[tion to social conditions that predispose individuals to…]
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tion to social conditions that predispose individuals to illness reflects an intrinsic identity of interest between the medical establishment and an economic system that values corporate profits over human needs. The foundations, corporations, and government agencies that shape health policy and fund medical research, as E. Richard Brown explains in Rockefeller Medicine Men, "support technical perspectives that separate health problems from their social and political contexts."
"Their policies," Brown notes, "reflect a general corporate class concern that any excess sickness and death not be attributed to the admitted inequalities of capitalist society or to the organization of production that places profits before environmental protection and workers' health."
The American Health Foundation provided a rather glaring example of this perspective when it recommended that employers enceptance and sales. If the drug, instrument, or procedure increases the technical effectiveness of physicians, it is likely to be ordered by them. If it increases the status or incomes of physicians, it is also likely to be used. If its availability in a hospital is likely to attract physicians or otherwise produce income, hospitals will want to buy it: If thirdparty payers will foot the bill, it is a sure winner."
Need for national health plan Modern medicine has, of course, made enormous strides in its ability to treat a range of diseases and conditions. But it is evident at a more fundamental level that the direction and nature of medical care has been shaped, or more precisely, distorted by the profligate class of investors and manufacturers who attempt to transform every human need into a marketable commodity. Social injustice, economic exploitation, the tem mirrors the deeper crisis of class inequality that defines social relations in the United States. The top 1 percent of the U.S. population controls 34 percent of the nation's total wealth, a share equal to that of the combined wealth of 80 percent of American families. The corporatization of health care and its transformation into a system that exploits human suffering as an economic commodity is the inevitable result of a social system that values private profit over human needs.
The history of humanity's efforts to combat disease and improve health has relevance not only in the annals of clinical medicine. Brown notes that medicine has historically played a rather small role in the reduction of morbidity and mortality rates. Better housing, working conditions, and nutrition, for example, reduced the death rate from tuberculosis and other infectious diseases common in the 19th century before medical cures were SOCIALIST E. Richard Brown, "Rockefeller Medicine and Capitalism," University of California Press, 1979.
Vicente Navarro, "Crisis, Health, and Medicine: A Social Critique, Tavistock Publications, 1986.
J. Warren Salmon, ed., "The Corporate Transformation of Health Care: Issues and Directions," Baywood Publishing Company, Inc., 1990.
Paul Starr, "The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry," Basic Books, Inc., 1982.
Howard Waitzkin, "The Second Sickness: Contradictions of Capitalist Health Care," The Free Press, 1983.
ACTION JULY 1990 5
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Organization for Women (NOW) in the