Dave Kingsley, & Kent Comfort offer an ongoing series of podcasts exposing the network of corporations, legislators, lobbyists, government agencies, and think tanks/foundations that comprise what has been dubbed the “medical-industrial” complex. A list of the sessions are immediately below. An explanation of the medical-industrial complex can be found below the session list.

https://youtu.be/8CQuMxCma-M “An Introduction to the medical-industrial complex:” what is it, and why should you care?”

https://youtu.be/SvBRfz8Ibuk  “The long-term & skilled nursing industry (quaintly called the ‘nursing home industry’) as a major component of the medical-industrial complex.”

“Fighting the Medical-Industrial Complex: A Peoples’ Campaign”

In his 1960 farewell address, President Eisenhower warned America about the “military-industrial complex. By the 1970s, the term “medical-industrial complex” was coined by writer and scholar Barbara Ehrenreich and her husband John (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1970/12/17/the-medical-industrial-complex/). In 1980, Dr. Arnold Relman, MD and editor of the New England Journal of Medicine further developed the medical-industrial complex (Arnold S. Relman, “The New Medical-Industrial Complex,” NJEM, Vol. 303, No. 17, 963-970).

The purpose of our podcast is to explain what is meant by an “industrial-complex” and specifically how medical care in the United States – indeed all health care – has been taken over such an entity to the detriment of Americans’ health. Let’s first consider what Eisenhower was describing in his speech regarding the U.S. military establishment.

President Eisenhower’s Warning

Following WWII, a permanent military establishment, the likes of which had never existed before in the U.S. had taken hold. Foreseeing the long-term hostility between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Eisenhower warned about special interests likely to leverage that conflict to their own advantage and at the expense of the public interests from which excessive amounts of capital began to flow and would only be intensified in the following decades.

Indeed, war related expenditures now account for 25% of the approximately $4 trillion federal budget. In President Eisenhower’s view in 1960, a “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.” His concern was that the U.S. would become increasingly militaristic and, over time, squander precious treasure on building an unneeded war machine with “total influence – economic, political, even spiritual. He believed that this influence was already “felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government.”

The Medical-Industrial Complex