Doctor, Doctor

As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Doctors are not like outlaws. Doctors bury their mistakes. Outlaws bury their successes.”

 As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Doctors are not like outlaws. Doctors bury their mistakes. Outlaws bury their successes.”

It occurs to me that I have lived too long to be famous.

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, it is indeed a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he’d been dead 30 years.

And if you don’t know who Tom Lehrer is, I have, indeed, lived too long.

But I still expect that whatever good I have done will be interred with Caesar’s bones.

Consider Shelley, Byron, Keats, James Dean, JFK, Martin Luther King, Jesse Woodson James, Billy the Kid, Alexander the Great, Évariste Galois, and Ronald Reagan.

No, Reagan didn’t die young.

He merely should have; proof that longevity is no friend of humankind.

Note what a friend death has been to Marilyn Monroe.

Now, consider the American health care network and its self-immolating success at the art of extortion.

Oh? What would you call someone who told you that you would die painfully and humiliatingly unless you paid them a great deal of money, even to the choice of bankruptcy or death?

You would probably call him, “doctor.”

Or an insurance agent.

Now consider this: What do you call the person who graduates last in his medical school class?

Doctor.

And if he’s willing to work cheaply enough, you call him an HMO-approved physician.

Still, the system has been extraordinarily good at keeping people alive.

With assistance from cleaner water and air, sewer systems located at greater distances from our homes, extermination and exclusion of vermin, regular bathing and foodstuffs that have enjoyed the benefits of refrigeration.

Has it occurred to anyone else that medical science takes far too much credit for our increased longevity, considering that the profession survived for centuries on the phenomena that most sick people simply get well on their own, regardless of bleeding, exorcism, and purging?

But we are going broke at the expense of medical science, or at least so actuarial medical science would have you believe, because we are living longer.

So some of you people are just going to have to die sooner so that doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies can continue getting rich.

Any volunteers?

Of course none of that is true of my doctor.

I like my doctor.

Which is why we choose our doctors.

From a list of doctors permitted by our insurance companies.

And we certainly want to be able to choose our own doctors.

With the advice and consent of a bunch of insurance company guys we know nothing about, who certainly have our best interests at heart, rather than just making a lot of money.

Which is why we prefer their judgment over a bunch of public officials that we can vote out of office if we don’t like the way they run our health care.

But I digress.

A reasonable person wouldn’t care whether he likes his doctor.

My doctor, for example, doesn’t know much about politics or baseball or woodworking or gardening.

Which makes him a pretty lousy conversationalist.

All we talk about is what’s wrong with me.

He’s not my friend.

He’s my most personal plumber and electrician; I hired him on the recommendation from a variety of sources that he is very good at what he does, and that he explains in lucid detail what and why he does it in my case.

And neither of us plays golf.