Reform? We Need a Revolution

Diane McWhorter’s experience with a doctor caring for her elderly mother has her hoping for more than health care reform. “Socialized medicine, hell,” she writes on DoubleX. “How about a cultural revolution?” Her mom’s doctor, due for a vacation, dumped her on a “hospitalist” after he diagnosed a “dangerous build-up of calcium” caused by prescription medicine. But hey, the doctor said: your mom has “already lived past her life expectancy.”

When McWhorter followed up with the annoyed doc, he said “I can tell you why” she got sick. “But I don’t need to tell you why.” When she pleaded with him, he told her variously that she could take care of her mother herself, wondered if she had a job, and complained about federal agents probing the hospital’s privacy policies. “If you’ve got a problem, write your congressman,” he concluded. “Joke or no, he gave me an idea,” McWhorter writes. “I will continue to call up people who don’t especially want to talk to me and seek answers to the urgent questions of the day." (More health care reform stories.)