The week earlier than the newest statewide lockdown, I had (very) minor surgical procedure. (I’m tremendous, thanks; nice job by nurses and docs alike. As you learn this I’ll be browsing at Bolsa Chica.) Spending a lot of the day in certainly one of Southern California’s largest hospitals, I had loads of time to quiz staffers from receptionists to surgeons about how they’re holding up as frontline employees in the course of the lethal coronavirus pandemic.
Suffice it to say they don’t seem to be blissful campers.
Simply as with the RNs and different well being care employees who’re threatening to go on strike over native hospital situations, they mentioned their office was “alarmingly unprepared” for COVID-19. Although they principally have ample entry to PPE now, they’re nonetheless actually, actually ticked off on the preliminary drastic rationing of medical masks, which within the early months of the outbreak had been actually stored below lock and key of their surgical unit. Staffing shortages are nonetheless very actual for them.
A good friend of mine who works in the identical hospital remains to be mad about her colleagues being informed final summer season to indicate up for work “even when they’ve a identified publicity until symptomatic,” as she wrote me on the time.
Final week: “The numbers we’re seeing within the hospitals are unfathomable.”
I might solely observe {that a} worldwide plague is difficult to plan for. And that, whereas I did my monetary half by having a principally elective surgical procedure, and paying the piper for it, Southern California hospitals are hemorrhaging pink ink simply once they want money stream probably the most.
Figuring out there would loads of downtime earlier than the laparoscopic knife, I introduced some studying materials: the Oct. 22 New York Assessment of Books, with an essay by David Oshinsky, a medical scholar who wrote the historical past of Manhattan’s storied Bellevue Hospital, discussing the brand new ebook “Which Nation Has the World’s Finest Well being Care?” by Ezekiel Emanuel.
Of the 11 international locations the College of Pennsylvania medical ethicist research within the ebook, the one motive that america doesn’t are available useless final is that he determined to incorporate China as an alternative of the standard group of 10 main worldwide democracies. Emanuel, who has Harvard doctorates in each medication and political philosophy, says you don’t wish to get sick in China.
Essayist Oshinsky stories on the fascinating turnabout the American Medical Affiliation has made within the final 75 years since President Truman first tried to go a plan for nationwide medical health insurance. Shocked at what they noticed as a probably pinko left flip for People, the docs’ foyer determined to sexualize the proposal, saying it could flip he-men Yanks into “dainty, steam-heated, rubber-tired, beauty-rested, effeminized, pampered sissies.” Truman’s plan, the AMA mentioned, was “blueprinted within the Kremlin headquarters of the Communist Internationale.”
Right here in 2020, you may say the docs received. It prices near a really un-commie $30,000 to have a child in america in the present day due to what one research calls “a wasteful overuse of medication and applied sciences”; it prices about $4,000 to have a child in Western Europe. We spend about half of the $1 trillion paid out worldwide annually for prescribed drugs; now we have 5 p.c of the world’s inhabitants. The 2 largest American political lobbies: Massive Pharma, adopted by the insurance coverage trade.
Oshinsky says Emanuel is cagey on which nation actually does well being care greatest, however Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Taiwan are in his prime tier. So Holland, in a pinch. Neatest thing about our system: “innovation and experimentation.” Neatest thing about in the present day’s AMA: Docs now assist Joe Biden’s plans to broaden the Reasonably priced Care Act.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California Information Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
