Day 7 - the US Health System sucks!

The US Health System sucks and let me tell you why. 

I have just been to a couple of days of the “Go Big Read” here in Madison.  It is the University of Wisconsin Common Reading Program (yeah I know sounds like remedial reading for the slow ones).  The book this year was “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”.  For all my students you know this person as have worked with her – or at least her cells – HeLa cells of course (go to the back of the room if you didn’t get this).  Anyway it was a bit of an intellectual chinwag about things like informed consent and medical ethics (yawn yawn I here you say).

Stay with me here, it gets more interesting.  Basically the story is Mrs Lacks had cervical cancer in 1950s and while getting radiation treatment the doctors took some cells – it was not part of her treatment and happened without her knowledge – and these cells magically grew in dishes in the lab, a big breakthrough .  They are now used in every lab in the world and have been used in countless medical discoveries, including, ironically, Gardisal, the cervical cancer vaccine.  The question her poverty stricken family ask is “how come we never got no money (how American) and besides we cant afford no doctors”.  As these cells are “immortal” they are also confused as to whether she is still in some way alive.  That is interesting because the way cloned and stem cell technology is going one day we may indeed be able to back a version of Mrs Lacks (although I personally doubt it given how unstable the cells DNA is).

To me the big picture was the fact that for all the good she did medical science her family don’t have decent healthcare.  If this had occurred in Brisbane the family wouldn’t be complaining about lack of healthcare – they would complain about the price of petrol, that bloody Bert Newton and how terrible he was in The Wizard of Oz, Anna Blight, water, and the Lions sucking badly this year.

For those who have never been here there is a vast inequity in the US in terms of health.  “It’s the best system in the world” they cry “if you have the money to afford it” they mutter under a cough.  Do we realise how good our health system really is?  Bloody good!  Not perfect but given what good healthcare costs I think we have it about right.  OK, Raelene wont get her breast enlargement and granny has to wait for her cataracts but Bob is getting his bypass right away (these are all fictional folk OK).

Now as long as we keep the bloody big drug companies from destroying the PBS scheme because that folks is what really keeps health affordable in Australia.