Pfizer CEO's Hospital Stay Was a Kafkaesque Prison of His Own Making
Pfizer (PFE) CEO Jeff Kindler went into hospital for "a minor procedure" recently and described it as akin to being held naked in prison with bad food and excessive bureaucracy. If only he'd had that experience before Congress passed healthcare reform, things might have been very different.
Kindler is the current chairman of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry lobby group that struck the deal with President Obama to get the reform bill passed. Kindler even received a compensation bonus from Pfizer for getting that deal through. Prior to the bill being signed into law, Kindler was the single most influential patient on the planet. Here's how he currently feels about hospital care:
First the paperwork -- three or four times paperwork has to be filled out and given to a succession of strangers. Then they take all of your belongings, they tell you to take your clothes off, and make you put on a gown that leaves you nearly naked, put in you in very small room, bring you inedible food according to a schedule they determine.Kudos to Kindler for telling it like it is. But some of the things he's complaining about are the very things he fought to preserve in the healthcare reform bill. PhRMA's pact with Obama was to give up $80 billion in drug industry savings in exchange for keeping U.S. healthcare largely private. Take the paperwork, for instance. Everyone hates it, especially the bills and "explanations of benefits" that arrive afterward. Correcting a billing error is almost impossible for a patient, and there are plenty of them. American healthcare bureaucracy exists almost entirely to allow providers to correctly bill the endless number private insurers and government reimbursers they need to get their money back. None of those paper pushers actually provide medical services, of course, they're just rent seekers.And if you try to sleep, they leave lights on, and do everything they can to make sure you can't. At the end, if you are lucky, they deign to discharge you.
Paperwork for patients just doesn't exist in the U.K.'s National Health Service. I mean that literally: because everyone is covered in the government's single-payor plan, there's no billing to be done, and no forms to be filled (aside from your medical history, obviously).
Had Kindler successfully lobbied for socialized medicine instead -- an unlikely proposition, I grant you -- his stay would have included at least one less indignity.
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Image by Flickr user Frenkieb, CC.