Two Medical Mysteries in the News

These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now? -- from an editorial endorsed by Bernie Sanders (See Update below.)

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Should medical care be run by the government? Two clues remain hidden in plain sight after a pack of American Journalists -- a scent-blind breed of bloodhound -- chased down stories about an aging rock musician and a humanitarian catastrophe.

First, it wasn't until I read a John Hinderaker post on Mick Jagger at Power Line that I learned the following:

Wow, you might think. That's impressive! We keep hearing about long delays and antiquated care in the National Health Service, and here Jagger is able to get cutting-edge surgery in a matter of days!

Oops, never mind. Jagger flew to New York for the operation, a fact that his press representatives don't seem eager to emphasize. [links omitted]

To be fair, I don't consume as much news as you might think: I scan headlines from a computer-generated list aggregated from a couple of handfuls of sites most mornings. But still, I have no trouble believing such information would be missing from or buried in most reports. To wit, live (if you can call it that) from Venezuela, comes the following tidbit about the latest Bolivarian Circle of socialist hell:

Things are so bad that, according to the report and other sources, patients who go to the hospital need to bring not only their own food but also medical supplies like syringes and scalpels as well as their own soap and water.

The word "crisis" occurs thirteen times in this article, while the word count for terms starting with social -- like socialist and socialism -- is zero.

You'll have to bring your own in socialist Venezuela. (Image by geudki, via Pixabay, license.)

(Access, a favorite buzzword of American leftists discussing medicine, occurs twice, but with the obvious question of whether Venezuelans have "access to medical care" left unasked.) Instead, you get a peppering of quotes treating the cause like some kind of mystery: "The health crisis began in 2012, two years after the economic crisis began in 2010. But it took a drastic turn for the worse in 2017, and the situation now is even more dismal than researchers expected," and "Despite all the headlines about Venezuela's collapse, researchers were still surprised by the scope of the crisis." With journalists resolutely not connecting the dots of all these mysterious crises, I guess I wouldn't blame the researchers for being surprised.

It is unconscionable for socialism to get the pass it is getting now when conditions have deteriorated in the latest pet project so quickly that even many teenagers should be able to remember when Venezuela was touted as a paradise.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Fixed a formatting error.
4-30-19: Corrected attribution of quote at opening. More here.