Why does it cost $32,093 just to give birth in America?

The following words are in response to this article from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/16/why-does-it-cost-32093-just-to-give-birth-in-america

Yes. Part of the "propaganda" aspect of this problem is threefold:

1) Everyone thinks they have a medical problem. There is a pill for everything. This is a cultural issue which has been influenced by Pharmaceutical companies pushing misleading advertisements of medications, including advertising and giving benefits to doctors.

The pharmaceutical group GlaxoSmithKline has been fined 3 billion dollars after admitting to bribing doctors and encouraging the prescription of unsuitable antidepressants to children.

More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outside established pediatric guidelines.

[2007] In Guilty Plea, OxyContin Maker to Pay $600 Million. The company that makes the narcotic painkiller OxyContin and three current and former executives pleaded guilty in federal court to criminal charges that they misled regulators, doctors and patients about the drug’s risk of addiction and its potential to be abused. Company sales officials were allowed to draw their own fake scientific charts which showed a lower addictive potential, which they then distributed to doctors.

FBI agents arrested former Insys Therapeutics CEO Michael Babich and five other former company executives on Thursday for allegedly bribing doctors to prescribe fentanyl to patients who didn’t need it.

These pharmaceutical company lobbies have opposed and lobbied against DEA enforcement in the US against corrupt doctors and pharmaceutical companies.

2) Medicine is typically focused on treating symptoms, not cures. Many doctors don't receive enough nutrition education, so they end up thinking that a pill is going to "fix" the problem. Sometimes exercise and fixing a nutritional deficiency can help, but these things don't make pharmaceutical companies rich. We need to either teach doctors more about nutrition or provide a system in which doctors and dieticians can collaborate on patients in a better way (or both).

A 1985 landmark report on nutrition in medical schools by the National Academy of Sciences found that on average, future physicians received 21 hours of nutrition instruction over four years. Medical students need at least 25 hours to be adequately prepared to help patients, the report concluded.

Yet more than two decades later, nutrition education in U.S. medical schools remains inadequate, according to a 2010 study led by Adams and her UNC colleagues and published in the journal Academic Medicine.

On average, doctors receive 19 hours of total nutrition education in medical school; in 2004 the average was 22.3 hours, according to the study, conducted as part of the Nutrition in Medicine project at UNC. In 2009, 27 percent of the schools met the minimum standard of nutrition training, compared with 38 percent in 2004.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-03-26/health/ct-met-heart-nutrition-20130326_1_mediterranean-style-diet-heart-disease-diet-and-nutrition

Years later, as a newly minted doctor on the wards seeing real patients, I found myself in the same position. I was still getting a lot of questions about food and diet. And I was still hesitating when answering. I wasn’t sure I knew that much more after medical school than I did before.

One day I mentioned this uncomfortable situation to another young doctor. “Just consult the dietitians if you have a problem,” she said after listening to my confession. “They’ll take care of it.” She paused for a moment, looked suspiciously around the nursing station, then leaned over and whispered, “I know we’re supposed to know about nutrition and diet, but none of us really does.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/health/16chen.html

3) Medical science isn't nearly as good as it could be, but these problems aren't highlighted often enough, so you have an entire country that has a misleading perception of medical science.

Scientific American: How Pharma-Funded Research Cherry-Picks Positive Results.

In 2009, Dr. Marcia Angell of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

Richard Horton, editor in chief of The Lancet, recently wrote: “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”.

"I can't tell you exactly what percentage of the trials are flawed, but I think the problem is far bigger than you imagine, and getting worse...it is so easy to manipulate data, conceal it or fabricate it...there is almost a code of silence not to speak about it." -Whistleblower Dr. Peter Wilmshurst

"The neuroscientific community needs to challenge the current scientific model driven by dysfunctional research practices tacitly encouraged by the 'publish or perish' doctrine, which is precisely leading to the low reliability and the high discrepancy of results."

Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science (Ninety-seven percent of original studies had significant results (P < .05). Thirty-six percent of replications had significant results)