Health
Care—Based on Good Will, Not Profit
By Ruth Oron, Meryl
Simon,
Miriam Weiss
In recent months, with revelations about Enron, Worldcom, Tyco and other
corporations, people are more conscious than ever that the profit motive
is against their well-being and happiness. Never has there been a greater
feeling of betrayal by the American people regarding such crucial things
as jobs, pensions, and medical insurance. And there is growing outrage
at how people are seen as a means for profit by the pharmaceutical industry.
It is unconscionable that in our rich country—the only industrialized nation
without universal health coverage—millions, including children, are uninsured,
and, senior citizens are often forced to agonize between paying for extremely
costly medicine or food.
Drug companies charge outrageous prices to cover, as they claim, the cost
of research and development of new drugs. But, Michigan Democratic Senator,
Deborah Stabenow, noted: "Drug companies get a tax break for research and
development costs, and also get to use, for free, the results of basic
research done at taxpayer expense by the National Institutes of Health.
‘They get the write-off. Then we give them a 20-year patent,’ Stabenow
said. ‘We protect them from competition for 20 years. And what do we get
in the end, the American taxpayers? The highest (drug) prices in the world.’"
(Reuters 7/18/02)
"Profiting from Pain: Where Prescription Drug Dollars Go," (A report also
issued last July by Families USA), gives the following information:
The pharmaceutical
industry has been the most profitable industry in America for each of the
past 10 years and, in 2001, was five-and-one-half times more profitable
than the average for Fortune 500 companies.
We have learned from Aesthetic Realism, the education founded by the great
American philosopher Eli Siegel, that the profit system is based on contempt,
which he defined as, "the addition to self through the lessening of something
else." And we have seen as true what Ellen Reiss, the class chairman of
Aesthetic Realism, describes: "Once you are after profit, you can’t be
too interested in what people deserve … It will cramp your ability to make
money from them …. Economics," she stated, "has to be different from what
has been in the world before," and she pointed to what Aesthetic Realism
shows is the central thing in economics: how fairly people want to see
other people. "… It has to be in keeping with the justice to people described
in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution." (The Right of
Aesthetic Realism to Be Known Nos. 925, 1517)
We have to ask: should persons be seen in terms of how profitable their
illnesses can be for a drug maker, or in terms of what will make for their
strength? We love Eli Siegel’s passion on this subject: "The idea of people
worried about their health [and] worried about money is barbarous," he
stated. "It is ego corruption."
The ill will drug companies have can also be seen now in the great worry
parents have because in 2002, after many decades of successful prevention
of deadly diseases like diphtheria and polio, there is a shortage of vaccines
for children, putting their very lives in danger. "Some pharmacists and
doctors say the government needs to provide better scrutiny when firms
halt production of key drugs or vaccines," wrote Julie Appleby in USA
Today. And she continued: "At the root of the issue is a clash between…drug
makers deciding to stop making unprofitable products—and public health
needs."
Medicine should be for the benefit of people’s lives not for profit. In
a series of historic lectures in May of 1970, Mr. Siegel explained that
the world had come to a point where the ill will of profit economics, where
the very goods and services that people need in order to live are controlled
privately, could no longer work. He stated:
Men live with
more difficulty and incompleteness, and the world is saying: We don’t
want ill will to hurt and poison our lives any more …. That sense of
justice, which is a name for good will, is tremendously powerful ….
We feel intensely that every person deserves full health coverage, including
pharmaceuticals, from birth!
For more information about this vital education taught at the not-for-profit
Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City, call 212-777-4490, or visit
www.AestheticRealism.org |
