#528: Comments on corporate corruption
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From Gerald Goldberg:
Hi Don,
Read your article on corporate corruption and the charges waged against the AMA. The problem in this country though I suspect it exists in most industrialized countries is that most doctors work for the company store. They are not free agents, which has certain benefits, but there entitlement is based on strict governmental control and regulation of the store. Most of the grants given to universities are allocated by upper level agencies, ie NIH, CDC, which merely the agenda that the government tries to set up For the most part it is an economic entitlement program that benefits the larger corporations, which are interlocked in maintaining control. Thus you see global manifestations of this in the bid to regulate say nutritional suppliments etc. Anyway to use an example in the US 2 years prior to 9/11 the budget for alternative medicine was halved from 5 milliion dollars, IN a system where the healthcare costs account for 600 billion dollars of reimbursement per year, to a mere 2.5 million dollars. In the same year the government opened a new office for bioterriosim with an operating budget of 120 million dollars per year.
After 9/11 most researchers in the US had to shift their priorities in terms of investigation because they had to go out begging to the NIH to get funds. The government had shifted it focus to bioterriosism and most top programs in order to stay alive had to switch priorites. Pork barrelism is alive and well and we should be proactive aginst the taint of MAD CASH COW DISEASE which is becoming endemic and rampant.
See my interview posted on mast-victims. The tragedy is that who is kidding who, no pun intended. There is a tragic amount of sophistry around rational approaches when the system itself is irrational and dysfunctional. I quess it is good to be Pharoh, what has changed anyway.
Sincerly Dr. G. Goldberg, MD