Reading In the Doctor's Waiting Room

The hardest reading we do, or try to do, is in the waiting rooms of doctors and hospitals, when the health of our loved ones may be on the line.

Most harrowing is reading about the way our medical system is geared by the big corporations to expand their profits by neglecting the actual care of patients.  It isn't criminal because it's legal, but it symbolic of our national materialistic corruption that it is legal.  Rush Limbaugh and his dittoheads insist that we have the best medical care system in the world, but that just isn't so.

We realize that this isn't so when we look at how our loved ones are being treated, when it then becomes personal.

"I started thinking about health care because of a personal tragedy:  almost five years ago, my father died from a hospital-borne infection he acquired in the intensive care unit of a well-regarded New York hospital. . .But although his death was a deeply personal and unique tragedy for me and my family, my dad was merely one of a hundred thousand Americans who died that year as a result of infections picked up in hospitals.'

"One hundred thousand preventable deaths.  That's more than double the annual number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number murdered, twenty 9/11s.  Each and every year."
--David Goldhill, Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father--And How We Can Fix It.