August 22nd, 2009
Medical insurance is not a greentech issue, or...
Muir’s Law: When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it attached to everything else in the universe.
John Muir was right. I have tried to stay away from the nasty squabbles over the gigantic American medical industry. There’s an over-supply of hot rhetoric and bloated bloviations on the Internet about the current battle over the future shape of the American medicine and pharma industry. I really wasn’t interested in sliding into that swamp here on a greentech blog, but…
How the U.S. goes about medicating, hospitalizing or ignoring its three hundred million residents is a costly issue. And anybody who wants to totally ignore the politics of American medicine should read the first-person account on the Atlantic site.
Not only did hopsitalization help kill this aged father, but the writer pulls out the stats that make medicine relevant to anybody wanting to spend money on any new tech in America. The U.S. government now spends eight times as much on medical programs as education, 78 times what it puts into land management and conservation, 87 times what it spends on water supplies, 830 times what it spends on energy conservation.
And the current debate is not about “healthcare,” it’s about the medical industry. Health is based on the food we eat, water we drink, air we breath, housing, traffic safety, exercise, stress, vacations (or not), sleep, nutrition, violence, peace or war. Those are real health issues. Some are being addressed by firms and researchers in the greentech sector, and deserve more money either private or public.
Take medication alone, public agencies are just beginning to face the issue of what to do about the long-lasting drugs that go through humans and sewage treatment and end up in rivers, oceans, soil and drinking water.
A newsman since 1969, Harry Fuller has worked for CBS, ABC, CNBC Europe, CNET and was founding news director at TechTV. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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