Last year, there were approximately 17,000 murders in the United States. 17,000 people were brutally removed from life via violent force.
Last year, there were approximately 39,800 highway deaths in the United States. 39,800 people were cut out of mangled automobiles and taken to a morgue.
Those are serious problems. But nobody proposes that we give up our fundamental rights as guaranteed by the Constitution in order to address those problems. Well, there's some who propose, but we, the people, dispose (and quite rightly) such notions rapidly.
Less than 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001. Yet the deaths of a mere 3,000 people have caused a massive erosion of civil liberties (a bipartisan erosion, I might add -- President Obama is no less culpable, given his support of the Bush regime's programs of torture, extraordinary rendition, and spying on Americans) and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans (who of course don't count since Iraqis and Afghans are mere mud peoples and thus not really human, as far as the average American is concerned). And the perpetrator of that mass murder is still on the loose, never brought to justice, while this mass murder is used to justify giving up our fundamental rights and the murders of hundreds of thousands of other people.
Yes, violent death is a tragedy. But I see no reason why the death of a few thousand people in a single act of terrorism should be any more a tragedy, and warrant any more a response or any more of a memorial, than the death of 39,800 people per year in traffic accidents or the death of 17,000 people per year at the hands of violent murderers. Dead is dead, in the end, and the dead care not whether it is Osama bin Laden, or Jeffrey Dahmer, or just some random drunk driver, they are still just as dead in the end.
-- Badtux the Mortality Penguin
Don't forget the thousands that die from mistakes in the hospital.
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Preventable hospital errors cause 195,000 U.S. deaths a year, twice as many as previously believed -
"The equivalent of 390 jumbo jets full of people are dying each year due to preventable, in-hospital medical errors, making this one of the leading killers in the United States," said Samantha Collier; vice president of medical affairs at Health Grades, which conducted the study.
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Who needs terrorists?
Thousand die from mistakes in hospital?
ReplyDeleteHow many people are killed by their doctors each year? When the only thing that the doctor ever listens to in his specialty is the drug pusher from big Pharma. They prescribe based on the gifts and trinkets and meals that their pusher gives them to use any drug for anything to up sales, damn the people. You can actually get a doctor to do something that is against his own self interest by giving him a pricey bottle of scotch whiskey. I worked for doctors for six years.
There should be a data base of drug interactions and cases of drugs causing death by themselves, so that each hospital and clinic or doctors office is required by law to keep track of all medications that a patient is taking. Including OTC drugs. Then check them against a national data base for drug prescriptions for bad interactions.
If the hospital, clinic or doctor still prescribes a med that kills someone, try them for murder. The prisons always need medical help.
If the FDA does not monitor any new drug or OTC drug that causes over 100 deaths, put a compensation clause in that they will be fined not less than 1/2 million dollars by an immediate decrease in their government budget for the annual year,
automatically. Then they might actually do some work.
I have scars on my hands from a VA
doctor that prescribed two separate psychotropic drugs to me.
I checked the Physicians Desk Reference, both had been on the market for over twenty years, both were not listed on the internet as having serious side effects, both warned to protect from the sun. I couldn't reach my drug checker. I left a message on her answering machine and then went to a store about 1 or 2 blocks away, carrying my umbrella.
I was in a drug induced coma for a while, I dimly remember the phone ringing and ringing. Finally, I got it together enough to answer.
It was my drug checker. She told me that I could not take those two at the same time, because they intensified everyone's reaction to sunlight. I was slowly coming to as I was talking to her.
I had the worst case of sunburn that I have ever had in my life.
Fortunately it was only on the backs of my hands. When I was well enough to go to the library and get on the internet, I found that the combinations was considered extremely dangerous and that anyone who took the combination should be warned to strictly stay out of sunlight.
Yeah, I love all of the simpleminded slobs that think the VA is da thing. hey, idiots, those rankings were by some lie for pay guys in, I think, Minnesota. They are cover-your-butt people. Hey, if the VA's so great, why do they have a $1 billion dollar a year reserve for settling malpractices suits?
Me, I bailed, I live in a third world part of a second world nation. I have the best doctors and dentists that I have ever had in my life.
For my VA copays, I can pay for my 6 separate specialists each year. That VA nonsense of you're not critical, we'll schedule you in for six months from now? Hey, my doctors all make house calls, same damn day. Costs me less than $30 per visit.
I never miss a podcast here. They don't simplify stuff.
ReplyDeletetragic. That would be the healthcare mess... a decision is made: I have no health insurance, so I have decided not to see a doctor for this problem. I die.
ReplyDeletepathetic. That is the word used when something shitty happens to people, when there was no decision involved.
Illustration: The kid that runs into the street and gets hit by a car is pathetic. The older sibling that sees the car coming and runs out into the street, pushing their younger sibling out of the way, and gets hit by a car... this is a tragic death.
Of course so many folks don't even understand that now, so tragedy is diluted.
as to your post, and the commenter's, as usual a great brain poke.
fergie the ex-greek-scholarette
Wow , came back to your page unexpetadly , thought it was
ReplyDeleteYahoo News , with that headline ...
a confused w3ski
Sigh. I know that I should stop caring since politics is always ugly and disappointing, but somehow I cannot turn away since I find myself so angry and disappointed by what my supposed “representatives” are doing in congress. The Democrats are acting like abused spouses who are constantly trying to fool themselves into thinking that they will be listened to if they submit to the bullying from the Republican party. As it is, Joe Wilson is practically a hero now for the Republican party. This commentary on The Young Turks is spot on.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....eature=sub
There was no particular need to fold to the Republican party, yet the congressional Democrats kindly did anyway without the Republican party even having to ask them. Who said courtesy was dead in American politics?
It looks like Obama is going to tie us to a plan to force us to buy health insurance and offer subsidies to people who cannot afford the premiums. This will help the Republicans keep demon socialism away and also make sure that insurers have a steady stream of new clients. However, for the average person, this is going to be a system that is even worse then we have now because there would not be anything stopping insurers from jacking up the prices of deductibles and premiums as compensation for the fact that they would not be able to get away with excluding people based on recissions and preexisting conditions. I thought that our current system was bad enough, but the Baucus plan is going to fuck over everybody EVEN MORE.
To add insult to injury, the Republican party is going to use the discontent that this "reform" caused as election ammunition in 2012. This will happen even though it is the Republican party that has been obstructing any meaningful attempt at reform and forced these concessions in the first place. People ARE going to fall for it because of our painfully short memories and attention spans. The Mayans were right. Get out your bumper stickers for the 2012 Palin/Cheney ticket.
I agree and have also posted about that some recently. But if 'they' can keep distracting the monkeys with bullshit like that they can get away with other things.
ReplyDeleteLooking at things from a hard point of view, it's a good thing that many do get knocked off for whatever reasons or this rock would really be over populated.
ReplyDeleteBravo! I'm so sick of this exploitation of 9/11 by the rightwing to make it Militarism Day. On 9/11, I spent the day picking up trash in a park with others in my community. But before heading out, we had to watch some war-profiteer spout nonsense about how the troops in Afghanistan were protecting all of us.
ReplyDeleteWhy don't we ever consider smoking related diseases and deaths when we're doing threat analysis?
ReplyDeletejim