From the indispensable Joe Bageant:
“Dottie is doping out the Romney [WV] medical establishment for me: ‘These Indians or Pakis or whatever they are run the hospital like it was a cheap motel. The place is dirty…. Anyway, I looked up our hospital on www.healthgrades.com. Cost me seven dollars. I learned that damned towel-headed doctor of mine has only four years of college someplace in South America.’
“No doubt you are wincing at the racist term towelhead. But people do talk that way, and if we use it as an excuse not to listen, we rule out listening to half of America. And besides, bad language aside, Second and Third world hack doctors do come to the United States and practice medicine in places like Romney, West Virginia and Winchester, Virginia. I dare any reader in high dudgeon to come on down here and let one of these doctors treat you for your next serious illness.
“Dottie continues, ‘Honest to damned, I think these doctors are here to take out the old and crippled people of this country. Kill ’em off in out-of-the-way places where the public can’t see. They treat us all like they expect us to die and like they expect to make money on us right up to the last minute.’
“Dottie speaks from experience. She used to work at the Winchester hospital, where she often wheeled dying patients in their eighties and nineties to get one last expensive scan before they died. Once she had to take along a nurse, who gave the poor old bastard CPR three times on the way to get a final billable CAT scan out of his insurance. He died minutes later.
—Deer Hunting With Jesus, p. 226
Neither the proposed health care reform, nor opposition to it, is going to change matters for old and sick folks in Romney WV very much, I wager.
