A tragic story here in Ohio that got me to thinking. God rest that child and her grieving parents. I don't even like to think about it. But here's the thing.
Most who ignore the news media are aware that death from medical malpractice is no small thing, and hasn't been for decades. Whether it's getting worse proportionately or not, I don't know. As much as we like to imagine that there is some treasure vault out there with a stat for everything that needs proven, it doesn't always work that way.
Especially when something, like the medical community, is what I call the Priesthood of Privileged Professions. Like academia in general, or education (public or higher), or the scientific community at large - at least the scientific community that toes the line. Ever notice that these are professions or vocations that the news media will promote, but seldom if ever critique, no matter how bad things are or how many failures stack on failures?
So that there is no small number of Americans who die from medical malpractice each year, though it is seldom mentioned, is not surprising. Likewise, there are the growing problems with medical care in general. We've seen it ourselves in recent years.
The last time my mom had a stroke while she was still living with us, my oldest son and I took her to the emergency room. By then it was not the first stroke she had, and we were fast learning the symptoms. But you couldn't get anyone there to say she was anything other than just old. Maybe a UTI. Both of us fired back and said dig deeper, it's a stroke. My normally introverted oldest became almost angry, telling them we've seen stroke, we know stroke, this is a stroke. After about ten minutes of back and forth the ER doctor, she finally agreed to run some tests in that direction and, would you believe it?
But then a year earlier, she had a stroke, they knew she had a stroke, and she remained in her ER bed for over a day, because there was no room at the inn. Or the hospital in that case. And this isn't some Billy Bubba's Hospital and BBQ medical place either. It's one of the premier hospitals in Ohio. Yet they just didn't have the beds. Finally they discharged her because, well, that was that. They set up some homecare visits instead. There simply were no rooms.
This is happening more and more as well. Even critics of America's healthcare who pine for good old socialized medicine have conceded that the one area American healthcare did shine was speed of service. While the legendary wait times in more socialized environments is a thing, in America it's one problem we didn't have. Until now.
My third son had a health emergency a year ago. He went to the ER, and they patched him up, but told him to call his primary care provider ASAP. So next day he did. He explained the problem, what the ER said, and his provider's office said sure, they can get him in. In about three weeks. He explained he actually needed seen, you know, now. But that was that. They told him to go to a clinic or wait. It made me think of this scene from Caddyshack:
Or, are you sick? I'm afraid we can't see you. What? That's what you're there for!
I've experienced the same thing. As have others. I know some who have said it seems like the medical offices are just not invested in things like making you better anymore. I'm sure it's not all like that. But there comes a time when you start thinking it can't just be our little corner of the world and everything else is just peachy.
But it's this sort of thing that is under reported, if reported at all, that so many don't want to talk about, that more and more people are seeing and getting fed up with. I know it's tough to think things are as bad as they seem. We love the ones who say 'Democracy isn't collapsing, America isn't unraveling, why things always seem that way but it always works out!'.
Yeah, they often do seem that way in this fallen world. They always seem to be falling apart, going from bad to catastrophic, or on the edge of collapse. And often it turns out things finally cross a bridge and pick back up. But sometimes they don't. Sometimes those yelling the sky is falling loud enough turn out to be vindicated when, in fact, the sky finally falls. And we know from history, the sky will fall. And if the good guys don't admit things are unraveling fast, the bad guys will be happy to step in and do something about it, even if it's all the wrong things.
Dave’s daughter in law here :)
ReplyDeleteI am firmly of the belief that we are living through a sort of Decline and Fall of the American Empire. Like it or not, my generation (Gen Z) and my children’s (Gen Alpha and Gen Beta) will be forced to relearn a great deal of basic skills forgotten in our technological age (growing and preparing food at home, home remedies + herbal medicine, etc.) as well as generally recenter the home as a place of production rather than mere consumption. We must also seek to build and support new cultural institutions (schools, libraries, colleges, newspapers and publishing houses, perhaps even medical centers) that run parallel with our failing mainstream institutions and can continue into the future after those institutions finally crumble. These don’t need to be formal institutions necessarily (home libraries and home schools will be vital) but some of them certainly should be. If we do not do this hard work, we will slip into a new Dark Age; I fear many parts of the country will anyways. But my generation will have the difficult work of seeking to pass on as much of our cultural wisdom as possible into the future amidst the decay of our civilization in its current form.
Hey! Hope your book business is going well. I keep finding some old books of mine and family's I debate about sending you all.
DeleteI have reached the age... I begin to think that every civilization is always falling - they are all in perpetual decline. (This seems to be seen in literature and art - throughout time it feels like everyone was always complaining about how much better it used to be, and things are rotting now.) The only thing that stops it, is the citizens, constantly and everywhere working to push it up. To keep having kids, and instructing them to keep things going. Again, and again, and again. Or like you said, new cultural institutions (or at least, new life into old ones).
Like it or not, my generation (Gen Z) and my children’s (Gen Alpha and Gen Beta) will be forced to relearn a great deal of basic skills forgotten in our technological age (growing and preparing food at home, home remedies + herbal medicine, etc.) as well as generally recenter the home as a place of production rather than mere consumption.
That does make me sad though. It does feel like an entire generation of parents completely dropped the ball on passing down knowledge. I'm trying to do better myself but sometimes it feels like nobody's listening...
(You're kids are just too cute, and does give me some hopes for a future..)
(Tom New Poster)
ReplyDeleteWe lost Dad (almost 91) May 23 to heart failure and for the past 18 months he had been in an out of medical care, include EMT visits, a rehab home and transport, etc. His issues included a heart attack and COVID. Yet all the services here in California near San Francisco ran quite smooth, in my view, although driving to see specialists was once in a while an issue. Maybe you're seeing a local problem.
Civilizations decay because their people do first. For every example above, I am willing to bet there are the same or even more examples of people abusing the very systems set up to help us, including illegal aliens who cannot be refused care at the ER but never pay in. Also, how many resources do we spend on immoral practices under the same guise of "healthcare?" How many appointments get taken up because some people need pretty regular appointments to get their prescriptions written. How many people who don't have to pay for their healthcare just use it for everything under the sun without a thought of actually taking care of themselves? How many people are on meds who might just need a good friend or confession? Or how many beds get used up in urban areas due to gun violence? Also, for every genuine and necessary malpractice suit, how many frivolous suits are there that insurance requires doctors to settle instead of going to trial? Unscrupulous lawyers find unscrupulous patients and tell them they "deserve" something.
ReplyDeleteI don't disagree we have institutional rot of course. We don't have enough beds in general due to corporate hospital clauses, and Obamacare pretty much shut down most private practices where your regular doctor might squeeze you in on a moment's notice. And since most doctors are corporate now, they have to follow corporate rules care. The good doctors really do hate it also.
I do shudder to think about what kind of society is being formed for my children and grandchildren though, as the quality of American continues to devolve. If Fulton Sheen's observation that, "To a great extent the level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood... The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women." is correct, just watching the Clancy trial reactions makes me see the outlook is fairly bleak at the moment.
But the news media told me that Obama and co fixed healthcare....
ReplyDelete