Adopt-a-parasite? The whole health (couldn’t) care (less) system is a parasite on the body politic. At Salon, a doctor lays out the obscenity: (via Suburban Guerilla)

As a resident in a Los Angeles hospital, he tries to get the on-call orthopedic surgeon to come in the middle of the night to treat a five-year-old with a severe broken leg.

When the surgeon, a partner in a private Beverly Hills orthopedic group, returned my call, I was naive enough to expect some further questions about the child’s history, requests for some laboratory work or more X-rays, and instructions on how to prep the operating room. Instead, his first question was: “What’s their insurance?”

Long story short, the surgeon refused to treat for insurance reasons.

In the end, all we could do was give the child morphine (a lot of it) and antibiotics, hoping we could keep him comfortable. Still, every time he moved just a little, he howled in pain. We hoped he wouldn’t lose his leg to some flesh-and-bone-eating infection. And so we waited until morning, when we would ask our teaching attendants to delicately negotiate with the surgical group to please come in and take a look.

Who is to blame?

Whom do we blame? Some would say the surgeon for refusing to play ball. But practically speaking, would you, whatever your job, work for free?

Everyone? No one?

You can blame insurers for their reimbursement games, the American Medical Association for lobbying to maintain the status quo, lawyers for bringing frivolous lawsuits, or drug makers for blocking international imports to keep prices high. The list goes on and on. But in the end, put it all together and it’s a system, a monstrous medical-pharmaceutical-legal-actuarial-industrial complex that’s leaving a lot of people behind.

(All emphases mine.)

Yes, I can blame them. I do blame them. I blame them for putting profits ahead of everything, and standing in the way of health care reform. I blame them for living their comfortable, upright, Dr. Jekyll personal lives in willful blindness to the way their Mr. Hyde professional lives trample on the bodies of children in the street. And the only “but” here is this: but more than that, I blame the politicians for letting them.

Don’t just howl, do something!