mahiwaga

Prior to Medicare and Medicaid and before employee-provided health insurance, health care was a luxury only the wealthy could afford, and most diseases and all cases of severe trauma were completely untreatable. I’m not sure why people think the era before the advent of antibiotics, modern emergency rooms, and positive-pressure ventilation was all that great.

A big reason why health care has become so highly regulated both by the government and by the private sector (the Joint Commission is a private non-profit) was because there were a lot of unscrupulous health care professionals back in the day robbing patients blind with “cures” that were useless or even actively harmful, at the while effectively threatening them with death if they didn’t pay. To me, they sound more like the bad old days.

Voting Libertarian? I hope you or your kids never get sick • 2016 Aug 3 • Jen Gunter, M.D.

Assuming we avert the Trumpocalypse and manage to remain a democratic republic (at least for the rest of my life), I imagine Democrats of the future will talk about Obama the same way we talk about FDR and the same way that Republicans talk about Reagan.