America's Tunnel Vision
America's Tunnel Vision--How Insurance Companies' Propaganda Is Corrupting Medicine and Law, the new book by author, law professor and former lawyer, Michael Townes Watson, is about the loss of your right to hold the healthcare system accountable for its mistakes. According to Air America Radio show host, Mike Papantonio, "this is a great book... it will stay on the shelf of our researchers here at Air America Radio."
What does it mean? I use the story of a young man whose life was turned upside down when he learned that he had glaucoma. He had scheduled and kept his regular eye exams every year since he was a teenager, so how could this have not been detected earlier? He found the answer--routine glaucoma screening tests had not been performed by his optometrist either for him or for hundreds of other patients. The result--his field of vision would continually decline, as if he were looking through a tunnel, until it eventually would decrease to a pinhole, and then to nothing.
All of this becuase of the negligence and failure of a trusted doctor, who he thought was doing things the way he was trained. The tale that follows the discovery of his condition is the same as the tales of hundreds of thousands of victims of medical malpractice every year--a tale of denial, cheating, lying, changing medical records, stalling and deceit, all in the name of saving the insurance companies money.
The way that the insurance industry has handled its obligations is to take their lobbyists around the country and use their money to convince the public that the laws should be changed to punish the victims of medical negligence--they have done this by inflicting "tunnel vision" on the public, convincing us that we will be better off if victims of medical malpractice should not have access to the justice system.
The book ends with a call to healthcare consumers to learn the facts about healthcare error, hospital mistakes, medical negligence, adverse drug reactions and insurance abuse, so that they can have the knowledge to fight the insurance industry lobbyists when those lobbyists come to their state.
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