The Three Transgressions

Last week I went to work with a sinus infection. Hardly the worst ailment in the world. My nose alternated between being stuffed up and runny. My throat hurt. It was uncomfortable to breathe and swallow. All in all, not the most debilitating medical issue in the world, but it still worried me. Because I, like millions of Americans, do not have health care of any sort. In the face of these masses working every day with illness trying to get by, a sinus infection is little cause for complaint. It did, however, give me reason to pause. As I stood out in the cold to unload a pile of scrapped theater scenery, as I walked through a cloud of sawdust, as I swept up mounds of dust and garbage, I thought long and hard about how we came to this as a society.

And I realized we do it to ourselves. The transgressions are our own. Three transgressions, actually. But more grievous errors regarding the well-being of this society I cannot imagine.


1: We Make Health a Business

This is the most glaringly terrible practice we have in regards to our own health and well-being. We're talking about people's lives. We're talking about their ability to go on each day and continue to work and provide for themselves and their families. Does this sound like a field which should involve meetings about next quarter projections and profit margins? No. It's actually the most terrifying part of our society. Not racism, not poverty, not hunger; the idea that we have made a business out of whether or not people live or die.

I would like to trust pharmaceutical companies. I would like to imagine that there's a board meeting happening right now where men in expensive suits are sitting in a darkened room with a projector running, the scent of smoke and sweat in the air. I dream of a time when these corporate executives spend long evenings pouring over endless research documents hoping that they can be the first company to produce a cure for cancer. Or AIDS. Or herpes. Or the common cold. I would like to. But I just can't imagine a corporation working towards the goal of putting itself out of business.

The sheer and complete backwards nature of our pharmaceutical system is that we have founded an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars to make sure we never get quite healthy enough to stop buying their products. It's far more profitable for them if HIV remains a condition controlled through expensive drug cocktails. They are in the business of control, not cures. Control gives them a steady revenue stream. Cures ensure a cash flow disappears forever. Which do you think is part of their business model?

The only upside to this is a good deal of research regarding cures for diseases is actually funded by our federal government and carried out by private institutions. Of course, when something looks promising, it must undergo years of trials before it can be approved by the FDA - an agency notoriously riddled with scandal from officials on the take by major pharmaceutical corporations.


2: We Do It To Ourselves

There's a story everyone knows about the old lady who spilled coffee in her lap and sued McDonalds. No one told her coffee was hot. McDonalds admits their coffee is served at especially extreme temperatures, but everyone in the world should be aware that coffee is hot. If you spill it on yourself you will get burned. The woman won millions against McDonalds, and now the fast food chain denotes "Warning: Hot!" on all of their styrofoam coffee cups. That's the most famous of the second of our three transgressions. Frivolous lawsuits.

Doctors work hard. From the moment they decide to become a doctor, they go through unfathomable effort to achieve that goal. College consists of biology, anatomy, physiology, chemistry, biochemistry, organic chemistry, and more. Then comes the MCAT, the most difficult standardized test ever devised. Once that hurdle is cleared, it's off to medical school, where you spend four years devoid of a social life. You study the mind-boggling number of human illnesses, injuries, and genetic disorders. You sleep little, as days are marked by classes that leave your brain swimming and your body smelling of formaldehyde. Then comes internship. The on-call room. 48-hour shifts. Residency. 10 years after you began you're finally where you wanted to be.

Then someone sues you for malpractice. And it all goes down the drain.

As a nation we are actually suing ourselves out of proper health care. As the cost of malpractice insurance skyrockets, so to does the cost of medical bills as doctors struggle to keep up. General practitioners are vanishing at an alarming rate as more and more doctors specialize to make more money. This is not to disparage them - the cost risk involved with being in general practice just isn't worth it anymore. And it's our fault.

Yes, if a surgeon leaves an instrument inside of you, he was irresponsible. You should be recompensed for the danger you were placed in. But if he doesn't? If you walk out of the surgery with slightly less mobility, but alive, do you sue? If you have to give up running marathons but the trade off is you get to keep both legs, do you feel the hospital is to blame? Fear of being sued dominates hospital mentality, because we don't seem to realize what we're doing. When we go after millions of dollars for what in the long run amounts to an inconvenience for us, we're taking those millions of dollars from a hospital. We're taking them from sick children and cancer patients. We're draining them out of MRI machines and ultrasounds. We're stealing from each other because we feel wronged.

I don't feel every malpractice case has been frivolous. Certainly not. But I do feel that we as a society, from the people who file charges to the lawyers who vigorously encourage us to do so, have completely ignored who we're really hurting. Our children, our neighbors, and ourselves. It helps no one when we take from medical care.


3: We Think We Need Universal Health Care

We don't. We really don't.

People repeatedly point to Canada as an example of universal health care in action. Everyone, regardless of class, receives free health care provided by the government. Seems like a good system. Until you take into account the fact that the wealthier Canadian citizens don't like sitting in line for six months, so they come to America for care. Meanwhile, the poor are still left waiting for treatment that in many cases comes too late due to the backlog of patients. The problem is not universal health care, it never was. It's that on top of our first two transgressions, we keep demanding this of a government that can't possibly provide it.

The wealthy will always have a greater advantage than the poor. That's the benefit of being wealthy. Until we convince the government that a war on drugs is about as useful as a war on pancakes and switch to a war on poverty, nothing will change. Insofar as health care is concerned, let's review. We let massive corporations be in charge of our medicine. We sue our health care providers to the point that they can't afford to treat us any longer. Then we tell the government we want them to make this all free. Well, maybe they will. And maybe six-hour stopovers in the waiting room will become six months. Or six years, seeing as how our population is much greater than that of Canada.

We don't need universal health care, and when we demand it we obfuscate the true issue and give politicians another way to avoid dealing with it. Should the government be doing more to lower costs? Of course. But they can do it by breaking the backs of pharmaceutical companies and passing legislation protecting doctors from frivolous malpractice suits. They can do it by educating the public so that those suits which do see court have juries that fully understand what is at stake and can make rulings accordingly. We need changes as a society on how we approach health care. Making it free for everyone will only put a tremendous burden on our government, again taking money from other programs that desperately need the funding, and only weaken our health as a nation in the end.



Have I said anything new? I don't know. Perhaps not. But therein lies our fourth and final transgression, the one that is not listed in the first three because it applies to far more than simply health care.

We don't do anything about it. We never ask the right questions. We never seriously pursue the real answers. We never become outraged. We never act. And so things remain the same, or get worse, as those who benefit from our complacency grow rich on our silence.

There's our problems, laid out for us, clear as day. So, who wants to be the first to change?