Dr. Oz Says Trump Wants You Healthy So You Can Work Till You Die
And isn't that what's really important?
Last week, Donald Trump unveiled his “healthcare plan” that wasn’t really so much a “healthcare plan” as it was a few random ideas, some of which were already a thing. While said “plan” is being roundly criticized, Dr. Oz stopped by Fox Business to explain the true reasoning behind it.
Is it that he cares about Americans and wants them to be healthy? Or that he cares about Americans and doesn’t want us to go broke paying for our healthcare? Ha! Don’t be silly. He just wants to get a year or more of labor out of us all.
“A lot of people watching this segment are thinking ‘Oh, we’re talking about healthcare expenses,’” he said. “This is about the value to the US economy, if we get this right. If we can get the average person watching […] to work one more year in their whole lifetime — just stay in your workplace for one more year — that is worth about $3 trillion to the US GDP.”
“Wow!’ Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo interjected.
“That’s the productivity we would unleash of people feeling they have agency over their future, like they’ve got stuff they want to accomplish with their lives,” Oz explained, like an actual sociopath with no real concern for human life. “If you’re sick, you can’t work. So keep people healthy, they’ll want to work, they’ll want to produce, not just for one year but for many more. But for $3 trillion It’s worth the investment to get that return.”
“I love it!” Bartiromo responded.
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I have questions! First, and most importantly, I need to know what is happening here sartorially. Are they outdoors? Are they indoors in front of screens that make it look like they are outdoors? Dr. Oz is wearing a suit and seems relatively comfortable. Maria Bartiromo is wearing a full-on furry hat, sunglasses, and a coat. One of them has to be uncomfortable here. It doesn’t look like the outside is real, but what do I know? Maybe she’s just super hung over?
Second, where is he getting that number from? He provides no source and I can’t find one anywhere. Did he pull it out of his ass? Did he get it from one of Oprah’s psychic friends? Who among us can tell?
Clearly, he knows his audience. He knows that people watching Fox Business are not going to give a flying shit about human lives unless it hits them in their wallets or gives them an excuse to hate a minority of some kind. Probably the only way one can get them on board with any kind of healthcare or basic human decency is to tell them it will be good for them financially.
However, I will say this. It is economically stupid to do healthcare the way we do it. It is economically stupid for a nation to not take care of its people and to neglect them the way we do. The way we do everything is very stupid and irresponsible, because we think about things in terms of everyone doing what is best for themselves as “rugged individuals” and not what is necessary for our society to function properly. In order to function, we do need to take care of people’s health. We also need people to take care of people’s health and to provide other things we need to live.
For instance, this past Friday. Dr. Oz had some thoughts about the rural doctor shortage.
They were not good thoughts.
“Alabama has no OB-GYNs in many of their counties,” Dr. Oz said during a rural healthcare roundtable with White House officials, “so they're doing something pretty cool. They're actually having robots do ultrasounds on these pregnant moms."
That is not, in fact, “cool” — as many actual OB-GYNs have been happy to let him know. It is very “not cool” that the state went and made abortion illegal, leading to a 21 percent decrease in OB-GYN residency applications. It’s very “not cool” that the state has the fourth-highest maternal mortality in the nation. The least “cool” thing about it is that it is an entirely fixable problem that this country has chosen not to fix.
“We have one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world in the country with the best medicine in the world,” Oz continued, somehow entirely missing his own point. “It’s often stated, people ask is, does healthcare stink in America? Well, they don’t like it. Would you leave America to get healthcare elsewhere? Nobody leaves. We have the best healthcare if you can get to it.”
I can probably think of a few reasons why people in Alabama are not going to Europe for ultrasounds, exactly none of which have anything at all to do with the quality of care.
The reason healthcare is better in other countries is because people have access to it. Because they can afford it (or don’t have to pay for it at all). Because they are not paying thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to give birth. It does not matter how great your healthcare is if no one can “get to it.”
We could have a similar system to Europe. We could make educating doctors and funding residencies a priority, but we choose not to. Because instead of caring that people are healthy and not broke (the stress of which is also harmful to one’s health), the best Oz and friends can do is care about how much capital they can produce and encourage them to eat more steak.
And that does, in fact, “stink.”
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It's true. They tape an ultrasound transducer to a Roomba and let it drive around on the patient. Sometimes the family cat jumps aboard, making for a whimsical video.
Pay no attention to Dr. Oz