“Best care anywhere” “Where you go first for care matters”
“Care that never ends”
“Our proton therapy is better than plain old radiation” “We have a cyber knife.”
We are different, we offer the best, choose us.
What is all this? What it is, is the worst of health care in America, it’s advertising, advertising with the same lack of substantiated claims that apply to clean gasoline or twelve-inch subs. The goal of this advertising is the same as it always is … to generate revenue.
Is that how you view our health care system?
Do you recall the pharmaceutical advertising for the drug treating fibromyalgia? That same drug has been re-branded and is now being advertised to treat diabetic nerve pain. They are merely tapping another potential market. Does this improve care or help control health care costs? (Interestingly, their website says, “If you have diabetes, tell your doctor about any skin sores.” Wouldn’t you hope your doctor knew you had diabetes before ordering a prescription to treat a complication of diabetes?)
How can we ever have an “affordable” health care system as long as we treat health care services as if they are provided under traditional market forces and without strong profit motives? Patient education is one thing, but none of the above is educational, rather it plays on the desire for ill people to receive help, to receive more health care and to take more drugs.
What makes all this really scary is the possibility these claims and others like them all across the Country are valid. That would mean that some individual or some group or hospital truly has a better way to provide health care, they don’t share that better way and as a result a lot of Americans are receiving less than optimum health care.
Related articles
- Why healthcare is so expensive, and what our leaders have failed to do to stop it. (mericandreamer.com)
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