Corruption, Kickbacks, And Covid: The Medical Profession’s Fall From Grace

The Wizard of Oz curtain was pulled back, and many malicious elements in the healthcare system were exposed, and many patients now doubt not only the system, but even their own doctors. To understand the key players and the real threat to our health, we have to look deeper at the corruption that led to driving up the cost of care, while simultaneously reducing access to care. Unfortunately, a lot of patients erroneously blame their doctors and don’t understand that there are much more nefarious entities behind our healthcare, or what I like to call our sick-care, system.

A majority of your physicians don’t even understand why their patient’s care gets denied and why the time that they’re allowed to spend with patients gets shortened every year. So many doctors have burnout and leave medicine, but never question why we’re in this mess in the first place. The doctors who depart medicine are then replaced by less trained mid-levels, like nurse practitioners and physician assistants, who, while they play an important role in the healthcare team, shouldn’t be at the head of it due to their minimal training.

What Even the Doctors Don’t Know 

What I’m about to tell you is something most doctors don’t even know. In the United States, we have middlemen who were created to help facilitate the supply chain of healthcare supplies and medications. If it’s healthcare supplies, like bedpans, catheters, ventilators, tubing, syringes, etc., the middlemen are called group purchasing organizations. If it’s pharmaceuticals, those middlemen are called pharmacy benefit managers. These middlemen have been enabled by Congress through legislation to allow for “legalized kickbacks.”

What are “legalized kickbacks”? In the United States, due to antitrust laws, most industries are not allowed to have kickbacks or monopolies. A loophole was created for healthcare by Congress so that these middlemen could have the more than shady opportunity to go to the supplier and ask for a little something extra in order to get their supplies, including medicines, into hospitals and pharmacies. The same middlemen then go to the hospitals and pharmacies and say, “Oh, you would like to have access to these products? Then you have to pay us a little something extra.” Sounds like a conflict of interest, right? It is. And how much does it cost the American patient? Our estimations are at least $200 billion a year.

And how much does it cost the American patient? Our estimations are at least $200 billion a year.

Now ready to hear something even grosser? These middlemen create artificial shortages of life-saving medication so they can drive up the cost even further. They ration meds, including chemotherapy meds, so that they can make a bigger profit.

Ready to hear something even grosser than that? Remember how we can’t have monopolies in the United States? Well, these middlemen have now bought almost all of the insurance companies. So they dictate not only the supply chain, but how medicine is practiced (how much time your doctor can spend with you, what drugs to prescribe, etc. because how can a doctor spend time talking about diet and exercise when he or she is told to give each complex human patient 10 minutes)? This is all to further drive up profits for their billion-dollar industry. As I mentioned above, most doctors don’t even know this. They’re cogs in a wheel they have no idea exists. I and many others have worked hard from even before the pandemic to expose this madness. 

We Can’t Give Informed Consent When We’re Not Given the Facts

Enter the era of Covid. Medications and therapeutics are made mostly for a for-profit enterprise. Of course, medical innovation is driven by capitalism and a tiny bit of altruism. In the past, we have never ever taken data from a pharmaceutical company at face value. Data from Big Pharma has always been manipulated, and most physicians know this. 

For example, when the psychiatric drug Zyprexa, made by Pfizer, came out, we were told that this drug was a panacea for schizophrenia. That it had very few side effects and a high safety and efficacy profile. Well, a few years later, Pfizer relented that Zyprexa caused, in many patients, weight gain, hyperlipidemia, diabetes, or what we know as metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome places the patient at high risk for heart attack and stroke. A few more years down the line, we found that in patients over 65 this medication could cause sudden cardiac death. A black box warning was then placed on this drug by the FDA. This is usually the trajectory of many medications. But for the first time, it became accepted dogma that a new therapeutic was “safe and effective.” Safety data takes years. And we were later to find out it wasn’t even that effective either.

In the past, when a physician noticed an undisclosed side effect, a case study was done and published. 

Ultimately, this is what informed consent relays. It is a sacred part of the doctor/patient relationship, and it was stripped away by the government and bureaucrats, even if they did have the best public health intentions during a crisis. Even now, there is government overreach, as the pandemic winds down, to prevent physicians from having honest discussions about potential benefits, risks, and side effects of all potential treatments for a novel virus. The risks have been downplayed, and physicians have been muzzled when they have observed out-of-the-ordinary occurrences with a new therapeutic, which is usually part of the course of treatment with any new modality. In the past, when a physician noticed an undisclosed side effect, a case study was done and published. Conversations were had in Grand Rounds at academic institutions. Now to even have a conversation privately in an exam room could lead a physician to lose her medical license.

Patients No Longer Trust the Medical Profession

Of course, this erodes not only the relationship between a doctor and a patient, but you can quickly glance on any social media forum and see that patients no longer trust the medical profession. This means a patient won’t trust even long-standing and validated recommendations from their doctor. I think that’s much more dangerous than a government-dictated edict of “misinformation.”

Ultimately, our first oath is to do no harm. But beyond that, we are supposed to look out for the well-being of our patients. Medicine used to be a holistic practice, and now it has become the slave of for-profit medicine and the government. I do not want to be all doom and gloom, so what can we do?

Well, we the patients, can speak up. As a physician, I too, am a patient and have voiced my concern and do so only with the intention of bringing awareness, care, collaboration, and healing. In addition, we can call our elected representatives and ask them to repeal “safe harbor,'' which allows for these heinous legalized kickbacks, feeding the healthcare swamp monster. Ask them to sign bills as they come up on transparency of pricing, which has overwhelming bipartisan support. We can also champion science, which is never settled, and also requires honest conversations in real time and constant study. Despite our political views, we as patients all have a valid story to tell and can join forces to help us all heal.

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