Worried about terrorism? Worry about the hospital instead
It’s a favorite right-wing meme: the nanny state can’t tell you what to smoke, eat, or drink. If our country was truly founded on the idea of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the nanny state would butt out of telling you what not to smoke, eat, or drink.
Probably as a direct result of that, between 310,000 and 580,000 of us will die this year from smoking cigarettes; another 260,000 to 470,000 of us will finally succumb because of poor diet and sedentary lifestyle; and approximately 85,000 of us will finally drink ourselves to death.
If you’ve lost count, that’s over 1 million US residents who defied common sense and died because of it. I think that’s a shame, but — sigh — there’s just no telling some people. Oh well. That just means more for me and you.
But I digress.
The thing all of us should really worry about is the horrifying possibility that you could end up dead after going to the hospital:
After the person in the mirror, the next most dangerous individual we’re ever likely to encounter is one in a white coat. Something like 200,000 of us will experience “cessation of life” due to medical errors – botched procedures, mis-prescribed drugs and “nosocomial infections”. (The really nasty ones you get from treatment in a hospital or healthcare service unit.)
Got that? You have a much higher chance of being killed by the health care system than by the worst terrorist attack you can think of: a suitcase nuke exploding in somewhere in the US.
Have a nice day.
