Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I typically refuse to go to medical check ups.  I attempt to avoid ones in Japan if necessary.  But in America, I'm downright afraid of going.  More than that though, I think that the American so-called heatlh "care" system is nothing more than a large fraud.  I see it more as a business than a service to people and I don't think I'm the only person with this viewpoint.

Since my dad passed away, I had some time to think over the whole situation.  I think if the health care system was better in America, he would've had a chance.  However, because he wasn't insured and my family was paying through social security, the doctors provided him with horrible treatment.  We'd frequently receive calls about how my dad would throw up or get sick in the summer.  For god's sake, he was in a nursing home in Southern California and he'd get sick!  That says a lot. 

I'm quite certain if he were someone famous or one of these people who had a ridiculous some of money to pay for his treatment, his stroke would've been treated and he would've done fine.  It's like that movie John Q and the scene where John Q spotted the doctor who was talking to his pals who had better money and thus would receive better personal care.  I have no doubt in my mind that this is a reality.

What's more insulting is that my mother has a $400k medical bill that she obviously will never pay off.  My poor dad died because the stupid hospital and staff couldn't provide proper treatment.  Why should my family owe these people any money for rotten service?  It's one thing if my dad had a gunshot wound through his heart and had been bleeding.  But it seemed that the doctors barely monitored him.

Then I found out that my dad, just before he passed away, had gone to the hospital across the street from his nursing home to be treated for a fever.  Later apparently he died of sickness because, according to the doctors/nurses, "they couldn't find a vein to inject him with medication/whatever."  Excuse me?  You're trained professionals.  You're telling me that with all your experience, you couldn't handle a simple case?  Then the doctors/nurses played it off with (feigned) surprise.  I have no doubt that these people didn't give a crap because they were 1) incompetent; 2) not paid enough to treat my father with proper care.

Here's a message to American medicine:

FUCK YOU!!!!!!

You killed my father, you let him suffer and I'll never forgive you.  You deserve to bear my eternal grudge and a curse that your profession will be driven off the face of this earth due to your unbearable greed and the fact that America's healthcare system is driven by politics rather than sensibility.

People equally deserve the right to the same level of treatment no matter what their economic status.  Medicine and health ought to be a service granted to people in the world on an equitable basis.  Obviously, America does not feel that way and treats it simply as economics and capitalism.  I don't give a rats ass how much you fuckers studied in college or how many late nights and ulcers you got just trying to get into medical school.  While the people in IT have done a superb job in trying to advance the lives of people, I've seen no cure for AIDS, cancer or whatnot.  I just see large numbers attached to medical bills.  Your ancient practices and ways of thinking are what causes the whole politics of medicine.  The only people truly advancing the arts of medicine are those in IT because we are the ones providing the systems, databases, and technologies to make these idiots do their jobs properly.  And they can't even get that right.

My challenge to the true future practitioners of medicine is this: find your equivalent of Open Source and Social Medicine.  What Open Source, social computing, and the internet have done to free IT from the shackles of companies like Microsoft, medicine must also break from their bond of ancient ways of thinking.  Forget forcing students to study useless subjects like evolutionary biology if they're going into medicine just to provide some useless professors' with job security.  Forget the MCAT and elitist mode of entering into medical school.  Forget studying the long, difficult ways of thinking like Organic Chemistry, physics, etc.  Medicine needs their short cuts like the perl/CGI, the HTML, the PHP and Mysql to make their profession useful.

We need revolutionary kids building medical solutions in their homes with nanotechnologies, 3D prototypes, etc.  We need to bring down the barriers to entry to let a new generation of people into the medical profession.  Maybe we need to even outsource medicine oversees since American doctors enjoy being overpaid and thus requiring a threat to their professions to make it more compelling to do a good and qualified job.

In any case, what's available in America is unsatisfactory and unacceptable.  I have no problem flaming the practioners in America and I have no problem receiving their ardur.  They don't deserve an ounce of my respect.  I consider firemen to be real heroes by comparison.  If you want my respect back, do something to change this situation rather than being the greedy, BMW driving, snobs that rob needy people of their money.