Increasingly I hear psychologists and other health professionals saying managed care is here to stay. Well, so is cancer but any intelligent person would question whether we should be supporting the disease. Every other civilized country in the world has a health delivery system, which costs a heck of a lot less and manages to keep most of its citizens alive and well much better than the United States of America. I am not too sure what I think of Mrs. Clinton, but I know a decade ago when she attempted to introduce a national medical insurance plan she was defeated largely by a group of psychologists that worked on Madison Avenue and serve the purposes of the American Council of Insurance Companies who misled the American public with the Harry and Louise cartoons, wherein they professed to be ordinary Americans appalled by the socialization of American medicine. Our legislators in Congress knew better but went along with this public relations ploy mostly because they received large amounts of money from the vested interests who needed to defeat any attempt to create a national medical insurance program that was not in the hands of "the right people."

What we have is a studied mediocrity where doctors and patients are equally abused by people who more or less tell us "what are you going to do, we have the law on our side, we have the money on our side and we can control the legislators with money and the kinds of advertising and public relations that health providers never had and possibly never will have."

What is to be done? Having worked in my youth on Madison Avenue I know what can be accomplished by simple cartoons and simple people telling us "we are just like you and we know what is best for you". We are being sold soap, which is the highest accomplishment of Madison Avenue, an inferior product at an outrageous price.

The drug companies spend much, much more on advertising and selling copycat products than they do on research but plead that their prices must be maintained in order to continue a high level of research, most of which is subsidized by the Federal Government. FACT, they spend much more money on advertisement and product promotion than they do on research and development and they spend too damn much influencing our legislators to allow them to overcharge us for what is becoming a mediocrity of pharmacology.

Being in New York and treating any number of these master’s of the universe that create the fairytales of product superiority, one realizes that most of them are tricksters who are much less than a mile wide and an inch deep but they are indeed masters of the word.

When is somebody going to start shouting that the emperor has no clothes? A group of mediocre wordsmiths have led us down a garden path and if we have any investment in truth and any respect for our profession we should be saying loud and clear that managed care, like cancer is here but it much surely not endure.

Let get our C-6 together. Start spending a little money on public relations and legislation. Let’s start suing the right people while we still have independent courts.

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