A colleague of mine recently returned from a medical trip to some of the poorest parts of India to help understand how health care is delivered to some of the poorest people in this world. The answer is, it isn't. I heard him discuss his experience the other day. It was fascinating to listen to. India has public health clinics, but none of the natives trust them. They lack the staffing and supplies to be effective. In fact, he discovered many of the physicians only show up for a couple hours a week. The rest of the time they are providing private services for people who can pay under the table. He showed pictures of birthing tables filled with blood, already cleaned and preped for the next delivery. This picture below especially caught my eye. This was a slide showing a wall marked up with a bunch of symbols. This image describes the D.D.T ( dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) that is sprayed in the public hospitals twice a year in an effort to reduce the spread of disease such as malaria and leishmaniasis.
Remember DDT? It's that synthetic pesticide that was banned from the USA in 1972 after a large public outcry about environmental and public health concerns. Fascinating stuff. The poorest people in America are like the middle class anywhere else in this world. How shameful are we. If you want to see poor people, you need to leave America. We don't have poor people in America. Our poorest people, by far, would be considered strongly middle class in any worldy comparison. How do I know that? Because I have never, in eight years as a hospitalist, admitted a single patient to the hospital for starvation and dmitting people to the hospital is what I do for a living. In a country where anyone, anytime, can go to the emergency room and receive all the free meals and healthcare they so desire, they never show up in a state of starvation.
They may be hungry, but they aren't in starvation. There is a huge difference. They come complaining that the cost of cigarettes are too high or that their Medicare wouldn't pay for their toe nail trimming. How telling that is of America's truth. We are not poor. We are just poorer than our neighbors and we don't like it. Poor is going to a country that sanitizes their hospital with DDT. You want poor. Go to India. Now stop complaining and be grateful for what you have.
Remember DDT? It's that synthetic pesticide that was banned from the USA in 1972 after a large public outcry about environmental and public health concerns. Fascinating stuff. The poorest people in America are like the middle class anywhere else in this world. How shameful are we. If you want to see poor people, you need to leave America. We don't have poor people in America. Our poorest people, by far, would be considered strongly middle class in any worldy comparison. How do I know that? Because I have never, in eight years as a hospitalist, admitted a single patient to the hospital for starvation and dmitting people to the hospital is what I do for a living. In a country where anyone, anytime, can go to the emergency room and receive all the free meals and healthcare they so desire, they never show up in a state of starvation.
They may be hungry, but they aren't in starvation. There is a huge difference. They come complaining that the cost of cigarettes are too high or that their Medicare wouldn't pay for their toe nail trimming. How telling that is of America's truth. We are not poor. We are just poorer than our neighbors and we don't like it. Poor is going to a country that sanitizes their hospital with DDT. You want poor. Go to India. Now stop complaining and be grateful for what you have.
