Healthcare Crisis And a Harrowing Case

BY LOUIE OVERSTREET

America supposedly has the best care system in the world — but world rankings and harrowing stories tell another story. 

U.S. News and World Report ranked America’s healthcare system 33rd in the world’s top 100, and our per patient cost of $14,775 annually is by far the highest in the world. Taiwan’s single-payer, government-run system is number one in the world. 

Here in America, we have an absolute joke running the Department of Health and Human Services. Secretary Bobby Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vaxxer, so we can expect a return of previously eradicated diseases. And adding insult to injury, he is staffing the various agencies under his purview with personnel that, to paraphrase a hit 1970s song, is little more than clowns to the left of me and jokers to the right. 

And America’s healthcare system is stuck right in the middle. 

Not only are things bad at the top, but it is also the case at the patient care-delivery level. A family friend, Effie, said it was okay to use her name. Effie’s three-day hospital stay reads like an episode from “The Twilight Zone.” 

Effie and Tee (my dear friend who passed a while back), worked hard to obtain a comfortable lifestyle for themselves. In retirement, they carried with them Tee’s outstanding healthcare benefits — so you can imagine Effie’s chagrin over her recent hospital stay. She was placed in a semi-private room — where she had to live out of her suitcase, share a bathroom, and receive hard to understand instructions from a medical team whose accents made it hard for her to grasp what was happening. 

Her blood pressure was elevated when she was discharged. Her prescriptions were sent to the wrong drugstore, and they refused to give her diagnostic results — telling her she would have to download papers from her computer, which assumes an octogenarian would be proficient enough on a computer to retrieve medical records. 

Effie might as well use my twigs and berries herbal-healer, given the state of the healthcare crisis that exists in America run by a court jester, clowns, and jokers.