We can fix healthcare

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What Is Cancer?

I have already explained how cancer in a human body works. To help you understand how deeply dangerous the cancer of unrestrained greed and uncontrolled power is, I’m going to use another analogy. Cancer is like a nasty virus. It invades a cell in your body or a system like healthcare, and changes its raison d’être. Cancer is an evil reprogrammer, a malicious hacker.

When cancer invades your kidney, it tells the organ to stop filtering your blood and to start growing. When cancer takes control of a bureaucracy, it tells the bureaucrats to stop helping others, grab all the money they can, and spread out.

Regardless of the type of cancer or where it takes hold, cancer forces its host to do one thing and one thing only: GROW.

In this way, cancer is like Ebola or Hanta. These are viruses that invade parts of your body that you need to live. When the virus invades certain critical parts of your body, it reprograms the cells to stop doing their vital functions and just multiply. Ebola stops your coagulation system so you bleed to death internally. Hanta prevents your lungs from working so you die from lack of oxygen.

Cancer is the master reprogrammer. Whether the cancer is in your body or in our healthcare system, either way, it reprograms for growth, stops vital functions, and we die.

THE ROOT CAUSE

Healthcare’s primary problem is not insurance companies making obscene profits; they are simply playing the game the way Washington set up the rules. Nor is it the massive chasm between Democrats and Republicans, as some would like to believe. Both political parties have done their fair share of expanding government bureaucracy and thus encouraging the spread of this cancer. Some have even called the federal bureaucracy the “fourth branch of government,” claiming that the bureaucracy is the real government.

When a cancer of greed and power, with its ability to re-purpose, invades a bureaucracy that is susceptible to cancer because it has nothing to restrain it, you have a recipe for disaster. We are experiencing that disaster, the root cause, on a daily basis.

A cancer of unrestrained greed and uncontrolled power within a government bureaucracy is the root cause for progressive deterioration of the American healthcare system.

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The above is an excerpt from chapter 6 of "The Cancer in the American Healthcare System."