For 35 years, maternity-care reformers have been barking up the wrong tree.  They've assumed that maternity care is being run for the purpose of getting the best results--the most mothers and infants surviving birth--but in the U.S., it's not.  The allopathic model of medicine was designed to produce huge profits, at many different levels, including medical schools.    For over a century, state and federal governments have, for the most part, shielded this for-profit industry from better, more effective, and cheaper alternatives, without bothering to ask which gets the best results.    You, as a consumer,  aren't required to buy the services of this monopoly (except when forced to, by the police, the IRS, etc.), but care which is scientifically shown to be more effective (and cheaper) is often outlawed, even if you can afford to pay for it out-of-pocket.  And even if you can afford it, the lack of continuity-of-care makes birth riskier than it is in countries which insist that health care is a RIGHT, for everyone, at every point in their lives,  regardless of their  ability to pay,  and which finance it by steep taxes on the wealthy.  

 

     If we adopted the health-care systems of any one of those countries, we'd have healthier populations, and at HALF the expense, per capita, that we spend now.  The reason you've never heard any of this is because the mainstream media are all owned by the same One Percent of Americans who also own the hospitals, the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies (health and malpractice), as well as the corporations which make our computerized voting machines and the proprietary software which runs them and which "count" our votes in secret.  There are many possible ways to fix this situation, but it will require a drastic reordering of priorities.

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