Category Archives: Health Care Series

Desert and Merit (3)

Posted on by under Health Care Series, MTSP Discussion: George Sher's Desert

The value or worth of a man is, as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power, and therefore is not absolute, but a thing dependent on the need and judgement of another.

–Hobbes, Leviathan, I.10.16

Sher’s account of desert and merit raises many questions, so let me double back to consider some of these, some addressed in his chapter, some not. I’d originally thought I’d leave the criticisms of Sher’s chapter at a single post, but it turns out that my criticisms have eaten up more space than I’ve thought they would. So this series on “Desert and Merit” is going to be longer than the promised or predicted two installments. Frankly, at this point, I couldn’t tell you how long it will be. As Michelangelo said (or is reported to me by Roderick Long to have said) about the Sistine Chapel, “It will be done when it is done.” I follow Michelangelo in such matters. Continue reading →

Desert and Merit (2)

Posted on by under cancel culture, Health Care Series, MTSP Discussion: George Sher's Desert

An unplanned installment in my series on “desert and merit,” care of Labcorp Drug Development. I applied to the job mentioned below three months ago, after spending eight months cleaning hospital operating rooms. I leave it to the reader to decide what conclusion to reach about my just deserts, based on my merits (or not) as a cleaner.

Dear Irfan,

Thank you for applying to Labcorp Drug Development as a Cleaner.

Continue reading →

Hit Me with Your Best Shot

Posted on by under COVID-19, Health Care Series

Well, it looks like the pro-booster side has essentially won the argument, at least in the US, over whether boosters ought to be given for recipients of the Pfizer-Biontech COVID vaccine, six+ months after the second dose. My brother Suleman and I have (very incompletely) argued the case in favor of boosters here, here, and here. As front-line health care workers (he’s a physician, I worked in OR EVS), we got our first doses of the shot back in December 2020, and our second ones in January 2021. He works with COVID patients in a hospital, and I work in an increasingly crowded office. Neither of us had any sense of how much protection we were getting from the vaccine at this point.

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Bishop John Shelby Spong, RIP

Posted on by under Health Care Series, Memorials and Obituaries

I was saddened to learn today of the death of John Shelby Spong, Bishop Emeritus of the Newark, New Jersey diocese of the Episcopalian Church. Though I can’t claim to have known Bishop Spong very well, he was a close friend of my parents’, and a constant presence in our family home. He was for decades Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Christ Hospital in Jersey City, where both of my parents worked–my father for forty, and my mother for thirty years. So we knew Bishop Spong less as a bishop than as a hospital trustee. The stories–or legends–I heard about him for decades were about health care, not theology.

Spong speaking in England; photo credit: David Gibson/RNS

Christ Hospital started its life as an Episcopalian institution. It later merged (or attempted to merge) with St Francis Hospital across the city, a Catholic institution. The merger initiated an apocalyptic sectarian battle for the mortal souls of both hospitals, a battle in which (I’m told) Bishop Spong did a fair bit of the fighting. Eventually, after a series of Jesuit-worthy legal complications I’ve never been able to grasp, Christ Hospital was consumed by the godless and soulless CarePoint Health System. By then, Bishop Spong had had the good sense to leave the hospital behind; Jesus Christ may or may not have been resurrected, depending on your theology, but Christ Hospital was not going to be resurrected, at least not in the form it originally took as an urban community hospital in the Episcopalian tradition.

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New blogger: Suleman Khawaja

Posted on by under COVID-19, Health Care Series

I wanted to welcome a new blogger to Policy of Truth, my brother, Suleman Khawaja. Suleman is currently a hospitalist at Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where (in Ridgewood, not at Valley) he also runs a private practice as an expert witness on a variety of medico-legal issues. He received his BA in Political Science (minoring in Philosophy) at Duke University, and got his MD at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. He did his residency in Internal Medicine at UNC Medical Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. By a strange coincidence, both Suleman and I studied extensively with Alasdair MacIntyre–as a graduate student at Notre Dame in my case, and as an undergraduate at Duke in his.

Suleman will be blogging here primarily on health care issues, with a particular focus on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Who Made WHO: COVID-19, Global Class Warfare, and Booster Shots

Posted on by under COVID-19, Health Care Series

Who pick up the bill when who made who? Ain’t nobody told you?

–AC/DC

On August 18th, The New York Times ran a story on the front of its feed titled “Booster Shots ‘Make a Mockery of Vaccine Equity,’ the WHO’s Africa director says.” In case that statement sounds needlessly inflammatory and emotionally manipulative, here’s the actual quote from Dr. Matshidiso Moeti:

Moves by some countries globally to introduce booster shots threaten the promise of a brighter tomorrow for Africa. As some richer countries hoard vaccines, they make a mockery of vaccine equity.

To say that the introduction of a booster program in one nation poses a near-existential threat to a continent of 1.2 billion people is a stretch. But it’s not until you drill down to the factual details of the worldwide dynamic of COVID prevalence, vaccine production, and actual vaccination that you get a sense of how misleading and irresponsible that statement is, and how shaky is Moeti’s subsequent claim that as a consequence of boosters, more dangerous variants of COVID will arise.

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The JBMDL Afghan Account

Posted on by under Health Care Series

I was sitting in my cubicle mid-day when an email with an odd subject line tumbled into my inbox: “JBMDL Afghan.” It was from a bona fide sender, so I opened it and took a look. It turned out to be an email from the director of financial services at a major hospital system, making reference to a new medical services “payor,” as we spell it in the trade. It was, in other words, the Joint Base McGuire Fort Dix Lakehurst Afghan payor, i.e., the payor of medical services for Afghan refugees housed at McGuire Air Force Base/Fort Dix Army facility in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Otherwise known as the US military.

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Cancel Culture: A Recantation

Posted on by under cancel culture, Health Care Series

In previous posts here, I’ve argued that “cancel culture” is fake news–an ideological confabulation devised by the Right to discredit the Left, which is usually “credited” with having created it. I now realize that I’ve been deeply wrong, and wish to recant. Cancel culture certainly does exist, just not in the way its usual ideological adversaries would have you believe.

Think of any event that requires scheduling, e.g., an appointment, a work schedule, business hours, a conference, a travel itinerary, a date. Think of how ubiquitous such events are, and how complex and expensive the infrastructure required to keep them going–to keep the slots filled, to keep the workflow efficient, to make sure everything runs on time. Consider how much reliance the various parties place on the others in the scheduling process. If A schedules with B, A relies on B to be there, and B relies on A to show up. If A doesn’t show up, the failure (whether culpable or not) adversely affects both B and any third parties who would have used A’s slot but couldn’t, given A’s (let’s say) sudden absence. If B doesn’t show up, the absence affects A as well as a set of third parties.

Continue reading →