Making a Profit from Offering Ineffective Therapies to Cancer Patients
Cancer Treatment Center of America In Tulsa, Oklahoma (Photo credit: Wikipedia)\
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It sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory: a secretive businessman founds a for-profit medical center to treat cancer. His hospitals offer conventional treatments but also sell highly questionable, unscientific treatments to vulnerable patients. These treatments help to increase profits. The businessman uses the profits from his cancer hospitals to support his favorite right-wing causes. Patients have no idea that the fees they pay for treatment help support these causes.
It may sound unbelievable, but it’s true. Most of this story was described in a lengthy exposé just published in the Washington Post on Christmas day. The Post revealed that Richard Stephenson, the founder of a large for-profit cancer center, is also one of the primary funding sources for Freedom Works, a right-wing Tea Party organization that played a major role in the 2012 elections. As the Post story described him:
[Stephenson is] “a reclusive Illinois millionaire who has exerted increasing control over one of Washington’s most influential conservative grass-roots organizations.”
Among other examples, the Post describes how
“more than $12 million in donations was funneled through two Tennessee corporations to the FreedomWorks super PAC after negotiations with Stephenson over a preelection gift of the same size…. The origin of the money has not previously been reported.”
What the Post story didn’t explain was the source of Stephenson’s millions: Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), a private, for-profit company with five cancer hospitals scattered around the U.S. Stephenson is the founder and chairman of CTCA.
For-profit hospitals present a big ethical problem, even when they provide proper care. The problem is that motivation to increase profits may work against the interest of patients. I don’t want to debate that here, because CTCA has another, more serious problem.
Non-profit hospitals are doing despicable things “dancing” on health …
How safe is your hospital?
Our new Ratings find that some are riskier than others
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Hospitals should be places you go to get better, but too often the opposite happens.
Infections, surgical mistakes, and other medical harm contribute to the deaths of 180,000 hospital patients a year, according to projections based on a 2010 report from the Department of Health and Human Services. Another 1.4 million are seriously hurt by their hospital care. And those figures apply only to Medicare patients. What happens to other people is less clear because most hospital errors go unreported and hospitals report on only a fraction of things that can go wrong.
“There is an epidemic of health-care harm,” says Rosemary Gibson, a patient-safety advocate and author. More than 2.25 million Americans will probably die from medical harm in this decade, she says. “That’s like wiping out the entire populations of North Dakota, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It’s a man-made disaster.”
Posted by Ann on September 19, 2013 at 1:59 pm
Filed under Bilderberg Group, Euthanasia by Government of all its people, Fight For Freedom, For all ManKind, Human Rights, New Stories Behind the Stories, One World Government by 1%, Politics, Survival, The Now, Wisdom
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