TV Medical Dramas and the Health Care Reform Debate

[Bragi]

A Toronto TV critic raises a quite interesting point: Do some Americans oppose health care reform because they are afraid of losing access to the fantasy health care systems they see in TV medical dramas? As follows:

Today, I put it to you that a central problem in the attempt by President Barack Obama to sell his health-care reform plan to Americans is the proliferation of medical dramas on U.S. network TV. All those medical shows are reassuring fantasies about the brilliance of the U.S. system.

Man, oh man, but American viewers love their hospital shows. Every year, it seems, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox venture back into the hospital/doctor/nurse genre because, well, these medical shows are darn popular. There is always room for a new hit about hospital high jinks.

I also put it to you that most American TV viewers believe that these glossy medical shows serve as advertisements for their medical system. They don't see them as soap operas or as absurd confections designed to titillate. They actually believe them. They need to believe them. In facing possible change, many Americans are, metaphorically speaking, terrified that their medical system will change from the glossy sexiness of ER and Grey's Anatomy to the drab reality of such British shows as Casualty and Doc Martin .

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/more-hospital-high-jinks-and-handsome-fellas/article1297503/

Huh. He may have a point.

[ejpoeta]

1. i know on ER they dealt with uninsured people from time to time and

there was someone who tried to oust them while the doctors finagled a way for them to stay. I never thought about it that way, but it makes sense since most people don't end up in the ER especially if they have insurance... unless they get really sick of course. I never thought of those shows as anything but tv, i guess because i have been in the ER... with my daughter and we had no insurance. that's why we took her to the ER. after holding our breaths and hoping it was nothing first, of course. Though, in all honesty, i wouldn't equate our small town hospital ER with big city ones... we didn't have to wait for hours....

I sure hope true ERs aren't like the tv ones, though... because they sure do sleep around on those shows...

[Warpy]

4. There's remarkably little of that in real life

There's nothing unsexier than a nurse at the end of a shift: exhausted, crabby, frustrated, sweaty, and stinking of urine and vomit. The ER docs are in similar shape but with enough paperwork to keep them occupied for another 4 hours and nobody's going to hang around that long waiting to get lucky.

[BumRushDaShow]

2. ???

There were popular medical dramas like Dr. Kildare (Richard Chamberlain!!!) & Marcus Welby, MD before the U.S. medical system was shot to hell by the Raygun corporatists. IMHO, it's a bit of a silly comparison.

The health system of the past wasn't like what it has gradually become over the last 25 years, with this greed-is-good, for-profit nonsense.

[Ruby the Liberal]

3. While I like House, in what reality does each patient

get treatment by a team of dedicated Doctors who have no other concurrent patients to attend to?