The day began with me feeling the excitement of a child. We were going to Busch Gardens and it stood to be a good day. While walking a dog this morning I felt a cool breeze coming in off the ocean and knew it would be a good day to be outside. Then I got home, we got the kids in the van, and took off to Busch Gardens where on the way we ran into no traffic at all. We arrived to the park, told them about our big stroller, and received free VIP parking. We got into the park and the gate to enter opened almost as soon as we got to it. We had arrived just as the park opened. So far so good, but it wouldn’t last.
We took the children up to see the horses, I rode a roller coaster, and then we took the kids to one of the play areas. Afterwards we decided to have lunch and that is when I started to notice that the stroller was really hard to turn. Eventually we saw that it had a flat tire, and we spent the next couple hours trying to get it fixed. We couldn’t and our day was done.
After being home for a bit and making dinner I sat down to finish the streaming series Dr. Death. It is the exact type of show I have been wanting to watch. It is carried by a fantastic cast and the acting is beyond most of what is on TV.
The end of the series came and I noticed a statistic that I have seen before. It mentioned that medical accidents are the third leading cause of death in the United States. The series is about a doctor that is either evil or incompetent and continues to injure and kill patients. The point of the blurbs at the end of the show is that this will happen again. Medicine in America is big business, but I had heard all this before. The irony is where and from whom I’d heard it before.
This was presented as an American issue in these blurbs. That medicine being big business is to blame, and it is, but the people I had heard these arguments from before were people that are anti-government, anti-truth, anti-fact, anti-vaxxers. They would like to tell you every medical injury is due to vaccines and this and that to fit their belief system, but I’ve never heard one of them rail against surgeries. Which is odd because vaccines came to be far before anything resembling modern surgery existed.
Forget that irony for a second and focus on another one. If one saw that medicine being big business was an issue wouldn’t one want more oversight of medicine? Wouldn’t one want doctors to be public servants instead of businessmen? The answer to the issue of hospitals and doctors as businesses is more government, not less.
I forget sometimes that the fringe right in America is excellent at naming problems but has no concept that we’re supposed to solve the problems. If medical injuries are a big deal, and there is no reason to think they aren’t, then shouldn’t solutions be presented? Universal healthcare with the government having far more oversight of who gets to practice medicine and how they do it is one solution. There have to be others. Maybe even ones palatable to the anti-government folks because the morality of the market doesn’t appear to be working in this instance.
David Huzzard Writes 