In the continuing saga of anecdotal evidence that our healthcare system is badly in need of repair, @ayjay offers this story from his son.
Yesterday my son, who works in the Chicago Loop, saw a woman on a bicycle get hit by a car. She wasn’t seriously injured, but she was knocked to the ground, dazed. He ran up to her to see if she was okay and pulled out his phone to call 911 — but she quickly, urgently said, “No! No! I can’t afford to go to the hospital!” And after taking a moment to gather herself, she got to her feet, picked up her damaged bike, and wobbled off.
They do say that the plural of anecdote is data. Of course, with regards to healthcare in this country, we shouldn’t even need the anecdotes to show how terrible the healthcare situation has become. We’ve got mountains of empirical data to do that quite effectively. The human stories do have a power that the faceless data could never convey, though.
