“Credentials. The only credentials I have is that I’m the only pilot willing to fly you up there. You don’t like those credentials? Walk.” – The X Files
Biden doesn’t think of those kids as hostages, just a captive audience.
Warning up front: I’ve got family obligations on Thursday that involve traveling late, so I might not have time for any sort of post on Friday. If so, be back in full force on Monday.
The Mrs. went into the hospital last year for “having lungs that were as useful as used party balloons”, which I think was the technical definition. In reality, one doctor said he thought she had Legionnaires’ Disease, which is weird because she never hangs out down at the Legion even though she likes mustard and bologna (one of you will get this joke and really, really laugh)*.
The reality of the care The Mrs. got was that she sat in a bed, they gave her some antibiotics, and then sent her home until her lungs looked less like they were filled with Jim Beam® bottles that had gone through a wood chipper. The care was just fine. Then the bill showed up – for two days in the hospital, the cost was about $16,000, which included a (I kid you not) $2,000 COVID test, which was negative.
But it was $2,000.
No, I don’t dress that way.
Again, the staff was nice, the doctor competent, but the real hero was the antibiotics that The Mrs. took. I don’t recall the line item for those, but I assure you, it wasn’t the food that caused her lungs to allow sweet, sweet, oxygen to once again saturate her hemoglobin. It was the antibiotics. I tried to get her to take my homemade antibiotics made of lead, some of the fuzzy stuff I found in the fridge, and several unlabeled vials of chemicals that were in the house when we moved in.
She turned me down. But $16,000? What’s up there?
Well, liability and gatekeepers. The idea is that every job has some liability associated with it. And courts have ruled that if I own a hospital and hire the neighborhood kid who mows my lawn to do brain surgery, that things might not go well. Well, in 2022, they wouldn’t go so well.
In the past, however, being a doctor was a state of mind. The Mrs. gave me a nickname over 20 years ago: John Wilder, Civil War Surgeon. Most of the operations that the members of my family have had, from splinter extractions to blisters to the occasional tracheotomy using a ballpoint pen and some duct tape and super glue have been performed by me. I got my medical degree in . . . nowhere.
What was Morgan Freeman called before the Civil War? Morgan.
In a real sense, almost everything I’ve done was just a matter of first aid, most not really complicated, and all really easy once I determined that no matter how much the other person is yelling, it is good for them and doesn’t hurt me at all. That last sentence will amuse at least three of you, so at least the jokes are getting broader as we go along.
I would assess, that at current prices, that I’ve done at least $4,349,209 worth of medical work on my family. So, enough to buy two Happy Meals© and a Big Mac©. Some of it was especially hilarious, like the time Pugsley (then aged three) slid sideways along a wooden bleacher at a wrestling tournament and ended up with three cords of splinters in his butt. Actual conversation from the bathroom while we were in the handicapped stall (the bathroom was filled with people): “Listen, hold still,” (Pugsley screams as I pluck a four-inch-long splinter out of his butt) “It won’t take long if you stop fighting.”
I did like the comfy chair very much, though.
But if anything goes remotely wrong, my family can’t sue me. When anything goes wrong at a doctor’s office, they can get sued. So an entire labyrinth of credentials has been created. This does two things: it makes sure that doctors have achieved a set credential, and it also assures that doctors are in short supply, and thus their cost is huge.
And that’s the basis of credentialism. From doing hair to doing nails to being a cop or a firefighter or . . . a zillion other professions, there are a myriad of professional credentials required. Heck, there are even credentials required to embalm dead people, and it’s not like they can lose a patient.
Credentialism makes sure that every person involved in every chain has a string of credentials a mile long. I’ve been through lots of training courses where I didn’t learn anything, and (in some cases) an “eight hour course” involves a lot (I mean a loooooooooooot) of breaks.
The credentials are required, of course, so that the company doesn’t lose a multi-million dollar lawsuit, even if they don’t have a practical impact on the job. They’re all made so that in a courtroom a person on the stand can say, “yes, I had the eight hour training on not shoving a cotton swab so far into my ear that I could feel my brain”.
Also, a colon can completely change the meaning of a sentence: “Wilder ate his friend’s sandwich,” vs. “Wilder’s colon ate his friend’s sandwich.” See? It’s the small things.
Certainly, there are professions that require more training. The bridge disaster in Florida shows that people should have training when dozens of people can die in an accident. But, whoops! All the people involved did have training. And, yes, I’d prefer not to go to a doctor who got his training at Doctor Bombay’s Surgery School and Meth Laboratory. Yet, Sam Bankman-Fraud was allowed to steal and/or lose billions of dollars based on being weird, something-something crypto, sleeping on a beanbag, and being able to fool Tom Brady.
Maybe he should have had a credential? “Unable to fool Tom Brady”?
But this design of creating every job with a nearly infinite number of credentials is adding billions of dollars in cost to the systems that we depend on, from filling up a car with gasoline (the tank, not covering the passengers) to buying PEZ© at Wal-Mart®. Some of them add a great deal of value, but some just add friction to the system.
Just like $15,890 of The Mrs.’ bill. And I’m not letting her go down to the Legion anymore.
*This is a reference to a song. It’s by “Bubbles” and you can find it if you search for “youtube mustard and bologna bubbles”. Not one you’d want to play if your office is near HR.
