health

The successor to “security theater” is here!

COVID-19 has reawakened America’s spirit of misdirected anxiety, inspiring businesses and families to obsess over risk-reduction rituals that make us feel safer but don’t actually do much to reduce risk—even as more dangerous activities are still allowed. This is hygiene theater.

Source: The Scourge of Hygiene Theater – The Atlantic

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Hospitals giveth, Hospitals taketh.

According to Alan A., the nurse generally handles three or four patients at a time. That would mean Sloan-Kettering is billing more than $1,200 an hour for that nurse. When I asked Paul Nelson, Sloan-Kettering’s director of financial planning, about the $414-per-hour charge, he explained that 15% of these charges is meant to cover overhead and indirect expenses, 20% is meant to be profit that will cover discounts for Medicare or Medicaid patients, and 65% covers direct expenses. That would still leave the nurse’s time being valued at about $800 an hour (65% of $1,200), again assuming that just three patients were billed for the same hour at $414 each. Pressed on that, Nelson conceded that the profit is higher and is meant to cover other hospital costs like research and capital equipment.

I don’t know any nurses who get paid US$800 an hour. Hell, I don’t know any nurses who get paid even US$50 an hour. An acquaintance works 12 hour shifts at a nursing home and at the end of the day gets paid about US$10 an hour by her own reckoning. She gets yelled at, bit on, pissed on. Her employer constantly threatens her with unemployment to obtain free labor. She doesn’t have any satisfaction about her job or herself at the end of the day.

I’ve gotten paid the same amount per hour washing dishes and I’ve gotten the satisfaction of hearing people say “these are the cleanest dishes I’ve ever seen at a restaurant.”

In Mexico we’ve got some price controls implemented so the most egregious overcharging doesn’t happen… but then again, most people would prefer spending more money than they can than to go to a state hospital managed by the IMSS, where mothers give birth on the bathroom floor and you can spend 12 hours sitting in the waiting room before a general practice doctor will even bother to tell you to go home.

I’m now wondering how long until the IMSS is dismembered and the pieces sold. Millions will instantly be unable to afford any kind of emergency healthcare and most types of outpatient care; the same thing that’s happened in the US will happen in Mexico. It will happen by design too.

You can go to the hospital, but you can never leave it behind. The sticker shock at the bills will prevent any kind of health recovery, not matter how many drugs they pump into you.

Then again, it’s by design. A hospital without consumers makes no profit.

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us | TIME.com.

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Link: You walk wrong

It took 4 million years of evolution to perfect the human foot. But we’re wrecking it with every step we take.

Go read it. It will explain a lot of things about lots of little things your body does as you get older.

Then Matthews sits splay-legged in front of me, puts her hand on my ankle, and asks me to move my talus bone. Weirdly, I’m able to do this. She explains that, when we don’t use our feet properly, our muscles have to strain to compensate—not just in our feet but in our whole body. She asks me to lift the front of my foot, which I also do. She then replants my foot and asks me to “trust my bones to hold me up.”

And I have to tell you, in that brief moment, it felt like I had never stood up properly on my own two feet before in my entire life.

Now I realize noesh has mostly gotten it right. I need a pair of converses since the real deal is out of my reach and — let’s admit it — Tijuana is definitely not a good place to be walking around barefoot.

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