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From Peter Mosko's Cop in the Hood:
I loved the show cops before I was a cop. But as a police officer I learned to dislike it. Party I didn't want to watch work videos when I wasn't working...But even more than that, I don't like watching bad policing. To the outsider, good policing should appear boring. It is only when things go wrong and mistakes are made that policing becomes entertainment.To show that I can relate literally anything to health care, this isn't a bad analogy to the problems in our health system. When you hear folks laud American health care, they're generally talking about the sort of things you'd see on an episode of ER or House: Heroic interventions, remarkable medical technologies, exhilarating 12-hour surgeries that save poor souls who just had a steering wheel smash through their jaw or a bullet rip through their thigh. But a really good health system would be judged on grounds that are considerably more boring. More people would walk places, and eat fruits and vegetables, and receive basic care, and be vaccinated, and receive phone calls reminding them to take the blood sugar medications. It's not that the heroism would vanish -- there will still be car accidents, and cancers -- but the focus would shift towards prevention and management. As a surgeon recently said to me, "Health care has always been played in the red zone with the diseases getting ready to score on you. We use goal line defenses to treat things. We want to move that way back up the field."And speaking of medicine and entertainment, you ever think that Grey's Anatomy might be destroying the future CPR-givers of America?
