Satire: A new vision for hospital choice, unburdened by fact or skill

    (Bas Slabbers/for NewsWorks

    (Bas Slabbers/for NewsWorks

    I am inspired by the Betsy DeVos confirmation. It has opened my eyes to a whole new career for me! I plan to declare myself a physician and open a charter hospital.

    The following satirical essay is edited slightly from a Feb. 7 Facebook post and reprinted with permission.

    I am inspired by the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as U.S. secretary of education. It has opened my eyes to a whole new career for me!

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    In the true entrepreneurial spirit embraced by Donald Trump and most Republicans, and unencumbered by government regulation, I plan to declare myself a physician and open a charter hospital.

    This will be an alternative choice to the American Medical Association-dominated hospitals strangled by the insistence of the AMA that doctors go to medical school and actually become certified in their specialties. Patients deserve choice. After all, such traditional hospitals are complete failures. Statistics never lie. It is indisputable that 100 percent of the patients seen in these traditional hospitals will eventually die. Sad!

    Hiring will start immediately for prospective physicians, nursing staff, and support personnel. If you’ve always wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon, but did not want to waste time in classes learning the so called “methods” of surgery and other useless classes supposedly relevant to the medical profession, here is your chance to wield the knife! Myself, I’ve always been fascinated by the heart. After all, it’s just a pump. I’ve used pumps. How hard can it be to fix one?

    We will select only the healthiest of patients to admit and will immediately return to traditional hospitals any patients who do not meet our standards of curability, good health, high-quality care when they return home, and most important … the ability to pay.

    Anticipating success in the pilot hospital, to be housed in the closed Pathmark store on Route 1 (They already have meat lockers installed to deal with the unavoidable mistakes every startup makes), I am already thinking about franchising my business model in order to give more choice to patients nationwide. An IPO is in the offing. As a subsidiary to my brick-and-mortar hospitals, I will also offer online courses for the benefit of those clients who would prefer to perform surgery on their loved ones at home.

    I am so looking forward to receiving payments from traditional hospitals in the area to fund my private project. Even though they struggle to have the most modern of diagnostic machines, I’m sure they won’t mind funding my collection of outdated, used medical equipment operated by employees with little or no training, in buildings not designed for medical care. That such payments increase the costs for those remaining in traditional hospitals is neither my problem nor my concern. Patients will be transported to my hospital by traditional ambulances, but any resulting costs will be billed to the appropriate traditional hospital anywhere within 10 miles of my service area. (Even if that 10-mile straight line distance means a 30-mile road trip to cross a river).

    My hospital will be run as a non-profit but I’m figuring my salary should be upwards of seven figures, since I am quite the visionary. I will be able to do this by paying my employees much less than they could earn in a traditional hospital. But don’t miss out on the opportunity to build your wealth. Loosely based on the Betsy DeVos family-owned Amway “this is not a pyramid scheme” Business, you too can rake in the cash merely by “sponsoring” others who will warehouse ever-increasing amounts of medical equipment and supplies in their garages. These “downline distributors” will do this for you so they can someday (usually never, but we don’t need to tell them the success rate) earn their own Diamond Pin and begin to exploit others on their own.

    Your ability to grow will be limited only by your conscience.

    To those friends already criticizing my idea, saying there will be no standards or accountability in my venture, I say, “Phooey.”

    Every one of my brain surgeons will be required to submit a receipt showing they stayed at a Holiday Inn within the five-year period before they decided gray matter was their playground.

    Make Hospitals Great Again! This is going to be bigly!

    John McDonnell lives in Yardley, Pennsylvania.

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