By Jessica Newman
Now that Alachua General Hospital has closed, low-income and uninsured Gainesville residents who relied on its emergency room for medical care have another, profit-driven option — a Solantic Urgent Care Center.
Solantic, a private urgent care center that already has one location in Gainesville and is opening another, is partnering with Shands at UF to provide lower costs and lower wait times for its patients, or customers, essentially following the model of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. In fact, the CEO of Solantic told The Gainesville Sun that the company’s goal was to make visiting the clinic as convenient as ordering a latte from Starbucks.
Solantic was started by Rick Scott, who leads the conservative anti-health care reform movement and claims to be making medical dealings easier for Americans with or without insurance.
If the government took control of our current, privatized health care system, Scott has said, patients would face long, bureaucratic lines and couldn’t choose their own doctors (even though this is a luxury that very few insured people in this country enjoy even now).
Recently, Scott threw millions of his own dollars into creating the main organization behind defeating positive reform and keeping the government out of health care: Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, the group that orchestrated town hall outrages sensationalized by the media last summer, as well as the group funding the insurance company lobbyists to undermine reform in Congress.
Before Solantic, Scott was the CEO of Columbia/HCA Hospitals but was forced out in 1997 after a federal Medicare probe found that his corporation was overbilling patients and bilking the system. It ended in a historically high $1.7 billion settlement, although no criminal charges were pressed.
Scott, a vocal opponent of government-run health care, tried to profit by cheating a government-run system.
People like Scott, who are making millions off the underinsured and uninsured, are fighting reform to keep things that way. Most of the arguments against universal coverage (like those by Conservatives for Patients’ Rights) come straight from the industry that capitalizes on the failures of our dysfunctional system.
If everyone had access to health care coverage, emergency rooms would no longer be filled with people suffering from minor symptoms, like a scratchy throat, who can’t afford to see an ordinary physician.
Urgent care centers like Solantic, which makes most of its money providing quick fixes to people without insurance instead of providing long-term care, would be obsolete because people could just visit their primary care doctors with an interest in their overall health.
Though Scott and Solantic officials refuse to comment on the issue, it’s obvious that any form of universal coverage would upset the company’s profits.
Wendell Potter, a former public relations consultant for health insurance giant CIGNA, has since decided to fight on the other side for a major overhaul of the American health care system. He realized that the health care industry as it stands is controlled by corporate greed, where insurers have no incentive to offer affordable care to patients (or customers, as Solantic’s patrons might be better described).
Under these conditions, Potter told Bill Moyers, “You don’t think about individual people. You think about the numbers, and whether or not you’re going to meet Wall Street’s expectations.”
Rick Scott and Solantic are merely a microcosm of our sick system, where the insurance industry profits off healthy people while people like Scott milk what they can from the poor and uninsured, who cannot afford coverage or suffer from pre-existing conditions.
These health care profit-mongers, who look at health and human life in terms of profit and loss, are the very same people who are paying and fighting to defeat any type of universal coverage.
Until we start to see health care as a right rather than a privilege, we will never move beyond that tit-for-tat bickering that has bogged down the health care debate up until now. We have an important choice to make as a society: what right do we value most — health and well-being, or private profit?
Tags: healthcare