Stephan: When you stress a system both its strengths and weaknesses become obvious. Every engineer and physician knows this. What Covid has shown us is how dysfunctional and corrupt the American illness profit system is. I look at data, and that is what it says. It's not the doctors, nurses, technicians, the whole hands-on contributors. They are heroes, it is the system in which they are being asked to operate, and the fact that profit is the system's first priority. The Johnson & Johnson story is a classic example of the corruption of Congress, as permitted by the Citizens United decision. Casey Cep, in this article illustrates what I am talking about.
We have got to create a society that has wellbeing not profit as its first priority or we are not going to get through climate change. The current health care system on the basis of data is the worst in the developed world. It is inefficient, unbelievably expensive, and produces poor health care. Anyone who reads SR regularly should know the data. And we all know stories of how unpleasant it is to live under for many people.
God gives you only one body, Deane Berg always said, so you’d better take care of the one you’ve got. A physician assistant at the veterans’ hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, she knew that spotting between periods wasn’t unusual for a forty-nine-year-old woman, but she went to the doctor anyway. Her two daughters had already lost their father to lung cancer, so Berg wanted to stick around.
Just perimenopause, the doctor concluded after a cursory examination. Probably a blood clot, the nurse practitioner told her when a subsequent ultrasound showed something on an ovary. “It’s not going to be cancer,” the gynecological surgeon said before removing both ovaries on the day after Christmas in 2006. But, when Berg went for her follow-up, she read the words on the pathology report before the surgeon had a chance to break the news: serous carcinoma. She cried, and the surgeon did, too. She would now need a full hysterectomy, chemotherapy, and a great deal of luck. Every year, around twenty thousand women are given a diagnosis […]
The bigger the company, the longer they can get away with mis-doings and may eventually get away “scott-free”.