"by Curt Maynard
Have you ever wondered why is it that American children love the McDonald’s Happy Meal so much? After all the food inside is no different than what can be ordered right off the menu, hamburger, chicken nuggets, drink and fries. Is it the toy perhaps? The aesthetically pleasing, brightly colored bag?
Personally, I think it’s a bit of both, don’t children just love the idea of a free surprise inside anything. I mean think about it, isn’t the advertising strategy associated with sugary cereals exactly the same, a toy inside a brightly colored box with friendly cartoon characters on the exterior?
Kids already know what to expect, by the time the average American child is eight they’ve undoubtedly consumed hundreds of happy meals, yet they still go for it each and every time their parents enter the McDonald’s drive through. Surely, the mystery must be gone, they must know how the burger or nuggets will taste. I’m not really all that convinced that the toy itself is very important to most children, what I’ve witnessed with my own eyes is that the toy is generally destroyed, discarded and forgotten by the time the child gets back home. The brightly colored, aesthetically pleasing bag can’t be the most important highlight of the meal either, as a rule kids don’t bother reading whatever frivolous messages are written on it - they may take a crayon and complete a maze or something like that, but in the end, after the food has been consumed, the bag is tossed along with the remnants of the meal.
Taking all the above into consideration I am left wondering if it isn’t the overall “presentation,” I.e. the meal, bag and toy together that ensure the child will consistently order and then reorder the same old crap, and that’s what it really is isn’t it, crap? If you, the reader are under the impression that a McDonald’s Happy Meal is a wholesome and nutritious choice for your child’s palate, then there really isn’t any reason you should continue reading this particular piece, stop reading it, and go back to your MTV and videogames. If there is a member of the opposite sex that’ll have sex with you, please use a condom.
So then, how does the Happy Meal relate to modern American health care? Well, I’m glad you asked, and I’ll be happy to share my opinion with you, but first, allow me a caveat. This essay is bound to irritate, annoy, and probably alienate many people. Most readers will agree with most of the ideas set forth, but in all likelihood, most readers will also be angered by some element, and it’ll be that one issue, that will violate some sacred cow or another and will cause most readers to reject everything within. If you are one of the few truly objective people left out there, this essay was written for you, and in truth, it is only people like you that are likely to understand the greater meaning of this article and its purpose, which of course is change.
Am I advocating socialized medicine? Ha, hardly, the government can’t do anything right, why would they be able to manage health care any better and/or more honestly that they manage foreign and domestic policy, wars and occupations, legislation and law enforcement? The truth is, the entire health care system is irreparably broken and will never be fixed until it is allowed to collapse first. I could tell you how it could be successfully reconstructed after its demise, but the reader would find the answers so distasteful that 99% of all them would reject these recommendations out of hand. Thus it is far easier, to allow the inevitable collapse to happen, and then realistically repair it afterwards, and that is the key word, realistically. Today, the American health care system is a Happy Meal, and people aren’t willing to forgo their toy and brightly colored bag for more nutritious food.
The point in writing this essay isn’t to offer any solutions to the disaster that the American health care system has become, it’s to point out how Americans have inexorably come to accept the corporate involvement in their health care, which by the way is manifestly insane, in that even the dimmest bulbs today know fully well that corporations don’t care about people, only the bottom line, profit.
The vast majority of Americans, and probably people worldwide are under the impression that medicine today is better than it was fifty years ago. In some respects this is true, but in others it is abysmally incorrect. Here is one example - a country doctor fifty years ago could listen to his patients lungs and immediately diagnose pneumonia, he didn’t require x-rays, blood tests, arterial blood gasses, a pulmonologist’s second opinion, or a consult from an infection control specialist. One shot of penicillin would clear the whole thing up, the patient was back to work in three days and the doctor received reasonable compensation. In the 1970s severe cases of pneumonia generally didn’t require more than three days on an intravenous antibiotic, and thus three days in hospital, and then 7-11 additional days on an oral antibiotic at home. Today, a severe case of pneumonia is most likely to require 10 -14 days on a variety of different IV antibiotics, some of them quite toxic, a half dozen chest x-rays, multiple arterial blood gasses and dozens of other lab tests involving blood. In all likelihood the patient will receive at least one CT scan or MRI at between $1000 and $3,800 a pop and if their elderly, a week or two on a rehab unit where they’ll receive physical and occupational therapy until they’re able to transfer safely from their bed to a bedside commode.
How did this happen? It’s simple really, because of the abuse of antibiotics and believe it or not, unrestricted immigration, which has allowed people with Third World infections to come into this country and be given medical treatment in our hospitals, nosocomial [hospital acquired] infections have skyrocketed. Hospitals are a perfect breeding ground for the continuation of these infections and provide an excellent place for the infections to mutate into more virulent forms. If patient A has a relatively nasty respiratory infection and Patient B is elderly and immuno-compromised, and the respiratory therapist taking care of them both has been coughed on by Patient A, there is a small possibility that the RT will carry that bacterium into Patient B’s room and expose the immuno-compromised Patient B to it. Patient B then develops the infection, but it then mutates because Patient B’s immune system isn’t as strong as Patient A’s and an entirely new version of the same infection can arise, requiring different antibiotics to treat. This is old hat, few people are unaware of these facts today, but what they may be unaware of is that the simple use of deductive logic demand that if this is true, and it is, the longer someone stays in a hospital the more likely they are to acquire one of these resistant bacterial infections, which should convince even the greatest adherent to the virtues of modern medicine, that staying in a hospital for more than a few days is a very bad idea. Now I’ve pissed off all of the respiratory therapists reading this essay, they’re outraged, their tender feewings have been hurt, but nonetheless what I’ve written is true. All hospitals are required to train their medical staff to properly wash their hands and to follow basic rules that reduce the likelihood of cross contamination, but nonetheless, statistically, with the hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, X-ray technicians, phlebotomists, volunteers, etc… hundreds, if not thousands of people are infected every single day in this country with an infection they did not have the day before. By the way, doctors are the worst offenders, ask any nurse. See! I told you. Now I’ve pissed off the doctors too.
In any case, how does this all relate to a Happy Meal? Well, a Happy Meal is essentially nothing but a hamburger, fries and a drink, but because it comes in a brightly packaged bag and has the promise of a toy inside, children absolutely love them. Adults too apparently haven’t outgrown their childish need for a toy and brightly packaged bag of crap either, as that is in effect what your health care is today - crap in a brightly colored bag with the promise of a forthcoming toy within.
We’ll explore the inherent problems with America’s health care system in the next few essays I write over the next month, but today we’ll focus on something that most people don’t even consider, and that is the consumer’s [YOU] unrealistic expectations. First off, you have allowed your health care system to be hijacked by corporations. Even the average deluded fool understands that a corporations bottom line is the dollar, yet you still have faith in corporate medicine - why? In truth you know better, but you’re in a state of denial that really knows no bounds.
Every time you turn on and watch the idiot box [television] it soothes you into a false sense of security, many of its programs revolve around medicine in some manner, whether it be about doctors, nurses, the emergency room, surgery, or whatever, you’re there with your popcorn and that same stupid look on your face, the avid viewer, the fan. The fact that its all a giant bag of shit never occurs to you, you like that handsome young doctor, and that’s all there is to it. It’s a fraud wake up! In any case, these programs help make you feel secure about your health care system, you always see the doctors find a cure, they have every single technological toy at their disposal - all that’s needed is just a doctors order and everything will be okay. You can’t imagine as you sit there rapt up in the program, that often there is nothing that can really be done for certain medical conditions - or even that occasionally, nothing should be done, that just doesn‘t compute, does it? These television docudramas never cover stories like that of a woman that entered the hospital for a simple surgery and left with no arms and legs or how two physicians involved in a medical case think that the other is monitoring the patient only to find that neither was monitoring blood levels of the patient who was receiving a nephro-toxic antibiotic and as a result the patients kidneys were destroyed because of their indifference or negligence. Hey - I guarantee you this happens all the time.
Want me to tell you a little secret? When you work for a corporation and you see things like this happen, you never tell. Nope, that’s right, you never say a damn thing, because you need your job in order to keep yourself out of bankruptcy from all that worthless materialistic crap you purchased over the last several years to entertain your pathetic self with. Want to know another secret? The corporations ain’t gonna tell either - nope - that’s called a liability and corporations will cover them up quick.
How does this work in health care. Let me provide a theoretical example. Let’s say that a patient is receiving an antibiotic called Vancomycin. Vancomycin is a last line antibiotic, if it can’t kill your bacterial infection, you’re screwed. It’s an incredibly effective antibiotic, but it causes kidney damage if blood levels aren’t closely monitored. Here’s the situation. A doctor orders the antibiotic, but he subsequently transfers his patient to a sub acute setting, where he isn’t obligated by law to see them on a daily basis. Well, doctors are human you know and he forgets about his patient. Since his patient is on a sub acute floor, the nurses aren’t of the same caliber as those on an acute medical unit and they don’t call the doctor to remind him to check his patients blood levels, which by the way, is ultimately his responsibility anyway, not the nurses. Time goes on and eventually the doctor remembers that he has a patient, then he remembers with dread, that his patient has been receiving Vancomycin for several weeks. He checks the blood levels and finds that he has destroyed the patients kidneys. Well reader, what do you suppose he does then? Does he report himself? Does he confess his error to the hospitals administrative branch or does he discharge the patient home and never tell them? What happens if the hospitals administrative branch finds out? Do you really think they’ll inform the patient? Do you think they’ll report themselves and open the facility up to a lawsuit? If you do, you’re a fool. Nope, everybody just pretends it never happened and when the patient reports to the doctor weeks later with complaints of jaundice and associated maladies, wouldn’t you know that he/she must have been exposed at some point after discharge to a malicious virus.
You should know better by now - you’ve seen how the corporations are screwing America and anyone and everyone in it. Why is it that you think they wouldn’t screw you too? Is it the “Happy Meal,” was it the aesthetically pleasing private hospital room they provided you with, was it the bells and whistles and buzzers and lights associated with all that high tech garbage the toted you to and from? Was it the “professionalism” of the hospital staff [They are trained to placate you with apologies and smiles, not with individual attention, that costs too much]. You should know better by now than to expect much from a corporation - and that is what your health care system is, “Corporate Medicine.”
If the above frightened you at all. Congratulations, you’re not completely deluded and/or asleep at the wheel."
