Index

Why Does Anyone Go To Med School?

Looking at the state of the medical profession, I have to ask why anyone goes after an MD any more. You come out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and go into a life of “wage slavery” working for contract places, hospitals or partnerships that beat you harder for more hours just to pay it off. Sure, they pay more than they pay most people, but they have you where they want you, and know it, so it is still chicken feed compared to the debts piled up to get there.

The medical sorts I know went into medicine because they wanted to take care of people. They can’t any more - while medical science and engineering has produced huge numbers of potential improvements in care, the pharmaceutical and insurance companies and what were once non-profit hospitals have taken over the care decisions and make them purely on cost and profitability. The benefits and medical necessity of any given treatment are well down their priority list, with “No” being the first and automatic answer to anything that costs more than a nickel. Profit is the only real priority, and the medical professionals end up wasting more energy fighting to overcome beancounting stupidity than they do taking care of patients.

The situation for medical types has been getting worse and worse ever since Nixon, so it isn’t like what I am saying is new. Now the COVID pandemic and the orange idiot’s incredibly bad failure to respond in any sane fashion have turned the urgent care side of the profession into a hell ground. The suicidal stupidity of the orange cult and the anti-vaxxers is making the situation worse because those idiots are plugging up the medical system with their predictable medical “crises” again as those of us in reality are watching them and wondering why.

With all of this, I have to ask why anyone goes into med school any more. It no longer makes any sense, at least in the U. S. The doctor’s life is far less about the patients and far more about the beancounters, a complete reversal of the days when “First, do no harm” was taken seriously. As OxyContin proved, profitable harm gets pushed, while less profitable things like vaccines have to have government sponsorship to even happen. The GOP has reduced the role of medical regulation to that of a public relations exercise while big Pharma makes the care decisions and writes the care guides, e.g. the DSM that used to be the bible for caring for people with mental illness until the DSM-5 rewrite when the drug salesmen dictated treatment.

I suppose that we should all consider ourselves lucky that there are people willing to go through the rigors of med school to come into this care-giver’s hell that the profiteers have made of the medical system in the U. S. At the same time, we as the citizens of one of the richest nations in the world really should be able to demand at least the care we are blackmailed into paying for, instead of the dregs left after the billionaires take their profit off the top.

Maybe, one of these days, we will get a government that actually cares about the citizens, too. I am no John Lewis or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but I am still allowed to dream. Medical students must be serious dreamers, too, and I guess I feel a little bit sorry for them even as I am very glad they are there.