A Rotten Foundation Unmasked
I wish everyone would read this short (43 pages), free, absolutely remarkable book (some memoir, a ton of facts, shocking and readable) by Pamela Wible, M.D.
If you want to know why our medical system . . . and the whole culture . . . is so screwed up, read this. It’s written for doctors and med students about their training, but you can effortlessly extrapolate to the problem that becomes a cancer when people ignore their inner moral compass because of peer pressure or for some outer gain.
There are some people who don’t know or care what’s right or wrong but that is not the majority of us. However when people en masse ignore what they know, we’ve got the mess we are in. The website for downloading the free pdf is here: IdealMedicalCare.org
The Precursor to Hilarity
To set up the bit that follows this one, I thought I'd mention this just-published NPR story about insane but normal medical charges. This REALLY happens.
And finally . . .
Hilarity
The more upset I am, the funnier I write. This just-published piece of satirical hilarity was borne of what I came to realize was a completely unnecessary breast biopsy on the day of Superstorm Sandy, on the eve of Obama's second election in 2012. On that day I experienced enormous relief that the test result was benign. But then the bills started coming: from doctors who had never identified themselves as out-of-network, and charges I never could have anticipated for a 15-minute needle stick—charges that were actually inflated due to the fact that my catastrophic medical coverage which did not cover them had higher "allowable fees" than the hospital would have charged if I'd had no insurance.
I'm happy to have finally found a home for this piece in a new online journal called Abandon. Read the whole thing at :
Abandon Journal
In Conclusion
There is a lot of rot in our human systems when we destroy one another and the planet. If I dwell on it too much, I become a floppy, exhausted lump of flesh who can't get off my couch. But when I manage to sit upright, I can remember that the solution to most every problem is first to see it, so we can then do something about it.
In the case of the medical system in the United States, the mess starts when doctors who have been traumatized and abused in their training perpetrate on interns the same treatment they received. Some interns kill themselves (if you go to Pamela Wible's site, look around; she exposes an epidemic in doctor suicide that gets almost no news coverage). Others go on to have a peculiar sense of inflated entitlement, charging fees that make no sense (see my "Cost of Care" satire; a commenter on Goodreads who lives in Australia thought it was pretty funny that anybody in the US is afraid of free—national—healthcare).
We suffer from systemic insanity: racism, medical abuse, consumerism, the power industry, and probably in other areas I have no experience. If people are committing abuse and believing it's not only justified but right, there is poison in their foundations. It must be exposed, and then we must all see it for the craziness it is and refuse to tolerate it.