By Jaime R. Torres, DPM

It makes me angry to continue reading about the severe lack of medical coverage in America, including a story about a diabetic man who lost his foot because he couldn't afford to take care of an infection. I have seen this happen many times in my profession as a podiatrist. For people to suffer this way in our rich nation is shameful and so unjust. Under our bottom line-driven economic system, more than 43 million people - including 11 million children - are uninsured. Thousands of seniors are forced to decide between buying food or purchasing the medicines they need to survive. Meanwhile, insurance companies and their HMOs get richer every year by denying and limiting care, and pharmaceutical corporations make billions from the misfortunes of others.

Dr. Jaime Torres, DPM Aesthetic Realism Associate

Eli Siegel, the philosopher and founder of the education Aesthetic Realism, was right on target when he stated that profit-driven health care is unethical because it is "based on contempt for people." 

In the commentary, "Ethics - The Only Answer for the Economy!" Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, explains: "Once you are after profit, you can't be too interested in what people deserve, what they feel: it will cramp your ability to make money from them."  This explains why mothers have to fight their insurance companies to approve surgeries that could save their children's lives. Podiatrists know only too well the frustration of an elderly woman who can't afford to take care of her ailing feet because her HMO, in order to maintain its bottom line, keeps podiatrists out of its panel. 

If this is not contempt, tell me what is. Treating patients in terms of how much money can be made from them is utterly contemptible and, in my view, totally contradicts what medicine is supposed to be all about. As a doctor and a human being, I'm grateful to have learned from Aesthetic Realism that the only opposition to contempt is good will, the desire to strengthen people and to be fair to them. This is the one way to really take care of oneself, too. 

Profit-driven health care is a failure. If Congress wants to solve this crisis, it should formulate a truly democratic national health plan in which all citizens are insured. To continue incremental patchwork plans is tantamount to ensuring that all passengers on the Titanic have life jackets. It will not save a sinking ship.

"Nobody should ever have to pay for having his body cared for," Siegel stated in his National Ethics Report of July 1968. "The idea of people worried about their health and worried about money is barbarous. It's ego corruption."

Health care should be based on ethics. And according to Mr. Siegel, central to ethics is the question, "What does a person deserve by being a person?" Only when we honestly answer this question can a compassionate, functional health-care system be devised.

To learn more, contact the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene Street, NYC 10014, (212) 777-4490; www.AestheticRealism.org