With the COVID-19 pandemic, and the dizzying swirl of rhetoric surrounding its management, healthcare has certainly been front and center in our media intake. The wearing of masks, vaccinations, and other topics labeled as healthcare present as legitimate each day but are we really talking about the same thing?
As Managed Care has been teaching us in recent years, having healthcare insurance is not the same as having Health care. The use of the word Health in describing business arrangements is pure marketing. When healthcare shifted from a doctor-patient relationship to an insurance coverage question, we walked away from what the whole thing was about.
We don’t talk about people anymore. We talk numbers.
Arguing With the Screen
The best Real World preparation class I ever took in college was Logic. The class combined basic math with expressed ideas. In the same way that 2 + 2 equals 4, arguments that legitimately support an idea follow appropriately organized thinking. If the presented arguments don’t logically support the idea, then it is not a valid idea as presented.
We all likely see commercials in which a product is endorsed by a celebrity. Is a movie actor singing the praises of car entertaining? Certainly.
Does the endorsement mean anything? Only that the actor was paid to sell it.
It’s like a preschool teacher endorsing investment strategies for the stock market. Well intended ideas perhaps but the source is not qualified to advise on the subject.
This is why I have developed the sometimes embarrassing habit of arguing with television commercials. Out loud.
When a pharmaceutical commercial comes on trying to get people to get their doctor to prescribe medications that they may or may not need, I get irked. Partly because treating physicians are best qualified to prescribe and pretty scenes of people running through meadows in the sunshine has absolutely nothing to do with the medication advertised. Then the commercial gets to the list of know side-effects. When death is one of the first listed, I keep wondering who wants to sign up for this?
The COVID Healthcare Show
Snake oil has been for sale for generations. I was not overly surprised when the bad players showed up in force at the start of the pandemic. What surprised me was the appropriation of political and public health leadership to sell their wares.
Suddenly everyone near a public forum was an amateur epidemiologist. (Listening to someone with an academic background in English expound on their prognosis for the virus in the U.S. population is a surreal experience.) Desired conclusions were built first, then supporting evidence added. Scientific data is cherry-picked so that only topics that support the conclusions is used. Information not supporting a given conclusion is dismissed or called names to invalidate the information.
Politics-agnostic Science and scientists were the first casualties of the public forum on COVID-19. I really miss them too.
Science starts with the evidence, then draws conclusions. Not the other way around. New evidence is gathered, conclusions get re-examined, and conclusions become revised as appropriate.
Deficiencies Sell
Only two days left! Don’t miss the 24-hour sale! Going fast!
When marketed with a sense of urgency, sales improve. It’s an old strategy – and one used with great effect in this pandemic.
We started with a legitimate threat and concern but it has been devolving to supporting other narratives. We instituted limitations on civil liberties in order to avoid overwhelming our emergency healthcare facilities. A noble cause, certainly but are we still taking about that concern? I’m no longer sure.
My BS detector has been getting quite the workout this last year and I can no longer say that the people running civil operations have our (we, the people) best interests in mind anymore. The way so many leaders continue to exert power over people for reasons that are not logically supported, my skepticism grows.
I hope you have questions too.
To be scientifically literate is to empower yourself to know when someone else is full of shit.
― Neil deGrasse Tyson
You must be logged in to post a comment.