals and the offices of the health care providers.  Physicians and the nurses should not work in such unsafe places and should care for their patients at home until things improve.  Just count the deaths by medicine since 1999 and you will mark 10 million graves, more than a Holocaust, more than in all the U.S. Wars since WWII, and more than were caused by nuclear bombs combined.  Isn't this worth fixing?  It has not been fixed by government nor by business. There is no more incentive for them to do that than for government and their allies in business to stop the war industry.  Medicine, instead of being the help people seek, is a money machine and patient deaths are the collateral damage.

We can reverse this by building a health care system that is based on patient and physician cooperatives through which access to care and treatment is from the bottom up and not the top down.  We do not have to accept health care as if it were a product bundled by the state and private companies. Currently, it is presented as a great benefit when it is actually a black box that cannot be unpacked by either the patients or the physicians.  We know instinctively that health care is a  series of relationships between family members, friends and neighbors among whom some are more knowledgeable and can help those of us who are hurt or sick.  It is not a monetary exchange system through which the physically well and most expert advisors are able to control more property and drive fancier cars.  Our current system of death-supporting-care is such an exchange.  The supposed correction of this tragic system is a form of universal health insurance underwritten by government and paid for by taxes.  That is a fool's position unless the government is first “of the people, by the people and for the people.” It is not.  It has not been since those words were first written.   I say, start at the bottom by organizing into cooperatives and let the reforms rise to the top and stop the killing that is being done in the name of medicine and money. 

Don McCormick is a member of Tomorrow’s Bread Today, a Catholic Worker effort that began in 1995.  They have a medical mission in Houston, Portland, Or and Hickory, NC where we have formed Patient/Physician Cooperatives.  They help support A Simple House in Washington.