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A Divide So Wide, A Healthcare Disconnection So Deep
Our national obsession with individualism and the attainment of personal wealth is so sick and so deep for some of our fellow citizens that even the bonds of marriage are often no match for the selfishness.
A woman with advanced breast cancer schedules her chemo and her radiation so that by the time the worst physical side-effects set in, she is at the weekend and can sufficiently recover to allow a return to work on Mondays. She has negotiated remote work-time on chemo days and the day after. She pays for her family’s for-profit, private health insurance because her husband is a small business owner whose business has felt deep losses during the recession. She must keep working if she wants the care that is attacking her cancer.
If it sounds brutal, that’s because it is.
I had occasion to chat with her husband. He believes that I am misguided in my work for a progressively financed, single standard of high quality care for all. He said, “You know, government can’t and shouldn’t do everything for us. It’s up to us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps.” Huh?
He really used those words. While his wife struggles to keep the premiums for the for-profit, health insurance paid, his bootstraps are sagging. Yet, he shows no sign of wavering from his entrenched position. He is not particularly active politically. He is not in the Tea Party or the Republican Party or any party. Yet his obsessive selfishness learned through intense cultural and societal indoctrination is so strong that he can bury the reality his wife is living and cloak himself in righteous anti-establishment, anti-government propaganda.
Arrogance and authority drip from his words along with his fury in even thinking about publicly funded healthcare. He is furious that anyone would even suggest an alternate way to handle our healthcare system. His love for his wife and his sorrow for her suffering are no match for the depth of his belief in self-will run riot as national policy.
For this man, healthcare is not a human right. Perhaps more accurately, for this man’s wife, healthcare is not a human right.
He laughs at me when I lay out some of the arguments for more sensible policy. We pay twice as much for our healthcare yet our outcomes are nowhere near the best in the world. He snickers.
There will be little chance to sway this fellow even when his wife’s cancer might have provided a teachable moment or two. What I really wanted to say to him, I did not say. I grieved for his wife, who was not with him this Sunday morning because it’s a bad day for chemo effects and because a working Monday is bearing down on her.
As I listened, I realized even more clearly that fighting for healthcare as a human right will not eliminate American born and bred hatred for the weak and the poor and the sick by those desensitized to the perils of the less fortunate. Passing civil rights legislation years ago did not eliminate racism or racists in America.
I thought about this woman with her advanced breast cancer and with a husband whose faltering small business makes it really hard for them to makes ends meet. I thought maybe I should tell him to pull up his own damn bootstraps, get a job with benefits and give his seriously ill wife a break. Why don’t you have an equal responsibility when the woman you promised to cherish and love and support is so very sick? I’d yell and tell him he understands relying on others for help – look how his wife, even at her own great personal peril, protects him and his ability to keep trying to make his business profitable. But that wouldn’t be the argument I’d want to make anyway.
Someday, when such a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer, she’ll keep working so long as she is well enough to do so, and under a single-payer, Medicare for all type healthcare plan, she’ll get her care when she and her doctor decide it best for the course of her illness and recovery not when it’s best for her continued earning of enough cash to pay insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses. The family will not avoid all the potentially negative financial impact of serious illness, but they will know that no matter what they will have healthcare. Medical decisions can be truly medical decisions, not financial ones.
The health insurance bill passed by Congress last spring does not interrupt this process of brutality. I wish it did. But so long as accessing healthcare is tied to one’s ability to pay (premiums, co-pays, deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses), more patients will make stilted decisions based on job-related, private, for-profit benefits and suffer greatly as a consequence.
I remain haunted by the words I heard this man say.
Clearly he believes his own rhetoric. And clearly he is not alone in his
blindness to the human suffering of others – no matter how close the
relationship.
We have a long way to go in educating one another. But
we may have to remember that those who firmly believe in self-actualization
through personal responsibility alone will not be our allies in the fight for
healthcare as a human right. They turned America’s romance with
rugged individualism into defiant selfishness. Thank goodness these souls
are in the minority. It’s troubling to hear their shameful grumblings,
but the voices of compassion combined with the sound fiscal policy of improved
Medicare for all will surely win out. Our voices must be clearer and stronger. We will not convince everyone that we are right, but confronting this unnecessary suffering we must.
Onward.
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62 Comments so far
Show AllIn a civilized society personal responsibility is only a virtue if it is matched by corporate responsibility. Centuries of experience have proven that corporations will be responsible only if they are sufficiently regulated.
The recent digital change of all medical records for computers, which doctors and nurses applaud because it makes their job easier, is a big step in making patient privacy and care a joke.
Only gullible fools actually believe the lies doctors tell their patients, that the privacy of their medical records is sacrosanct. Your medical record is the fetish voodoo doll that doctors and nurses keep to represent you. It isn't always used to record facts about you. Sometimes, it's also a recording of whatever lies someone wants to make up about you. They can do this with impunity. Suppressed hostility toward patients is common in medicine.
The medical profession is full of huge dishonest egos, who DON'T have their ethical act together.
They even get away with openly participating in torture,
and NOBODY loses their license for doing so.
Medicine in America desperately needs adult supervision -
not kids regulating kids (doctors regulating doctors), but REAL ADULTS regulating them. Presently, medical licensing board members are all doctors, except a few others who are also beholden to their health care industry. To become an honest profession, doctors MUST become subject to a patient-based licensing board. A board with teeth, whose primary interest is right and wrong, ensuring patient safety, and the power to PERMANENTLY bar wrongdoers from ALL future practice in America. I'm fed up with doctors' whiney complaints about malpractice suits. If justice were done for patient welfare, many of today's doctors would be kicked out of the profession, and doing something else to pay off their school loans.
200,000 patients a year die from preventable medical mistakes.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/11856.php
The American Medical System Is The Leading Cause Of Death And Injury In The United States
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed.htm
Half of all doctors admit they've witnessed dishonest, unprofessional, or impaired behavior by their colleagues, WHICH THEY DIDN'T REPORT.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22083982/
The medical field is filled with spoiled brats. Its ethical restraints are as rotten as Wall Street's. They don't have their act together anywhere near as well as they pretend.
Their promises that your medical info is private, are not worth the breath they expend saying it.
OK, Shawn, for the sake of argument, let us say that we eliminate all those terrible doctors from the profession, i can relate to that. How do you propose to guarantee the right of folks to adequate access to decent docs and therapies without going into bankruptcy, that is even when they can borrow enough money for the care in the first place? i think that's what this article was about ...
Those greedy doctors and lawyers that keep you here until they have extracted every last penny from you need to go. I've been a personally responsible guy and I don't get sick and do everything to avoid them. But to prevent bankruptcy, make those doctors and lawyers cheap. The article's only blaming the insurance companies. Single payer is nice too but even a single payer card won't stop greedy doctors and lawyers from scarfing for money. Yeah, insurance co's are greedy bastards but so are most doctors and trial lawyers. Every doctor who is rich has an insurance company as a business buddy. That's irresponsible of doctors.
Right now, thanks to our for-profit system, you are seeing the best doctors -- the ethical doctors who care about caring for people -- leaving the system or practicing elsewhere. We need to get out of the for-profit medical business, period, if you want to see real doctors interested in medicine and their patients more than their yachts, their pricey homes and their social agendas.
Can't argue with that but we also need the doctors' cooperation as willing to be ethical and responsible.
Yikes!
OK, Who sent you in here to say that?
The parable told in the piece is confirmation of the power of myth and "The Big Lie." In an office or two somewhere within the bowels of the corporate media, some functionaries are probably patting themselves on the back.
Of course, a just karmic reward would be these image manipulators to be laid off and lose their health insurance just as they come down with a chronic disease.
Yes, 'intense cultural and societal indoctrination' gets it about right. As I consider Hubby's mindboggling reaction (quite common here in the US), suddenly 100 years seems like quite a short time. Another 25 election cycles. Every other one Big Pharma and the private "payers" will think of another dodge to keep the game going just a bit longer.
Don't believe everything you think, America.
Perhaps this fellow, in his insistence on "individual responsibility", should take himself off her policy and fend for himself vis-a-vis healthcare, don't you think? And maybe his kids, if he has any, should pay for their own, too - after all, ya gotta start 'em out young if you want to instill the "right" ethic ....
Or maybe the guy misspoke - maybe he meant that in this country every man has a right to pull himself up by his wife's bootstraps. So, if his wife predeceases him, he can just get another one to suck off of ....
Ah, what a wonderful country ...
Men don't use their wife's bootstraps to pull themselves up. I know I don't.
Oh yes they do. More than they'll admit. My own bootstraps are reaching the breaking point.
Very classy but nothing sexist about what I said !
Made up assumptions.
Unfortunately they do. I have that situation and I am near the breaking point. And this is not to say he doesn't work hard, it's just that he's always been able to lean on me -- and I have never been able to lean on him.
sweet post aquifer. that guy is vile, and there're a lot like him out there.
Donna, there's one thing you need to do, however, and that's get out of the PDA, out of the Dems altogether - Dems and single payer just do not mix. They string you along and cop-out at the last minute, as Kucinich did ....
But maybe you just need the health insurance ...
The Dems have proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that their definition of health care reform is enhanced profits for drug and insurance companies and less health care at higher cost to you and I.
The proud Rugged Individualist bourgeois businessman whose terminally ill wife remains tethered to the grindstone until her dying day is a tragic scenario straight out of Dickens.
Dickens' eloquent preambles would be briefer nowadays, because he could skip the first clause and cover the territory by writing simply, "It was the worst of times."
Man has to work hard to earn. The guy tried to save his wife but didn't have enough money to pay a greedy doctor doing business with a slick insurance company.
You really are living in a fantasy world, Shawn. He did not try to save his wife. He is dependent on her job for the health care benefits. That's why she has to go to work - in spite of his being a big fat super-important self-reliant enter-freaking-prising bizzinessman. (ptooey!) He can't afford the health care payments for the family himself- he probably refuses to handle the coverage for his employees too. The man needs a serious woopin. That's why she drags herself into work despite being nauseous from the chemo her husband couldn't afford, so she won't lose sick days and risk getting fired. Her boss and her husband are moral twins.
There's no such thing as a self-made man. It's time you and that dude learned the lesson...and some humility.
This has nothing to do with greedy doctors. It's about selfishness, solipsism, lack of empathy, reptilian morality.
Try not to get sick.
i just can't see how a "man" like this could even look in the mirror without shattering it.
All the man said was
“You know, government can’t and shouldn’t do everything for us. It’s up to us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps.”
The rest Donna drew her own conclusions. She said she thought of telling him more but chickened out. Now she says this
"His love for his wife and his sorrow for her suffering are no match for the depth of his belief in self-will run riot as national policy."
He may support single payer but Donna doesn't know that unless he told her that he opposes it but she should have quoted him. She didn't and her analysis is logically falacious. I support single payer but believe in pulling myself up by my own bootstraps without freeloading off my wife. The women in this article has breast cancer but no word on why the doctor didn't help so Donna talks on about insurance. You think a single payer magic card would have cured her from breast cancer? What patients, doctors, and nurses having some responsibility? You can't blame insurance companies for irresponsible people. Not even the best insurance can replace personal responsibility.
Re:"He is dependent on her job for the health care benefits. That's why she has to go to work - in spite of his being a big fat super-important self-reliant enter-freaking-prising bizzinessman. (ptooey!) He can't afford the health care payments for the family himself- he probably refuses to handle the coverage for his employees too. The man needs a serious woopin."
Hey, nothing wrong with suggesting a spouse to try finding work. I did it. My wife cried and beat me up one day and threw a few glass bottles on my head but she did the right thing one week later when she knew that it was time to be practical and prudent. She's working now and we're doing ok. Not much income but we're kool. She misses her former job as a housewife and once in a while I'll get into an argument and get yelled at for telling her to move forward but she'll get over it anytime. Can't see a day she'd kill me for it.
Any individual who talks about the need to not rely on government always ends up relying on them the most. What would that same man say to government working for Corporate America and the MIC? You know, doling out too many handouts to them when they are more than rich enough to take care of themselves? The man is delusional and if he's a conservative who believes in reducing wasteful spending, he needs to show his support for single payer health care and call for ending wasteful spending for corporate and military goons hawking up all our taxpayer dollars and making the value of the dollar worthless. I won't bother with the rest of your post on your wife. I hope she doesn't get sick. Seriously, you and her need to take a vacation if you haven't done so already. You might learn a few good lessons.
Nice anecdote - (no sarcasm intended) bottle tossing is not in part of the repertoire of any relationship I would enjoy, but if it makes your lives more colourful, toss away. ;-)
I think the (healthy) man in this case who is relying on a mortally ill wife to provide him with medical coverage is not a man. He is also wilfully oblivious of all the ways he benefits from government handouts himself. It's part of the gestalt of such a person.
drone, maxpayne - Exactly!
Re:"I think the (healthy) man in this case who is relying on a mortally ill wife to provide him with medical coverage is not a man."
I'm not finding that anywhere in the article. Donna says "Perhaps more accurately, for this man’s wife, healthcare is not a human right." so she assumes what he's thinking without asking him. I wouldn't ever ask my wife to seek employment if she were knowing she'd have no chance of getting a job. Now when Donna wrote
"He laughs at me when I lay out some of the arguments for more sensible policy. We pay twice as much for our healthcare yet our outcomes are nowhere near the best in the world. He snickers."
she didn't tell us what she really told him. We all want single payer health care but exploiting his wife's situation to lecture him about good policies? Come on. The problem's more than just insurance. And poor guy. His small business falls apart and she wants him to work for a job that spoils him? He should have benefits but he can't expect the best insurance to stop a doctor from botching a job. Americans go to other countries to get their surgery and dental work. Why? Must be good doctors who don't charge a lot but get their work done. I've seen Americans going to Canada and Mexico just to get their treatments and none of them got insurance but it's cheaper there. and even if everyone had insurance from the government, it doesn't stop waiting times for patients. I hear that Canada's having some trouble on that.
Hey, Shawn, don't you think it's pretty crumby that i person with a job can't bring in enough to take care of a family? Shucks, when I was growing up, we had 5 kids, my mom was a "housewife" (talk about work!) and my dad worked a blue collar/lower management job. We weren't "rich", but we weren't "poor", and we had healthcare.
Under the current and previous admin - you gotta have multiple jobs to even try to do the same thing. Don't you think that sucks? Don't you think we should make a system where one of you, either your wife or yourself, wouldn't have to work outside the house?
I only asked my wife to work because we had to keep up with our payments.
Re:"We weren't "rich", but we weren't "poor", and we had healthcare."
Single payer existed? Never knew that.
Re:"Don't you think we should make a system where one of you, either your wife or yourself, wouldn't have to work outside the house?"
If nobody works, then nobody pays taxes and no single payer.
"I only asked my wife to work because we had to keep up with our payments."
Shawn, that was my point, when i was growing up, one person with one job was all that was needed to "keep up with the payments"
"Single payer existed?"
No, Shawn, at that time a) medical care was cheaper and b) companies provided their employees with adequate insurance. Neither factor exists now.
"If nobody works, then nobody pays taxes and no single payer."
Shawn, read the question again - didn't say that "nobody" should work, only that it shouldn't have to take more than one in a family to have to ....
"The guy tried to save his wife but didn't have enough money to pay a greedy doctor doing business with a slick insurance company."
Wow, Shawn, did you talk to him? Is that what he actually said?
Donna said he still loves her in the article.
"Hi! You've reached the answering machine of Donna Smith. Please leave a message after the high moral tone."
Hatred for the weak and the poor and the sick? Talk about an ideology blinding one into a mis-diagnosis! The weak, the poor, the sick should flee this type of practitioner as if their lives depended upon it.
Folks here should take an internet trip and visit conservative chat sites. It is very strange trip indeed. I can only visit for short periods because the mindset there is so alien to me.
When the health care "debate" was in full swing I went over to see what the dark side thought. One discussion was about the absurdity of insurance companies not being able to deny people for pre existing conditions. The attitude was, of course they cant cover that, they'll go bankrupt! They completely sided with the insurance companies, and had absolutely no compassion or concern for the people that had P-E conditions. None whatsoever...
Of course they were completely ignoring how Insurance companies use P-E conditions as a total scam, where they deny to pay for your cancer care because you didn't tell them you had acne.
Imagine if they did the same thing for auto insurance. Before you can get your car insured you have to disclose all preexisting conditions your car has. Unfortunately you forget to mention the dent in the drivers door. Later that year your car gets t-boned on the passenger side. The insurance adjuster checks out your car, and sees the rusted dent on the drivers door and says. "Ah Ha, "You did not disclose that when you signed up for a policy with our company. I am denying your collision claim for your lack of full discloser of the dent on the opposite side of your vehicle!".
I am quite sure right wingers would not put up with insurance companies doing this to their vehicles, but they have absolutely no problem when an insurance company does it to their own bodies.
I just don't get it...
Rightwingers have no clue as to what they believe in. It's all in the money.
Absolutely, maxpayne.
Their core belief is 'What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine too'.
Rightwingers will be the first in line when stuff gets handed out.
Maybe it's easier to understand them if you consider that they operate with two separate rule books: one for themselves, and one for everybody else. You see that in action when you watch how differently the moral scandals play out on either side of the house. It's the reptilian brain at work (no, not the wacko conspiracy reptiles), the lowest level of functioning of the human brain. I've seen it develop - or underdevelop - when I was a teacher in high school. Often, they're not the brightest candles on the cake, but their extreme self-interest and arrogance propel them forward. Sometimes, they are so extreme, school is a complete waste of time for them, and they drop out early to become big shot wheeler-dealers in various settings.
Another type you find on those conservative sites is the authoritarian followers. They'll follow anyone with enough charisma - Jim Jones, Heaven's Gate, Waco, Colonia Barron, etc. I see them as fragmentary characters - incomplete to the degree they lack moral autonomy, a self internally defined; they'll believe and support anything, no matter how outlandish as long as they can belong, and for all the claims of rugged individualism, lacking individual courage, they work in concert.
Too bad these are the poltroons in charge right now.
Soooooo True! Richard Burr down here in NC is a Regressive running for reelection to the Senate. He has an ad that shows two seniors complaining about gooberment spending that is out of control and we need to get the gooberment out of our lives. As soon as I looked them I thought, "Those two guys are getting Social Security and Medicare.
What a frigging joke.
They're getting the top-drawer very best medical care available on the planet, and You're paying for it. They also get free club memberships and huge freebies every which way they turn...they and their families.
you knock yourself out to collect points on your over-leveraged credit card - for those guys, every day is xmas!
I have had the same family doctor for twenty years. My husband goes to him as well. He sent us a survey a while back and after it was completed he sent us a letter saying that he was going to join something called MDVIP and limit his practice to 600 patients. So I went to the website today and guess what? If I want to keep him as my doctor, I have to cough up $1500 a year for "wellness checkups and preventative medicine your insurance company doesn't cover." My husband also has to cough up $1500 a year. Apparently their yearly checkup is so awesome and covers so many more things that I should pay $1500 for the privilege. And no, insurance doesn't cover it. For all this money I apparently get to spend more time with him and have a nifty CD with my medical records on it. Since I'm currently on Social Security, this isn't going to happen.
I don't know what my doctor's personal financial situation is and I suspect this move is partially motivated by a desire to spend more time with patients and partially by a desire to insure his income in the face of Obamacare. Those 600 patients will be cherry-picked folks who definitely can afford to pay their medical bills.
I just hope one of the doctors at his former practice will take me on. The other main member of the practice is near retirement and I don't know any of the younger doctors. Look to see more of this sort of thing happening near you.
Moonshadow, please post the URL of his website here. Also, tell us what your largest local daily newspaper is.
Trylon
Yup I have heard of that too. Here is a link to their site. http://www.mdvip.com/patient/default.aspx
If you check out their website their motto is something like:
"MDVIP is an innovative partnership between your wallet and your doctor that creates life-changing healthcare." ;-)
Yup, that's the site Tom. You pretty much summed up their philosophy from what I can see! The biggest local paper near me is the Lexington Herald-Leader.
My doctor's got the right to run his practice however he wants, but it is both distressing and annoying that he's gone corporate. My veterinary clinic of nearly thirty years joined a corporate chain a couple of years back, and our relationship just isn't the same. You want to do business with local people, but like trying to find stuff that's not made in China, it's getting harder and harder to do.
As Donna Smith's story illustrates, it is almost impossible to change such behavior through reasoning because it is based on an emotional problem. This is taken from a psychotherapy session and illustrates the problem and how it can change:
I was working with a man in his early forties, handsome, well-dressed, a vice-president of a medium-sized hi-tech firm who no doubt earned at least several hundred thousand dollars a year. He asked me, "Can you tell me why I have such a hard time with people on welfare? I can figure out that many of them need it, but I still can't stand it." I asked him to take a quiet moment to get in touch with what it was about people on welfare that got him. He became quiet for some time, then said, "It's about someone getting something for nothing." I asked, "Al, how much did you ever get for nothing?" He immediately burst into tears, and cried long and hard.
The kind of resentment he displayed at first typically stems from the common emotional abuse that forces a person to be uncomfortable with grieving their own losses and thus getting over them. They therefore see everyone else as trying to get away with something, while they have suffered. My client needed to grieve his own past in which he felt quite unloved. Then he would become comfortable, likely even feel good about, gifts to others. The tears in this session represented a big step in his progress toward gaining empathy for himself and others. Moral: Rather than trying to convince, we often have to help others pay attention to their own emotional roots in an issue and empathize with the pain behind their irrational position.
While i applaud your courage and the stance that we need to be open to helping people heal. It has also been all of our experiences that narcisists never ever heal and certainly never ever pay attention to anything but thier own nutty projections.
We can only help them when they ask for help annd they never do. So being open to them is pointless and even a bit dangerous. best just keep your distance. It might seem different to you because you see people coming to you for help but those people who do seek help are actually a very small percentage of the population as a whole.
The thing i can't figure is how the health care itself and how evil and brutal it is is always left out of the discussion. The discussion and this article ALWAYS focuses on the issue of access and afordability.
Afordability of WHAT ? Ever taken care of a family member with cancer ?
The bold and ugly truth is that they would be MUCH better off without the bogus brutal treatment all together ! Who cares if you have access to it ?
You culd get some little kid down the street to mix you up some drain cleaner or something if you wanted to spend a few weeks puking your guts out before you die. The results would be the same as the "chemo".
ANYTHING you do would be better. NOTHING could posibly more stupid or worse. At every turn you just get bogus needless expensive operatons and now all the ER's and IcU's all are totally filthy disease ridden swamps of designer lethal mutant forms of all kinds of deadly pathogens.
Best thing for all of us would be if they forcably shut down 100% of the hospitals in America and buldozed them to the ground and forced the fake doctors to go out and get real jobs.
Re:"Best thing for all of us would be if they forcably shut down 100% of the hospitals in America and buldozed them to the ground and forced the fake doctors to go out and get real jobs."
If you had to be rushed to the hospital, would you still call for bulldozing it?
Ardent,
While i agree that the treatments are brutal and the "cure" rate often low, I have observed in my time in medicine a number of things.
"He then convinces the family that it is necessary to not 'give up' and the torture continues"
The key is, what has he told the patient - who, after all is the focus (or should be) of the whole affair. If a treatment does absolutely no good for anyone, ever, that is one issue. If the treatment offers, not a cure, but the possibility of an extension of life, or a period of remission, that is another, if the treatment has demonstrated "cure" rates, even in low numbers, that is another.
In the time I spent as part of my training in a cancer institute what astonished me was the incredible things people would undergo just for a "chance", even if a very small one, or even for just a little longer life. I think that it is up to the patient to say when enough is enough, no matter how hard it is on the family, and they do.
One big problem in our country which influences this whole issue enormously is our attitude about death .....
I have also observed it from the patient side - the lack of interest in, or pooh-poohing of "alternative" approaches. There are a number of reasons for this, i think and one could have a whole discussion about it.
In any case, there is no doubt that the medical profession, IMO, has to take a long hard look at itself in terms of the issue of "just" or "adequate" compensation for its services. Interestingly, I think, the institution of single payer would force this discussion as well as make sure everyone had access. Ironically, after a shake up period, the healthcare they had access to may well wind up being of higher quality once it was understood by practitioners that it was no longer a "lucrative" field - you were in it because you gave a damn .....
Your experience has obviously made you very bitter about the medical profession, and i cannot blame you for feeling that way - in your case, and certainly others, it is, no doubt, justified. But is the answer to wipe it all out or to fix it?
Over the years i have noticed what i feel is a decline in the overall "health" of healthcare provision. I clock it up in many ways to the increasing infiltration by the "business/market model" of life, wherein docs and hospitals "compete" with each other for "market share" (hospitals) or "consumers of healthcare" - those we used to call "patients". All sorts of ugly things have been happening in the pursuit of this model - none to the advantage of the patient, and even, believe it or not, to the advantage of the sincere practitioner.
There are some good docs in the system - i hope you find one, sometimes they do come in useful .....
This would open up jobs for bulldozer operators. I'm for that.
Sadly, your hostile view of Medicine is realistic. Interestingly, I did not feel that way the 30 years I lived in Canada, 17 years of which I worked in hospitals. I came home after 9-11. Stupid me.
I was living in Calgary in 1992-1994 when Bill and Hillary Clinton were making their brave attempt to reform health care. The level of misunderstanding about Canadian health care was terrible and I participated in cyberspace discussions to try to keep the records straight. I made two or three written submissions to Hillary in Washington. The communication medium at the time was ascii text and I captured several months of the health care debate, compressed it, and archived it upon diskettes. If I decompress and read it now, it is deja vue all over again. There is nothing new under the sun. The same blind points of view emerge that the author of this article mentions.
Another timely article, Donna. Obama, Pelosi and Co. are taking the HCR bill on the road again to sell it. The Pelosi dragon was on NPR yesterday in a rather extensive interview. I believe it was Scott Simon who interviewed her. I couldn't listen to the whole thing -- couldn't bear it. No tough questions were asked, of course, and she just blathered on about how the insurance companies were going to be held accountable, that they would have to justify rate hikes -- just ask Wendell Potter, this won't be difficult! And then this morning I heard about this tour -- also not the first this year -- to sell this bill.
For a bill that is so marvelous and wonderful and beneficial for the American people why the hard sell? Because they know the bill is hated and why -- and they know who hates it. You've got to hand it to the Repubs, though. They played this one really well at the expense of the American people. All the Dems fell in line and passed a bill worthy of Bush, or Romney, if he were Prez. They knew Obama wanted this "win" at any cost for his Presidential resume, and all they had to do was say no. In a few weeks we'll see if they get to reap the fruits of their strategy.