In 1999, when Jack Kevorkian, a doctor of medicine, was imprisoned for life for having medically assisted with 130 suicides in his professional career, not only did he get branded with the alias of Dr. Death, but it also opened a Pandora’s box of questions about how far the boundaries of medicine could be stretched. Just the other day, I visited a relative on life support in a hospital, and found myself face to face with the disturbing realization that there wasn’t really any reason to delay the imminent. Life support seemed like a desperate or maybe even a selfish ruse to keep alive a sense of hope, even as the outcome seemed inevitable.

When my brother and his wife were expecting their first child, they were shell-shocked when the doctor said, “It’ll have to be a C-section!” All the reports, all the tests, all the lab work, everything had been fine down to the last ultra-sound. When his mother-in-law’s third cousin, who also happens to be an attorney at law, remarked that the doctor must be commissioned on the number of C-sections she performs in a given month, or simply, because its quicker to perform that procedure rather than wait the 8 – 16 or more hours a normal delivery may take, that made my brother raise an eyebrow. Similarly, we all know that pharmaceutical companies cut a deal with some private practitioners to prescribe generic brands of drugs that they manufacture. I’m 36 years old and I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve read the news about a surgical instrument having been forgotten in the abdomen of a patient, or the Elm Street nightmare in the world of healthcare, a ‘misdiagnosis’. I only state the self-endured. My cousin, a pancreatic cancer survivor consulted a bunch of physicians, oncologists, radiologists, physical therapists, churches, parishes, and everyone else under God’s open sky, over the course of a gut-wrenching year which nearly took him away from us, all because none of these people of knowledge and of the book were able to diagnose the ailment correctly. In that year, until his disease was accurately diagnosed, he had lost blood cells, 80 kilos of weight or more, and gone from a pleasant-looking chubby fellow to looking like one of the skinny zombies in the Michael Jackson “Thriller” video. If this sounds far-fetched, please note that according to a John Hopkins study published on 2012-09-24, medical misdiagnosis kill 40,500 ICU patients every year. That’s just slightly more than the size of my hometown Mount Pleasant, Michigan. I cannot begin to imagine what would happen if my town vanquished over the course of a year, leaving behind only the ruins of a life that once was.

Prior to the ambitious Obamacare Health Plan trying to make healthcare more universal and health insurance more of an accessible and affordable reality than a myth, anyone that wasn’t able to afford a legitimate healthcare insurance plan might as well have sought out Dr. Kevorkian, because they wouldn’t have been able to get access to comprehensive healthcare. In this era of thumb-scanning and moon roofs, we should have been able to implement enviable healthcare practices across the board. This change of culture, this reform, this uniformity in healthcare across God’s country, seems to us as allusive as a young Elvis might have seemed to his young female fans; they could see him, admire him, attend his concerts, listen to his LP records, but it was only a few of the blessed ones that were fortunate enough to get front row, maybe even catch a touch, or better yet get possession of a memorabilia of the King.

In Germany, they say that whether you are a German citizen or not, whether you have health insurance or not, whether you are a member of a participating medical network or not, whether you are rich or poor, you are entitled to a full course of treatment from diagnosis to care to cure, as long as you happen to be within the geographical boundaries of Germany when you become sick.

There used to be an old angel on our campus at Central, we all called her The Iron Lady. She was 88, frail, and extremely fragile, and yet she would be seen jogging around town with her tiny little steps of high magnitude in minus 20 temperatures over patches of snow all around. I’m sure she was getting healthcare from somewhere that was giving her the stamina to accomplish this impossible feat. The day we make the process of healthcare as easy to define as the above stated German example, healthcare that works for all, that’s the day when all our syndromic surveillance data will begin to come together as tiny little pieces would in a bigger jigsaw puzzle called Life!