The Worth of a Man

How much is a human worth?

I’m talking dollars and cents.

Every year someone wastes time on a cutesy story about the breakdown of the chemicals that work together to create a person.  The current evaluation is around $4.50.

(Mine is most likely less than that when you take into account my usual and customary aches and pains.)

But like with any product you cannot merely it break down to its elements and expect a fair representation of total worth.

For example, how much does a brick cost?  They generally can be between $2 and $15 a piece.

And yet take a few thousand bricks and you can build a beautiful and unique “Brownstone” in Manhattan and sell it for millions!

So what about the building blocks of our bodies, how much are we really worth?

One place that is constantly called upon to figure that out is the courtroom.

When one of us dies as a result of an accident that might be caused by a company’s negligence attorneys get together to ply their trade.  They seek to place a value on a truncated life in order to compensate loved ones left behind as well as realize a hefty contingency fee in a ‘wrongful death’ lawsuit.

Naturally these numbers are contested by both sides as the residual potential lost in that human life is boiled down to dollars and cents.

But say we are still alive and we wish to know how much we are worth not just to our family but to society in general.

There is a fight that has been going on for at least 14 years in the medical device industry that seems to have a bearing on this issue.  A staple of hospital care has been found lacking in a critical safety measure.  The staple is the simple intravenous tube.

This prolific plastic straw that is routinely used to save a life can when used improperly just as easily take it away.  And when hospitals couple that double edged sword with practitioners on 24 hour shifts or longer the results can be deadly.

A few years ago a pregnant woman first lost her unborn child and then her own life when a nurse accidentally connected a feeding tube intended for her stomach directly to the intravenous line thus sending the deadly liquid into her bloodstream.

Many such errors have caused serious injuries and death over the years and no amount of careful good intentions will stop an unfortunate reoccurrence of such a mistake.

But in 1996 an incredibly simple fix to this age old problem was suggested.  Make intravenous tubes that have different functions incompatible with each other.

In other words a tube used to deliver plasma into the bloodstream will not fit into a bag intended for a different use!

What a great idea!

Disasters averted, everyone is happy!

Well not everyone.

The medical device industry did a quick ‘no-brainer’ type investigation and realized the fix while it would save lives would cost them money.  They mobilized their ‘lobby’ and effectively stalled any changes.

And that’s where we stand today, fifteen years later and counting.

Fifteen years of unnecessary loss of life.

Fifteen years of immoral increased profits.

Want to know the actual cost and reason for that delay?

The new tubes that would save lives cost $13 compared with the old possibly deadly ones at $1.50!

So our lives are not worth the increase of $11.50 according to the medical device industry especially since our broken down parts will only return $4.50.
This makes even less sense when you realize that the industry passes along their costs to the consumer/patient in the form of a thousand percent mark-up!  They could easily get away with charging $150 per inserted tube.

However you have to add the cost to retool the factory and make the different items and send out instructions and train people and make new packaging and oh it’s such hard work, I’m so tired…

Clearly health reform is not necessary in this country.  No oversight is needed to keep American citizens safe from mal-practicing practitioners.

The politicians who advocate repealing the heath reform bill that instead should be bolstered and restored to its original intent are clearly in the pockets of groups such as the medical device lobby.

Allowing impersonal corporations to determine life and death decisions anywhere is wrong but especially in the emergency room where people go as a last resort seeking life saving care.

When corporations decide that it is less costly to defend or pay out a few wrongful death verdicts than to correct the underlying defect causing those deaths government has no choice but to step in.

Hiring lobbyists to bury legislation - $10 million

Not having to retool a plant to save lives - $5 million

Saving that life by spending an additional $11.50 – Priceless!

I believe we’re worth it!

New North Shore LIJ Commercial?

If you live in the New York – New Jersey area you may have seen or heard one of the three (so far) commercials touting the prowess of the doctors at the North Shore L I J Hospital family.

They tug at your heart strings and are meant as part of a self awareness campaign determined to get you to think of them when and if something medically goes wrong with your body.

The ads are effective but not complete.  Toward that end I have a suggestion.

Picture if you will:

The scene is a semi-crowded bar.
There is an early middle-aged man sitting on a stool.  He is leaning on his right elbow and his legs are slightly spread apart revealing a noticeable bulge in his crotch.
The man is slowly looking around at all the women in the room.
Suddenly he spots a rather beautiful busty blonde.
A slight smile spreads across his face.
The camera closes in on his crotch to reveal an increased arousal.

The voice over starts:

“This is my penis.

It’s the penis I used to get upset at when it wet my bed as a child

And it’s the penis I used to spend hours alone with after a new issue of Playboy came out

It's the penis that remembers that night in my chevy with Becky Sue

But it's also the penis that went limp when it found out it had prostate cancer

And it’s the penis I entrusted to the radiologists at North Shore LIJ to take care

And today it’s the penis that thinks of and thanks those doctors every time it stands at attention for a hot woman.”

The camera blurs as he walks out of the bar with the blonde on his arm.  He looks back and winks at the camera.

Fade to NSLIJ logo and out.

No Brainer?

Suppose the worst happened to you and you had to be hospitalized.  

Perhaps you have a terrible illness that requires an extended stay or even worse. 

Now feel your anxiety at the prospect of never again seeing your friends or family.  Feel the fear and isolation; the absolute despair at ending your life on Earth alone. 

That is what may face our Gay and Lesbian brothers and sisters in America in this, the 21st century. 

Naturally your parents or children could visit you but in many cases Gay men and women found themselves estranged from their families as a result of arcane societal taboos. 

Unless you happened to be married and your spouse was of the opposite sex you could not count on having your life partner visit. 

This is changing as President Obama has mandated hospital visitation rights to same sex partners. 

The implementation of this compassionate 'no-brainer' will naturally face tremendous opposition from unfeeling radical groups who do not like anyone other than themselves to be treated as human beings.  The sad part is that many in the opposition's camp are probably gay themselves as has been shown time and again by the so-called religious right and a few homophobic Congressmen. 

In a nation born on the notion 'live and let live' too many feel it's 'let me live and you die' and if gay, die alone.  (WWJD?)

Doctors, Dentists, Insurance Companies, and Hospitals Suck

This is the story both sad and true
Of a lady who likes not a fuss
So giving the Devil his undeserved due
She will hereby remain anonymous

It is almost midnight and the young lady will probably not return home until 3 or 4 am.
This has not been her week.
Five days ago her purse was stolen out of her pocket book in her locked office at her supposedly secure workplace at a Long Island Hospital. Aside from the terrible inconvenience that goes along with such an invasion of personal property and space she now has the unenviable task of stopping and replacing credit cards as well as personal documents. The thirty dollars the bastard stole is truly the least of her worries and one can only hope he uses it to buy an overdose of drugs and die.
Naturally hospital security is tremendously helpful. Sort of like the proverbial teats on a bull.
"File a report and I guess you could make a claim with your insurance company. Have a nice day."
But life goes on and so did she.
Her next encounter with the medical profession was a visit to the dentist. This normally annoying task that many fear like the plague would have been like rolling off a log for our heroin if not for a small sidetrip into the Twilight Zone. Years ago you could sit fairly straight up when you visited the DDS but nowadays it's all about the comfort of the guy in control. So you are basically lying down while he does his dirty work. It was while she was in this position that the dentist decided to drop his little mirror down her throat causing her to gag. In pulling the thing out he bruised her epiglottis, that flap of tissue that sits at the base of the tongue and keeps food from going into the trachea, or windpipe, during swallowing. "No, don't pay me now, we'll submit our bill to your insurance carrier. Have a nice day."
So now, two days later, two days of a sore throat she checks out the good old epiglottis on the web and finds out that if it is scratched it could become inflamed and if that happens it could get infected and if that occurs it could swell and block the airway and you could die. The odds are against this Rube Goldberg scenario but when it is you the odds tend to go up, don't they?
So she is now in the emergency room trying to get past the barrier set up to stop anyone this side of crazy from wanting in, the front desk clerk. And since some scumbag addict has her purse she does not have her insurance card. Those clerks live for this type of situation.
"We can't look at you until we see your insurance is paid up."
Hopefully everything will turn out alright (it did) so she can plan her next step in this week from hell, a trip to a lawyer. Hey, doctors have insurance also.
Have a nice day!