The Crooked Timbre of Humanity

Posted on by under EVS Journal, Health Care Series, slices of life

EVS Journal 6
December 16, 2020

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made.”
–Rabbi Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

Another Hava Nagila incident in the OR today. Was playing it pretty loud on repeat, twirling my rag as they used to do back in my shtetl. Nineteen year old co-worker Ron goes, “Oh man, turn that Arabic shit off!” Arabic! 😂

Ron keeps ordering Alexa to stop, but she won’t listen. Once it starts,  there’s no stopping Hava Nagila. And if Alexa is on shuffle-repeat? We’re talking eternal musical recurrence. Either you love your fate, or you don’t. I do. Ron doesn’t. 

I’m celebrating the vicissitudes of fate when the Director of the OR walks in unannounced. She seems flustered, startled, even annoyed. I don’t know what she expected out of a cystoscopy turnaround in OR 1 by her crack EVS unit, but Employee #1027742 twirling a rag to Hava Nagila and pretending to be Tevye the Fiddler was perhaps not it. Continue reading →

Fiddlers in the OR

Posted on by under EVS Journal, Health Care Series, slices of life

I started an “EVS Journal” back in 2020, when I worked in environmental services in the operating room of a small community hospital in west-central New Jersey. I’ve decided to start posting edited versions of them here, for whatever interest they might still have. 

EVS Journal #5
December 15, 2020

Seth, Bilal, and I are doing a late turnover in OR 2. Alexa is playing Christmas carols. I get annoyed.

“Two Muslims and a Jew in here, and we’re listening to Christmas carols. Why?”

Without a word or reaction, Seth commands Alexa to play “Hava Nagila.”

“That’s better,” I say.

“I hate this fucking song,” Seth rejoins. Hava Nagila continues. Continue reading →

UHC, Denials, and Wrongful Death Revisited

Posted on by under EVS Journal, Health Care Series, moralism

The questions you ask determine the answers you get. If you ask the right questions, you have some hope of reaching the right answers. If you ask the wrong ones, you’ll likely reach the wrong answers. If you give up on asking, you get nothing but what you started with, so that if you begin in ignorance, you end there.

The debate about the killing of Brian Thompson threatens to begin and end either in misdirection or reinforced ignorance or both. Stuck between two competing brands of outrage–one exulting in Thompson’s death, the other outraged at the exultation–we’re in danger of losing the denials/reimbursement plot altogether. I know I’ve posted on this issue already, but think I’ve found a better way of saying what I was trying to say in that post, one that does a better job of asking the right questions than my last post did.* So here is UHC, Denials, and Death, Take 2. Continue reading →

Divestment at Yale

Posted on by under activism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Well, they say it’s kinda frightenin’
How this younger generation swings
You know it’s more than just some new sensation
Well, the kid is into losin’ sleep
And he don’t come home for half the week
You know it’s more than just an aggravation
–Van Halen, “And the Cradle Will Rock…”

Yale Daily News, December 8:

Yale students overwhelmingly pass divestment referendum

The Yale College Council announced today that the student body has passed the divestment referendum by a large margin.

Continue reading →

Bienvenidos a la Resistencia

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, liberty and the left, slices of life

Witherspoon Presbyterian Church
Princeton, New Jersey

I joined the Defensa del Barrio committee yesterday of my local Resistencia chapter–in “defense of the neighborhood,” also known by its slogan, ICE Out of Princeton. It reminds me that when I was in fifth grade, I wrote a short story in which my friends and I were forced to some woodland redoubt just outside of town, to organize resistance to hostile forces that had somehow taken over. I guess the adults had dropped the ball, leaving the defense of the town in our hands. I don’t remember who the hostile forces in my story were, or what we ended up doing about them. I just find myself wondering whether the story was coincidence or prescience.

Continue reading →

A Dispiriting Day in the OR

Posted on by under EVS Journal, Health Care Series, slices of life

I started an “EVS Journal” back in 2020, when I worked in environmental services in the operating room of a small community hospital in west-central New Jersey. I ended up posting the first three entries of the Journal here at Policy of Truth (1, 2, 3), but posted the majority on Facebook under a private setting, largely to avoid repercussions at work. I’ve decided to start posting edited versions of them here, for whatever interest they might still have.

EVS Journal #4
December 4, 2020

A dispiriting day in the OR. It had nothing to do with the case load, which was moderately heavy in a normal way, but arose from something I’ve so far avoided mentioning in my daily missives here: the War Between the Shifts. I trained on the day shift (8:30-5) but now work on the night shift (technically, 3-11:30, but more like 3 to midnight). Each shift has a different supervisor, but the de jure supervisor of the day shift outranks the de facto supervisor at night. Continue reading →

UHC, Denials, and Death

Posted on by under Big Data, Health Care Series, Palestine

This post has been superseded by a new and improved version written a few days later (Dec. 18, 2024). 

Let me just get straight to the point: I have a real worry about how people are reacting to the UHC killing. It’s not the usual worry that we’re being mean to Brian Thompson. It’s that a lot of what people are saying shows a misunderstanding of how the health insurance denials process works. I work in health care denials management on the provider side, and have in fact dealt with UHC‘s denials reps. I have no sympathy for them or for the insurance industry generally. UHC is the apex predator in an industry of predators. But on the whole, I don’t think it makes sense to say that insurance denials kill people. I’ll grant that excess mortality and morbidity are possible through an insurance denial, but death-through-denial is not the modal case of premature death or even close to it, and it’s a mistake to suggest otherwise. Continue reading →

Divestment and Complicity

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

I’ve reproduced a comment of mine below the fold from the website of Princeton Alumni Weekly, responding to critics of the student divestment campaign described in my previous post. One critic had said: “I fail to see why students on campus should vote on how the University invests its funds.” Another had said: “Students shouldn’t be ‘running’ the University any more than alumnae/alumni should. Leave investing to the experts hired by the University to manage the endowment funds.” Continue reading →