Category: Politics, Religion & Money

The Frontline/NPR documentary The Healthcare Divide is of personal interest, because of my 36 years in hospital information systems — including work done at, and for, facilities and organizations featured in this report.

The coverage is focused on Safety Net Hospitals. There is no mention rural Critical Access Hospitals. These also serve as safety nets, and have the same problems, but they are much smaller and, by definition, there is no local competition. After watching the documentary I checked a discussion on C-SPAN.

In 10th grade American History class, 50 years ago (!), we had a discussion about determining fact vs. fiction. One of the kids said he’d heard there was a miracle carburetor. It got incredibly good mileage, but the oil companies and auto manufacturers were keeping it a secret. There was, and is, plenty of justification for doubting the integrity of oil and car companies, but my classmate’s claim reminded me of the “Paul is dead” hoax from a year earlier.

My family had visited the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, MA. A featured exhibit at the time, and of greatest interest to me, was Hitler’s Mercedes convertible touring car. It had mechanical fuel injection, and learning about that made the existence of a “miracle carburetor” seem very unlikely to me.

So here we are today, with people continuing to be sucked in by obvious hoaxes. But unlike Paul is dead or the claim of a miracle carburetor, or even the JFK conspiracy theories, they aren’t harmless. They are malicious lies that can hurt people very directly and personally, as this Associated Press article explains.

Once again I have praise for The Premonition, by Michael Lewis. It’s a story of unwavering individual competence in the face of systemic incompetence.

Lewis shows how the pandemic revealed the inefficiencies of both the private and public sectors. If there’s an overarching theme, it’s that the CDC no longer does it job. Trump was the final blow to a once-great organization that began to decline 40 years ago, with Reagan and the AIDS crisis.

Whenever Michael Lewis has a new book out, I buy it immediately. His last book turned out to be an unintended prequel to his latest book. The Fifth Risk explained, in unsettling detail, how Donald Trump undermined, and even dismantled, the federal government’s various science-related agencies. The Premonition covers the risk made real, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The CDC completely failed to do its job, and the blame is entirely on Trump.

It’s interesting that Lewis refers to the real people he features as being “characters.”

A discussion on NPR’s The Pulse of the imagined condition suffered by Charles McGill, played by Michael McKean in Better Call Saul.