IS THE HEALTH SECTOR BECOMING COMMERCIALIZED?

One of the most important public facilities provided to society is the health service including hospitals, clinics, surgeries and also pharmaceuticals and health care professionals. Their common aim is to help those in need of assistance to recover their health, which means their job is a matter of life and death. Yet unfortunately, the current free market economy and rampant capitalism has taken its toll of this sector too. Private hospitals and clinics are mushrooming all over the city, doctor’s fees are soaring and the prices of life saving medicines are going through the roof. In other words, the health sector is being commercialized.

The opponents of this view, the capitalists, are in fact claiming that medicine is business like anything else, and when they say that medical research is expensive and this needs to be reflected in the price of medicine and treatment, what they really mean is that they need to make substantial profit. What happened to the Hippocratic Oath in that case? What is the point of promising to save lives and then saying you will only do it if people pay you sufficiently? Surely the contradiction is obvious. The money Pfizer makes in a day is in the billions same as the other giant pharmaceuticals so surely no one can turn round and say they deserved all that. Besides, generic copies of drugs can be produced much more cheaply all over the world – surprise surprise – which goes to prove that the profits made by big companies are exorbitant. Those who produce generic drugs also make a profit one must remember.

The big bosses of the health care industry also assert that detailed and lengthy procedures involving expensive blood tests and scans are the ideal way to ensure that patients are safe and sound. What happened to diagnostic medicine is what I would like to know. If doctors can’t diagnose illnesses without a battery of tets, we can just leave hospitals to be run by robots and close the medical schools. Tests should be resorted to to confirm a diagnosis when absolutely necessary; after all, it should be remembered that not all tests are good for patients; take MRI scans for instance. Modern day hospitals are so concerned with filling their pockets that the real reason why they exist, the patients, have been sidelined.

It is obvious that this state of affairs should not be allowed to continue. There should be official limits to what hospitals can charge for certain procedures. Pharmaceuticals should also be persuaded to drastically scale down their profits. The whole sector needs to be reminded why they exist in the first place