Don’t call Mr. Bezos a ‘disrupter’! Capitalism is about profit at any cost , it is never about self-congratulatory Neo-Liberal mendacious rhetorical posing. Call him an opportunist like all other Capitalist. Mr. Bezos is, in his other guises, owner of the Neo-Conservative Washington Post , CIA Propagandist and Savior of Capitalism! Forget the primary role of Health Care , in sum, the welfare of patients and their return to good health. The tracking of Patient Outcomes was of primary concern , when I was in Health Care, where I worked the latter part of my career, almost 20 years.
But there is this from Warren Buffett on ‘costs‘:
Mr Buffett’s graphic description of ballooning healthcare costs as a “hungry tapeworm” is indicative of a growing exasperation in America’s boardrooms over soaring healthcare costs.
Or this from Paul Fronstin: ‘an independent research organisation focused on healthcare and other benefits’:
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; French: Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques, OCDE) is an intergovernmental economic organisation with 35 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade.
‘An independent research organisation focused on healthcare and other benefits.’ ?
On the vexed question of both positive patient outcomes and rising costs can be addressed by the answer of Universal Health Care: in America Medicare for all! I forgot, for just a moment, that I’m reading one of the House Organs of the failed promise of Corporatist Paternalism, and its troika of pretenders who offer a Free Market alternative to that Universal Health Care. To paraphrase/riff on Blanche DuBois: ‘I rely on the kindness of greedy Capitalists’ and their allies and a bought and paid for political class!
As a patient, I encounter the future in which cost cutting Corporations remove from Health Care the necessary human interactions: by providing check-in kiosks that ask, not just for your insurance card, but your drivers licence, because there is no person, but a machine, to check who you claim to be! Here is where Corporatism will fail , in their unenlightened imperative of ‘cost cutting’, they will utterly alienate their ‘consumers’ who are in fact their ‘patients’ ! The Free Market Mythology undermines, in the most primary way, the humanity, its civic/moral status as a primary obligation, in a world of equals, rather than a world subject to the ‘feigned benevolence’ of a world of profiteers, like Bezos, Buffet and the execrable Mr. Dimon!
Almost Marx
https://www.ft.com/content/8929ecf4-0608-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5
Thank your for your question.
Begin your inquiry into Neo-Conservatism here:
Cloaked in Virtue : Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy by Nicholas Xenos
https://books.google.com/books/about/Cloaked_in_Virtue.html?id=r-LwdL_i1QwC
Then , Sphinx Without a Secret by M.F. Burnyeat:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1985/05/30/sphinx-without-a-secret/
Both of these cover the intellectual mendacity of the ‘philosophical founder’ of Neo-Conservatism Leo Strauss . Without his self-serving re-reading of the Western Philosophical Tradition, that Neo-Conservatism would not have been born.
Next see:
The Neo-Conservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the shaping of Public Policy by Murray Friedman .
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neoconservative-revolution/1E04348FDD4069CA02085D5C06EB070
See ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ by the paranoid Samuel P. Huntington, here critiqued by Edward Said:
Here is the political criminal, himself, on his paranoid fantasy of the hegemon’s technocrat. Mr. Rose’s sycophancy toward this monster is predictable, Fukuyama got the same obsequious deference! Who recalls the probing interviews conducted by Mike Wallace, in his 1950’s Night Beat and The Mike Wallace Interview, that puts Mr. Rose’s kowtowing deference to shame?
See also the Wikipedia entry on ‘The Clash’:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations
Other sources on Neo-Conservative nihilism:
Project for a New American Century
The signatories to the ‘Statement of Principals’ are a whose who of American war mongers!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
Also see this by the premier Neo-Conservative intellectual Francis Fukuyama, which is a concerted attack on the whole of the meliorist politics of the American 20th Century. The melding of political reaction and nihilism.
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/12/08/the-decay-of-american-political-institutions/
The imperative of your inquiry should point to the fact that the advocates of ‘The War on Terror’ , Huntington’s ‘Clash’ made real, have no real military experience. Even the present American political class has only two Neo-Conservatives, John McCain and Tom Cotton, with actual experience of war. The rest of these public intellectuals have no problem sending someone’s children to fight in America’s Thirty Years War. At last count, the ‘Fronts’ of that ‘War’ have expanded to eight!
Look to the career of the bellicose Jeane Kirkpatrick, once a Democrat, whose Party affiliation ‘evolved’, as she became a paradigmatic figure, that describes the rise of a certain faction of that Neo-Conservatism*:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeane_Kirkpatrick
Regards,
StephenKMackSD
*Look to other Democrats, like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, who were subject to a similar political evolution. The Friedman book is the very history of that evolutionary process!
