IS OBAMA BAILING OUT BIG PHARMA'S BUSTING BUBBLE?

By Byron J. Richards, CCN
February 7, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

Bubble economics has become a painful financial lesson for America and the rest of the world. Will we learn from our mistakes? Will we get smarter about recognizing bubbles before they burst, so that the air can be let out of them in a less painful manner? It appears that our new president, in his passion to provide health care for everyone, is about to pump hot air into a bubble that is ready to explode under the weight of its own fraud and lack of results. The magnitude of this problem is on par with the scope of our mortgage meltdown mess, yet the problem is quietly flying under the radar – mostly due to denial. Sound familiar?

A free economy works well when its members roll up their sleeves and put in a hard day’s honest work. It suffers when those in leadership or control con the system for excessive personal profit or when members are lazy or seek something for nothing.

At the moment it is very popular for Americans to hate Wall Street – and with good reason. However, be careful what you wish for. Wall Street exists to coordinate investment in the private sector, leverage the power of money to expand business productivity, and consequently to produce jobs for Americans and the rest of the world – so that you can buy whatever you want in exchange for what you have produced. Investors help make this possible, and expect a piece of the pie.

A bubble is a fraudulent product with a sustained revenue source that does not produce a legitimate or desired result. It sucks up money and acts like a parasite on true productivity, eating pie that wasn’t earned. In the case of the financial products provided by Wall Street, various players created fraudulent investment products with no real value and sold them as if they were legitimate.

Investors around the world bought them, providing the bubble funding. Consumers went along with it, using the money to buy houses they couldn’t afford while acquiring additional possessions with Monopoly-money credit. The price of housing soared on the back of this fraudulent bubble, providing temporary financing to fuel real jobs for the economy. The problem with all bubbles is that there is a day of reckoning. And that day has come.

The Health Care Bubble

Many are now blaming the lack of regulation on Wall Street for the bursting economic bubble. This implies that greater amounts of regulation would solve the problem and prevent it from happening again. However, laws are typically bubble makers. This is because those with money, often obtained by a bubble in the first place, use that money to lobby for laws that lock in their bubble. And this gets me to the story of the Big Pharma health-care bubble – a story driven by the opposite problem of Wall Street – too much regulation getting in the way of health while flowing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into a black hole.

Hospitals profit only when beds are full. Last year in the beginning of February, like this year, hospitals were lamenting over the lost profits from the lack of a vigorous flu season. Yes, it’s true, unless a lot of people get really sick in the next few months hospitals will be in big financial trouble.

Doctors can only make money when people come to see them; which doesn’t happen that often when people are well. When doctors get people well they lose business. No wonder they swear by vaccination programs. And Big Pharma can only make money on drugs when people have to take them endlessly – not when people are made well by a treatment. Hundreds of billions of dollars are in play.

Most of us in the field of natural health call this the sickness industry. Yes, I know, there are legitimate health care needs and expenses. That is not my point. We have more than a slight problem on our hands, as several hundred thousand Americans are killed each year by the fraud within this industry. No war has ever taken such a toll, especially from an enemy that is not even openly identified. Regulations and laws, both state and federal, are used to buy cover for this fraudulent and murderous bubble world – sanctioning it as legal.

The problem is far worse than public health officials care to admit. Denial is always needed in order to perpetuate a bubble. Injuries and deaths are swept under the rug. They are typically blamed on the patient’s underlying health, not on the treatment that caused further problems.

The health-care bubble has been building for a century. It has reached the breaking point due to high profile disasters like Vioxx. There are currently numerous bubble-related drug scandals under investigation, causing the general public to be more afraid of bubble treatments pushed on them by their bubble-trained doctors. FDA management is most often a co-conspirator, pitting itself against the more prudent advice of its safety scientists. FDA management is a revolving door with the industry it is supposed to regulate, and FDA managers typically move on to take high-paying jobs in the health-care bubble economy.

Scientific journals have been hijacked by the bubble gangs, their integrity lost. Research universities are on the bubble payroll, as are key doctors around the country. Professional organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Heart Association are little more than organized bubble gangster mobs. Most doctors live in fear of their licensing boards. The Big Pharma bubble economy is like house building gone wild – is it too big an industry to let fail?

The problem with the health-care bubble can be summed up by asking one simple question: Where is the result of actual health produced from services and treatments? No business can survive without help when it routinely fails to produce the result or product that is expected – why should health care be any different?

This phony industry can only be sustained if the costs of its services and products are paid for by others – and these health care costs are already a major drag on productivity and competitiveness for all Americans (costing lots of jobs). Obama was told by the health care industry that it would take at least two years to try to rein in the fraud in this system before a national health care system could even have a chance – and that is just the blatant fraud – nobody is looking into how deep the rabbit hole actually goes.

Obama is not listening and is instead taking the opportunity of the financial meltdown to orchestrate his health care agenda through “stimulusâ€