Medical Consumers

I loved Paul Krugman's complaint this morning about calling patients "medical consumers."

"The prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong...with our society's values."

For three years now on my little blog I've made mention how Americans are referred to by every institution -- not as citizens -- but as consumers. I don't know how medical consumption should be seen any differently...particularly not when 70% of our economy is consumer spending and 16% of our GDP is consumed by health care. I have to think these two areas overlap to some degree.

Without verifing, that Krugman is an economic wonk he's most certainly referred to citizens as consumers two dozen times in just the past week alone. Yet somehow, as citizens become patients, whoa! Back up the trolley! The consumption of medical products and services should somehow be exempt?

I like the idea of people as consumers; what it does is take the "human" out of the equation, and gives me something to blog about. Consumers have no responsibilities towards other consumers. Hmmm...just like Americans today. Consumers have no responsibilities towards making habitable, human-scaled places to live. Hmmm...just like Americans today. Consumers' only job is to make a corporation's pile of money into an even larger pile of money. Hmmm...just like Americans today.

We've created an "education industry," for-profit institutions that leave outgoing students mired in debt while corporate shareholders sit on a beach making 20 percent. (I'm one of them, to be sure. I've money in mutual funds that most certainly invest in Phoenix (NASDAQ: APOL) My retiremental future is dependent on sucking even more monies out of the next generation of students...well, at least to become more profitable. So long as it makes me money, I don't give a damn about what value this institution provides to society. That's for a citizen to think about, but I'm not a citizen, I'm a consumer.

Jeffrey Immelt has created a wholly owned subsidiary, GE Healthcare, whose sole purpose (at least to me) is to extract profits from sick people. So long as my holdings of GE stock makes me money, I don't give a damn about a healthier citizenry. I only care about fixing up consumers so that they live longer to consume more, obviously increasing my holding values of Best Buy, Home Depot, et al. Indeed, sick people are immensely profitable -- the most profitable segment of our population. And we have the most sick people of any advanced nation on earth and the percentages are growing. Imagine that -- built-in growth. I'm not certain how my mutual funds invest on any given stock, but I can be damned sure that both Phillip Morris (lung cancer producer, NYSE:PM) and AstraZenica (lung cancer drug manufacturer, NYSE:AZN) both find themselves in my portfolio.

Interestingly, my last blog post indicated a desire to move away from equities. However, I'm just a dumb blogger (an Internet consumer, hehe) -- you think I really ought to double down on a systemic collapse, on an economic depression? I admit I'm moving in a more secure direction to be sure, but I didn't take all my 401(k) and purchase T-bills or gold with it. What I wish for and what I get are too often two totally different things. For now, medical consumers are powering my growth in wealth. A healthier citizenry is not, has not, and will not be on any horizon in my lifetime, for we are both far from healthy and we are far from being citizens.

Citizenry has faded. We cannot fall behind a Democratic president, regardless of his party. He's a nigger to a great number of white Republican consumers around me. Bush was a dolt to a great number of white Democratic consumers around me. We see ourselves on one side of the ideological fence or the other. We don't give a damn about our 2.1 wars; they mean nothing to us as consumers, save for our stock in Raytheon (NYSE: RTN). I count on not a single neighbor for anything, anything at all, here in sterile white suburbia. If and when a resource shortage ever comes I'm hoarding, and I'm going to get mine. I've got no reason to become a citizen, to band with others to trade skills, labor, or assistance. I don't even know their fucking names -- why would I suddenly ask them to trade a cup of sugar for a little charcoal fluid?

"This kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong..."

We already use this kind of language. We've been using it for as long as we've debased the citizen and exhalted the consumer.