Quotation of the Day
14th January 2025
ZMan:
Anyone who has had anything to do with the American healthcare system knows that it is both amazingly good and amazingly insane. If you have a treatable form of cancer, you can be cured of something that within living memory killed people. On the other hand, if they find some trivial ailment during your physical, you can be subjected to endless hustles to pump you full of prescription medications.
From my limited experience with the system, it appears to be a system created by organized crime, but some of the members found Jesus and wanted to help people, so the compromise was gangsterism mixed with altruism. The frustrating part of it is you are never sure which end you are experiencing. Often it feels like it is both at the same time, which should be impossible.
One reason for this is we do not treat medicine as a business. The medical professions, even the bullshit administrative stuff, are full of people who have nailed themselves to the cross as a sacrifice to the rest of us. Any suggestion that they are acting from anything other than the your best interests is treated as blasphemy. They are “care givers” who sacrifice for the rest of us.
Popular culture does not help, as it is full of movies and television shows that portray these people as altruistic angels, sent here to serve humanity. This took a massive hit during Covid, when we learned that the chubby nurses were making TikTok videos in empty hospitals when they claimed to be saving lives. This change in public perception had no impact on their view of themselves.
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This confusion about the reality of the medical business lies at the heart of the debate of health care reform. The “universal medicine” people are sure that the problem is the profit motive, so they want to remove it. They think this will turn everyone into angels who live to serve us. Instead, it will turn them into the sorts of people who will never be fired for the Los Angeles wildfires.