Wednesday, October 22, 2014

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?

21 comments:

  1. Excellent takedown, Andrew!

    There would be far less concern about ebola if the CDC chose to act competently rather than politically correct and as Obama's mouthpiece.
    The CDC and Obama have been caught lying to the public, instead of putting effective protocols in place several months ago.

    I would've thought, before this debacle that the CDC would've had effective responses years ago but it's far worse than I ever expected.

    To make matters worse, the cry for more money as somehow a cause of the CDC's failures is an effort by these idiots to take the focus off their incompetence and dishonesty.
    Especially now that we know what the CDC has been spending our money on.
    Fat lesbians isn't exactly an epidemic and it's definitely not more important than, oh I dunno, actual DISEASES.

    So, rather than fire the head of the CDC and replacing him with someone competent, and who cares about protecting Americans more than being PC Obama creates an ebola czar. I feel so much better now.

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  2. Ben, Thanks! I had a much more positive view of the CDC before this. They always struck me as an apolitical agency whose total concern was health -- with rare political exceptions like their one-time attack on guns. But this has made them look either incompetent or, worse, politically motivated.

    As for the takedown, I just found it hilarious that this woman offered zero reasons for her conclusions, and then went ahead and recommended a total remaking of the US healthcare system based on her political views with a couple unrelated Ebola cases as the justification.

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  3. There was a drunk guy hit by a car while walking down the interstate near my hometown a couple weeks ago. Isn't past time we do something about our crumbling national infrastructure? The NTSB needs to do more to encourage accident preventative driving. Auto makers must work symbiotically with oil refineries to create a more level playing field between drivers and gas stations. The problem is, we don't even have automotive-literate mechanics in our culture because we don't value transparent communication between dealers and road construction workers. Americans shouldn't have to worry about being run over while staggering blind drunk through the dark on a busy thoroughfare, but until we suppress the mounting hysteria over that very problem, bridges are going to keep collapsing during rush hour. Send money.

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  4. tryanmax, LOL! Nicely done! That's exactly the kind of stupid analysis this woman has done. None of her recommendations are connected to the event she's discussing, she never bothers to draw any connections, and she doesn't even explain how the things she wants will help... not that she even really explains what she wants except some nebulous hints of "change" with socialist overtones.

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  5. Andrew,

    The claim that lack of insurance is connected to Ebola hitting Dallas frustrates me especially because there is no connection. This would've happened even if we had universal insurance.

    Side-note: Multiple shootings in Ottawa, CA at Parliament Hill, the War Memorial, and a major mall.

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  6. Kit, Interestingly, she doesn't actually say that, but she certainly implies it. And yeah, where is the connection? If everyone in this country had access to the best hospital on demand for free, this still wouldn't have changed a thing. But then, she doesn't really care because she just wants to push for a remaking of the healthcare system with a single payer and doctors turned into employees like everyone else.

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  7. P.S. On the shooting thing, let me toss this out there.

    There is a headline about three "teenage girls from Denver" who wanted to go to Syria to fight for ISIS. This sounds shocking. Seriously, teenage girls normally are busy worrying about Smiley Virus and Arianna Venti (yes... a Starbucks joke).

    Well, it turns out they are not really American teenagers, they are from Somalia and they live here now. Suddenly, it's not so shocking, is it?

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  8. Unfortunately, conflating current events with pet causes works to convince most people to buy the snake oil. It seems the less sense an argument makes, the more credulous people become to assume the speaker/writer has made a connection the rest of them can't see. Some of it is credentialism: "She has a job in media. She must be smart." But most of it is an innate human urge to scapegoat.

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  9. Blogger ate my post...it was brilliant, btw. Here was the gist -

    Basically, the CDC said "nothing to worry about; go about your business; it could never happen here" [and so did the President even when the CDC was finally sounding the alarm] and failed to prepare our state health officials who in turn prepare local medical facilities in the very scenario that happened in Dallas. And to her point about "...we don’t even have health-literate professionals. Most doctors are specialists and are well versed only in their field." Yeah, one of those specialties is...wait for it...Emergency Medicine where they are VERY literate professionals as well as every nurse. BUT they are not looking for Ebola if they are told "nothing to worry about; go about your business; it could never happen here" Why would they?

    Oh, and I have a solution for the "we can't ban air traffic in or out of Ebola-ridden countries because it would keep aid from getting to them. Seriously? That's like saying we can't stop the traffic on the highway after an accident because the ambulances can't get to the crash site.

    Here's my compromise - Mandatory 21 day quarantine for anyone seeking a visa into the US or returning to the US from the effected Ebola areas 1) before they leave the affected area or 2) before they are allowed to leave the airport at their final destination.

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  10. Oh, and Tryanmax - Your scenario IS brilliant!

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  11. T-Max - Last week, I personally got stung by the "failure of auto makers to work symbiotically with oil refineries to create a more level playing field between drivers and gas stations."

    My rental car ran out of gas on the highway.

    I hate them.

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  12. tryanmax, if you haven't already, I hope you leave that as a comment on the HuffPo's column's feedback section.

    AP, as always, thanks for supplying excellent analysis/takedown! I'll be sure to let my wife's huge web of doctors (due to her many health conditions) just how idiotic they all are for never communicating with each other to make sure one medication they prescribe won't adversely affect something another one currently has her taking. /sarcasm

    If nothing else, though, I'm convinced the author of the column has as big a disconnect with reality as the CDC.

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  13. tryanmax, Sadly, that seems to be true. The less sense the connection makes, the more people just assume there is a solid connection. I don't get it.

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  14. Bev, That's not fair to point out that ER people are themselves specialists! You know that specialists means doctors who earn too much!

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  15. Thanks Eric!

    I have never seen this supposed communications disconnect she's talking about. Every doctor I've ever had has communicated with their staff and nurses. They've communicated with labs and with any specialists they called in or GPs who called them. They communicate with pharmacies. They communicate with patients. Who's left?

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  16. Hysterical comes from the Latin hystericus or of the womb. Years ago it was thought that the womb occasionally made women a little crazy. The treatment was a hysterectomy.

    Today we know this incorrect as women are crazy even without the womb. :)

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  17. "Thanks Eric!

    I have never seen this supposed communications disconnect she's talking about. Every doctor I've ever had has communicated with their staff and nurses. They've communicated with labs and with any specialists they called in or GPs who called them. They communicate with pharmacies. They communicate with patients. Who's left?"

    The bureaRats.

    Bravo Zulu, T-Max!

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  18. Koshcat, LOL! In all seriousness though, I have on many occasions heard feminists screech that "hysterical" is a sexist word meant to demean women by implying that women are emotionally unstable... even when applied to a man.

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