Idiocy and Ebola... Huffpo Style

So I found myself following a link which promised an educational article about Ebola. Sadly, it turns out the article was at HuffPo, so the chances of learning much fell to zero. Ultimately, the article told me nothing except that some woman thinks protective clothing is hard to wear. That's it. Well, actually, the article also told me again how poorly leftists “reason”... it’s just not natural to them.

I don’t remember the name of the woman who wrote the article and I don’t really care, but she spent several pages whining about how hard it is to put on, wear and then remove the protective suits that hazmat teams wear. None of that was particular shocking. Finally, she came to her conclusion. This is where it got stupid. First, she began her conclusion by claiming that our response to Ebola has “drawn out the true vulnerabilities in the health care system.” Interesting. Up to this point, the article has not addressed this issue in any way, so this conclusion comes from out of the blue and you should take it with a grain of salt.

So what does she tell us? Well, she begins by noting that we spend trillions of dollars on healthcare, but we spend it all wrong. Oh no! See, we don’t spend it on “population health.” Sadly, she never tells us what that means or how we misspend the money. So her point is lost at best.

Next, she proclaims that Ebola “should not be a threat to American citizen.” Heck, I agree! And if we kept it from entering the country, then it wouldn't be. But that's not her point. Instead, she says it shouldn't be a threat because we have clean water, information, a means to educate ourselves, proper hand-washing procedures and protective suits.

Ok, hold the phone. Apparently, our little airhead doesn’t realize that this single case of Ebola came from Africa via a man who lied to get on an airplane. It didn’t spring up in the US because we let our water get dirty, because we failed to educate the population about the safe handling of anything, or even from a dirty American toilet seat. So how does any of the above change what happened, much less cause it? It can't, so she's wrong... again. The only reason Americans are facing a possible Ebola problem is because no one has bothered to contain the disease by quarantining the carriers. Funny how she never mentions that. In fact, see how she continues:

“We have the technology, and we certainly have the money to keep Ebola at bay. What we don’t have is communication. What we don’t have is a health care system that values preventative care...”

“Preventative care”? WTF?! Is she really saying that the reason that two or three Americans have Ebola is not because they were infected by the man from Africa but because our insurance-based system doesn’t pay for people to engage in preventative care to prevent Ebola? Would Ebola screening and mammograms have done anything to change this result? Hardly. Again, she's a moron.

It gets worse:

“... What we don’t have is an equal playing field between nurses and physicians and allied health professionals and patients.”

Huh? How does that matter? This is union bullship and has nothing to do with how the Ebola virus works. The lack of communication that failed in this instance was the CDC failing to provide proper guidance to basically everyone who asked them, and that’s on Obama and his team... not some made up lack of unionization of nurses or socialization of hospital structures. If you want to make that kind of claim, you damn well better have at least a grain of evidence.

She continues blathering:

“What we don’t have is a culture of health where we work symbiotically with one another and with the technology that was created specifically to bridge communication gaps.”

Really? It’s interesting that every doctor I’ve ever visited has worked symbiotically with their nurses and staff. Where isn't this true? Again, the real problem here was the CDC and Team Obama politicizing this issue, not some phantom lack of communication among the hospital staff.

“What we don’t have is the social culture of transparency, what we don’t have is a stopgap against mounting hysteria and hypochondria, what we don’t have is nation[sic] of health literate individuals.”

This is so typical of the left. First, note that her position would be entirely flipped around if Bush had been president. Then she would talk about the failure of the evil Bush Team to protect the poor stupid public. But with Obama in charge, she goes the other way and blames the public for making a big deal about what's been done to them. That's calling blaming the victim. And keep in mind, this woman is herself making a big deal about this. In fact, she’s taken an isolated incident which has affected only a handful of people and would have been far less if the CDC had done their jobs, and she’s using that to recommend an unrelated wholesale restructure of the health care industry. That's called exploitation. That's called generating hysteria.

Also, isn’t the word “hysteria” sexist? The left has made this claim in the past.

Finally, our politicized ditship says the following:

“We don’t even have health-literate professionals. Most doctors are specialists and are well versed only in their field. Ask your orthopedist a general question about your health -- see if they can comfortably answer it.”

Wow. First, every specialist I’ve ever met also has basic medical knowledge. Secondly, it’s so painfully obvious that queen ditship doesn’t understand the concept of specialization. Specialization is a way to improve the breadth and depth of skills available. By letting people specialize, you let them focus on areas that a GP simply wouldn’t have the time or skill to do. There is nothing at all wrong with this. In fact, only a retard would say that a cancer doctor must also know how to perform plastic surgery or set bones or handle pediatric indigestion. Humans specialize so that everyone can cover manageable areas and together create a much stronger healthcare system, a system that covers more areas and in greater depth than would be possible without specialization... every field does this. A system that didn’t have specialization is a system that wastes training, wastes skills, and results in lower quality service. And pointing at a plastic surgeon and saying, “He’s not skilled at fighting Ebola” is as stupid as pointing at a waiter and saying, “He’s not skilled at writing computer code!” But ditship doesn’t realize that because her mind is weak and politicized and she's anti-doctor.

And you know what? Even if she was right about any of this, and she isn't, the cost of changing all of this is astronomical compared to quarantining the 2-3 people with the disease... "quarantine" is a word she never uses, by the way. Think about it. Putting 3 people in a hospital isolation ward for a month will cost a fraction of the trillions it would cost to remake the system as she wants it... and which changes aren't in any way justified by this Ebola event.

Sadly, articles like this will continue to get the mouth-breathers at Huffpo to rail against the parts of the healthcare system that work while hypocritically excusing the failures of their God Obama and his politicized, incompetent CDC team. Leftists suck.

Thoughts?