I’m writing a review-like blog post on Timothy Snyder’s Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (Crown, 2020), a short book on American health care. To that end, I’m interested in hearing what PoT readers have to say about health care in the US today.
I keep hearing hand-waving stories from right-leaning members of our managerial class about how unemployment benefits are dampening the desire to work among rank-and-file workers. Let me give you a small glimpse into the work ethic of this same managerial class in my own case. I’ll leave you to decide, at least in this case, whose work ethic could use some improvement.
I’ve been writing here since October about the eight month gig I recently did working full time for Operating Room Environmental Services (OR EVS) at Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington, New Jersey. About seven weeks ago, I gave notice at the hospital, telling both Surgical Services and HR that I would continue to work at HMC’s OR once a month as a per diem worker at the same rate as I’d earned before. They were delighted to hear it; OR EVS has been decimated by turnover, and was practically dying for weekend coverage. I could easily have insisted on a raise, but didn’t. This, by the way, for an institution that failed to give me bereavement leave after the unexpected death of my wife in March.
Continue readingFor at least six months now, hospital spokespersons have been coming before the public to assure would-be patients that hospitals have been thoroughly scrubbed clean of potential infectious agents, most of all SARS-CoV-2. So, they insist, “hospitals are safe,” and no one should hesitate to go. This video below is typical of standard-issue hospital propaganda.
No, hospitals are not safe. The video above, like so many in its genre, above confuses de jure policies with de facto realities. Yes, policies are in place “to ensure safety.” But as should be obvious, a policy’s being in place doesn’t ensure safety. People have to be following it, all the time, and to the last letter or decimal place. Even if they are, adherence to policy is not sufficient to ensure that a hospital is 100% infection free, or 100% safe. Nothing can do that.
Continue reading[An anonymous submission by a physician at a New York City-area hospital.]
If you wanted to concoct a story of a cruel, vengeful god who plotted to induce madness upon all of humanity, you could not do better than the COVID-19 pandemic. Under normal circumstances, all it takes is a few sensible, simple, commonsense hygiene practices to prevent infectious illness from becoming a major public health problem. As diseases go, the usual suspects are pathogens we know well (influenza, rhinovirus, etc.), whose disease courses tend to follow a familiar and predictable narrative: prodrome, syndrome, convalescence, immunity. Serious illness is an exception to the rule with these players, and it clusters predictably in familiar groups of outlier hosts: the very old, those with severe medical problems, the very young. These individuals are at risk roughly as to how old, close to being newborns, or medically complicated they are. Continue reading
Most of the national media reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic has focused, understandably, on the catastrophe taking place in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic. A student in one of my classes, with friends and family in Queens, told me that he knew personally of fifteen COVID-19 deaths in Queens alone (Elmhurst). New York City essentially leads the world right now in COVID-19 cases.
Somewhat lost in the shuffle as it always is, is the second-place case of New Jersey, where, apart from graduate school, I’ve lived all my life. You can turn on the TV to see what things are like in New York, but whether you see it there or not, things aren’t much different in Jersey: like New York, New Jersey is under siege. And “siege” is no metaphor. COVID-19 is an invading army–much more so than the Japanese, the Nazis, the Soviets, Al Qaeda, Saddam, or ISIS ever were–and we’re losing the battle to it. Continue reading
The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies…
–Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics”
Imagine a version of Atlas Shrugged in which the Taggart Tunnel disaster involves a causal process driven primarily by Mother Nature, and what goes off the rails is not a train but a health care system. Now imagine that the hero of the piece is not a shadowy figure like John Galt but the functional (not moral) equivalent of Dr. Robert Stadler. Now imagine that a retreat to Galt’s Gulch is a physical impossibility. If, for some readers, this requires a re-conceptualization of how the world works, maybe a lot of other things do, too. Continue reading
Apologies for deluging you all with posts; I’ll try to keep these to a maximum of two a day. But the situation here in the New York/New Jersey metro area is getting increasingly critical. As I said in my very first post in this series, our situation is closer to Italy’s right now than most people realize. That outcome isn’t inevitable, but it can only be averted if we act. There’s no need to be sitting at home “bored” with the lockdown. There’s more than enough to be done even within its constraints. (If Gazans can do it, so can you.) I can’t publicize every plea for assistance I see, no matter how legitimate; I can only ask concerned readers to be on the lookout for them, and please consider responding to some. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 