Thursday, March 3, 2016

A Snapshot Of Sick Care In America

If you wanted to make sick people sicker, how would you do it?

Suppose, as a thought exercise, you wanted to make sick people sicker. Maybe you are a psychopath or sadist, or maybe you’re just curious. Well, if a bunch of people sat down and brainstormed some of the most effective ways of worsening an urgent illness or injury, they might come up with something like this:
• Make them wait intolerably long times in uncomfortable seats in a room filled with other sick people.
• Make sure that they pay, or agree to pay in writing, before you treat them. Make them fill out lots of paperwork, most of it irrelevant, and force them to stand at a desk for 15 minutes while entering every piece of data about them from birth onwards into an archaic computer system that assimilates information at the speed of a sloth.
• Make them wait even longer in little tiny airless rooms that have been filled with a variety of sick people, one after the other, all day long for years.
• Make sure the room is brightly lit with fluorescent lights and has no comfortable resting place.

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