A PAINFUL LESSON
By Richard Davis

GUILFORD- Rep. Warren Kitzmiller-D-Montpelier recently became the object of criticism by some members of the state Chamber of Commerce and the media for injecting a human element into the debate about the difficulty of doing business in Vermont. He had the nerve to say that Vermont is not unfriendly to business. He suggested that perhaps the only problem that business owners have with doing business in Vermont is that they just can't make as much profit as they would like.

Talk about hitting a nerve. Kitzmiller deserves some sort of medal for speaking truth to power, but he probably should not hold his breath.

This little dust-up reminded me, once again, why the need for higher and higher profits kills people. One need only look to the U.S. health care system to understand why unfettered profits of insurance companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers is not only unconscionable, but is also immoral. Yet we tolerate it because business profitability is a sacred cow in the U.S.
About 15 years ago I had a conversation with a diabetes nurse educator at the Joslin Clinic in Boston. The Joslin is one of the world's leading institutions for the treatment of diabetes. Much of their focus is on education and prevention, something that the U.S. health care system gives short shrift to. It is not uncommon for a newly diagnosed diabetic to spend a week at the Joslin, learning how to manage the disease. Sadly, this kind of treatment is all too rare.

The Joslin nurse and I were talking about glucometers, the little machines that measure blood sugar levels. I was trying to get her advice about alternative methods for getting a drop of blood other than constantly sticking the ends of fingers. Anyone who has had to endure those endless stabs knows that fingertips were not meant to suffer through thousands of insults.
She told me about a machine they were testing at her facility that did not require blood to get a blood sugar reading. It used the same technology that is used by pulse oximeters, the devices that are put over fingertips to measure the level of oxygen in blood. Light is able to pass through small blood vessels and extract desired information.

She told me that the new glucometers were in the testing stage and showed great promise for making the lives of diabetics a little less painful. A year or two later I had another encounter with a Joslin nurse and asked what happened to the bloodless glucometers that were in testing and development.
I learned that the new glucometers were a great advancement, but there was one problem. These new machines didn't require diabetics to constantly buy test strips at up to a dollar apiece. Once the machine was purchased the company making the device couldn't continue to profit every time a diabetic stuck their finger to extract a drop of blood. It turns out that the companies that make glucometers could care less about making money on the machines. In fact, most diabetics can usually get them for free.
These companies rely on the sales of the test strips by diabetics who may spend $30-$150 a month. Unless diabetics continue to painfully extract their blood, the glucometer manufacturers cannot maintain their high profit levels.
The second Joslin nurse told me that the public would not be seeing the new bloodless glucometers anytime soon. She said that one of the companies that profits off of test strip sales bought the patent and all of the manufacturing rights from the developer of the bloodless glucometers and they simply stopped any further production of the new technology.
That is only one small example of how the perverse and inhumane ethics of the current U.S. health care system rely on pain and suffering, assuring that profits are the highest of priorities.