Our blindness to what these words are telling us is really astounding. My first time to fully comprehend the contradiction came from an experience while I was teaching at Harvard in 1969. The medical community in the Boston area put together a “Health University” which was a sixteen week course contributed by health care professionals at every level. At the end they distilled what the many discussions and brainstorming sessions had produced and came up with a set of wonderful proposals. I won’t go into them now. I will at some later date.

The major conclusion was the title of this blog. The reasoning is very simple. If people are doing what they are doing for profit then they want to create conditions where they maximize their profit. In our present system we pay (or our insurance pays) when we Are sick. When we are well we pay nothing except for insurance. The insurance aspect may be misleading unless you remember that even when you are sick profit is protected every time the insurance doesn’t pay.

Where is the motivation to keep you well? Certainly preventative medicine and nutritional programs for health and the ridding the environment of disease causing agents is not going to help make money from sick people. The only sensible way to promote health for all is to make a healthy environment, health nutrition and habits and treat diseases in the most effective way possible. Where is there a place for profit in the rational system?

That is so different from what we do now. How did we get to this point? We allowed people to make money from activities that were being done for other reasons. Scholars did research, including medicine development, in a system that rewarded them with educational milestone and then secure well paying livelihood. My life as a researcher and medical school teacher was a good one. It was upsetting when the free exchange of scientific information was ended as my more greedy colleagues got into patents and profit. Watching that deterioration evolve was education in how greed and the profit motive work against the very goals the universities and other research institutions had sought after for years.

The contamination of the system by greed and profit spreads like a cancer. You can nott ignore it and go on as before because the very foundation that made research possible is gone.

I taught doctors all my career. I wanted to be a doctor but could not afford it. The cost of medical education is a factor in determining who our doctors are. It selects people who can afford the “investment” and many see as just that hoping to get a return on it when they practice. Such attitudes are very compatible with the profit oriented drug industry and many forms of collusion grow from these connections in almost innocent seeming ways.

Is it even possible to “reform” such a system? There are interconnections and causal loops galore and since the science practiced in this system is based totally on reductionism, even the philosophical basis strengthens the misunderstanding of what is really going on.

The reductionist view tells us that these people are being altruistic and that their economic motives don’t interfere with that. They support this illusion by reducing the system to parts to demonstrate the truth of their assertions.

Health care reform will never happen. Such a system can not be reformed.