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Note To Cheaters: Next Time Hire the Brains
An anonymous reader writes "A man and his accomplice are accused of cheating on a Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) by using a wireless pinhole camera and cellphone to send realtime images of the exam questions to a team of people supplying the 'correct' answers. One problem: the 'answer team' was tricked into the job by being told they were taking a test to qualify them as MCAT tutors. There were several clues the 'tutor exam' was bogus, including the poor quality of the images of the questions. Suspicious, the 'answer team' discovered the real MCAT test was occurring at the same time. They started feeding wrong answers to the accused cheaters and called campus security. The two accused cheaters now face several charges as a result."
Since when does cheating on an exam result in criminal charges????
According to documents filed in provincial court in Richmond, B.C., Josiah Miguel Ruben and Houman Rezazadeh-Azar are each facing six charges including theft, unauthorized use of a computer, using a device to obtain unauthorized service and theft of data.
THESE are the charges? How about "conspiracy to commit murder," or "reckless endangerment?" These are the people who will be our medical doctors?!
Lots tests are based on cramming for the test and lead to people who can pass the test but they are clueless on what the test covers. and for stuff like Cisco and IT / MS tests need to be more open book / open goggle. Now I don't know that much on the Mcat but I think it covers stuff a doctor needs to know and if so they should make a big deal about it.
I think the cheaters probably have a much more rewarding career ahead of them with an organisation such as the CIA or ASIO.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
That was a really elaborate ruse. With that much free time to cook up something like that, you'd think they could ... oh I don't know ... maybe just study for the test?
Or maybe the cheaters were just working up a movie script idea. Do a few months in the slammer, sell the rights, then buy a really good test tutor for next time.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Well, I think there's a bit of a difference. When something's wrong with a computer, there's little harm in the tech googling for the best answer, asking experts, reading manuals... When there's something wrong with a patient, I'd rather have a doc who KNOWS what to do to make sure the patient doesn't need a toe tag before he comes up with a solution.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Lots tests are based on cramming for the test and lead to people who can pass the test but they are clueless on what the test covers.
The tests are designed to be cost-effective, not insightful.
Take this FA as an example: select people that don't think much and the "security" is so much cheaper. As for the persons that do think (graduates or not)... heck, name them hackers and be done with them, they don't make good consumers.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I think the only real crime was duping those people into thinking they were applying for a job, and they certainly got sweet, hilarious revenge.
This was just an admissions exam. Basically a soft wall to keep the real dumb asses out of medical school. Even if they had succeeded in cheating they would've still had to deal with... you know... getting accepted and going through all of medical school.
Their IT skills and organization skills seem good. They might make good remote-location medicine nurses or something.
They don't place jails in penal colonies anymore.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
The only reason they were caught is because those helping weren't in on it. That's a very scary thought, because I'm sure for the right price, this could very well be done.
The real question is what opportunities lie in leveraging an Ender's Game-like approach to solving problems. Obviously cheating on tests is one of the, what about productive approaches?
Indeed, and cramming is a legitimate response if not the desired one. The same goes for all those high value tests, GRE, MCAT, TOEFL, SAT, ACT etc.
I'd personally have no ethical qualms teaching students strategies for maximizing their scores, mainly because that's what everybody else is going and the tests themselves do nothing to discourage it. But, cheating is a completely different matter.
Except this was someone with an arab-sounding name in Canada.
And for some insight about this neck of the woods, the universities in BC are very geared to medical and biology research (particularly UVic and UBC) , even if you live in a rinkydink city away from Vancouver and Victoria, chances are the college will have more than half their spaces dedicated to nursing. In high school we have (only) AP Biology. Pretty much if you live in BC your career track is in medicine by default if you aren't going into trades. If you want to persue anything else, you get no help or encouragement.
But enough of that soapbox rant. We don't even know if that was a Canadian or just an international student. The universities and colleges in BC are hosts to more foreign students than locals. This isn't necessarily bad, but I sure hope the taxpayers aren't paying for this.
...or chemistry, or pharmacy, or anything else dealing with human lives directly or indirectly at the end of the chain:
You don't belong in the profession.
You are going to kill people. No question. Someday you will kill someone with your incompetence.
--
BMO
Honestly - I'd almost like to see some sort of charges/significant fines pressed against these people.
As a guy who endured a poor GPA all through college because of his morals, I'm glad their "tutors" caught on and put the cheaters in their place.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Pre-med students spend their undergraduate days obsessing over that test, learning how to memorize and regurgitate - but not comprehend - information for it. Pre-med students don't care whether they understand the material they take in school, as long as they pass the MCAT and pull the GPA that they need for the med school they want to go to.
This is not the way we should select who our new doctors will be. We are screening for automatons when we should be screening for thinkers. Cheaters like this are exactly what the MCAT is pretty well looking for - people who will do just the right amount of work to pass the test, without bothering to comprehend the information that it is supposed to be testing people on.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
What qualifications are required to get into the military?
Yah, but in many cases, a soldier messing up means missing the target and *not* killing someone. Almost the opposite of fraudulent medicine.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
From TFA: each facing six charges including theft, unauthorized use of a computer, using a device to obtain unauthorized service and theft of data.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Let's face it.
Cheating in college is rampant, it's just that most people are good at it.
Like how you'll study your ass off at a test and get a 30, which was pretty high all things considered, then there's a group of Chinese students that get 100 on it but can't answer even basic questions about the material if you come to them and ask them since they did so.
Or how companies complain that they'll hire an engineer who will have a degree and good GPA but doesn't even have a basic grasp of how their field of engineering works.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The consequences of these tests affect people's careers so cheating is a really big deal.
Licensing organizations take great efforts in maintaining the integrity of their exams because they can get sued if individuals get an unfair advantage/disadvantage. The consequences result in people wrongfully losing their jobs or companies hiring someone unqualified for the position.
3) since he pissed his doctor off, nobody will renew his anti-psychotic medication.
Regardless of their field of expertise, no professional on Earth can be expected to know all the answers off the top of their head. However every professional should be expected to know how to find the answer in a timely manner. Debugging a human is much more difficult than debugging a PC, so for MD's in particular this often includes "reading manuals" or referring the patient to a specialist (ie: "asking experts").
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
We should add "crimes against humanity" or somesuch. Let me see a doctor cure the fractured skull I give him for fucking up my friends health and getting rich from it.
Your rich uncle dies and leaves you $30 million but *only* if you complete medical school by a set date, but he didn't understand the timeline and set the date too soon to be realistic *unless* you connive your entrance *before* you've had time to master the entrance exam.
Of course, you could just walk into any admissions dept. with a lawyer attesting to the legitimacy of the will and the funds behind it, and explain how *very* generous you feel toward your prospective alma mater if the conditions of success were expedited. Young people sometimes take rules too seriously.
A person's response to specific circumstances doesn't always dictate ethics over the long run, although most people who take this for granted discover otherwise.
I'm not sure their medical careers are ruined. Pharmaceutical firms are always on the lookout for highly motivated sales reps capable of banalizing bonhomie with the white smocks on tropical fishing expeditions. They'd probably be good at holding one hand under the deck chair while passing themselves off as rabid fans of any college football team in America the good doctors happen to name.
I'd personally have no ethical qualms teaching students strategies for maximizing their scores,
I would, if teaching them strategies to maximize their score competes on the time available to teach them what is actually needed (among others, how to think! Especially critical thinking seems to be let aside today's "education"; sometimes I feel this is on purpose, until Hanlon's Razor pops into my mind).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Q: What do you call the student who graduates last in class at Med School?
A: Doctor.
Vision with execution is hallucination.
Ha ha I don't think most people are good at it at all, it's easy to catch if/when the professors care:
1. I know someone who's father is a professor in the US, and routinely catches cheaters. The irony is that they are frequently Indian students who are cheating because they need to keep their GPA very good in order to stay, and yet when they are caught.. yeah, they get send home.
2. One of my ex-roommates (Chinese) cheated his way through everything, so he did great on homework, but very poorly on Mid-Terms and Final Exams. (Since they are harder to cheat on than homework, which can just be copied). The professors could have caught him easily if they wanted to.
3. I know one professor at a community college who catches people cheating every other term or so. All he does is look for groups of people who got the same wrong answer. (Not just the same question wrong, but the same answer for that question). If this happens with more than a few questions on a test, it's pretty obvious that there is cheating going on. He always tells me "I just would hope if they were cheating, they would get all the answers right! But they always have a leader who gets them wrong..."
4. More and more schools are using tools like TurnItIn, which compare what you submit to stuff on the internet. This makes it very easy to tell if you simply copy-pasted someone else's report and slapped your name on it - but PEOPLE STILL DO IT!! Unbelievable to me. They just want to be caught, or they are too lazy to even cheat right.
5. A group of students in my MBA class (I know, sad) were caught cheating because when they were all supposed to be taking their tests independently at home online, they happened to show up to the test-taking software all using the same IP address (Because they were all at the same house), which the test program flagged for the professor. (Who then examines the answers and found... statistically unlikely similar patterns between the answers of the people who happened to share the same IP address during the test).
Anyway most of the Chinese people I've met don't actually "cheat" (I mean according to the rules), but they study for the test and only for the test. They prioritize getting a 100 on the test over knowing and understanding the material. They take practice tests like 100 times and coach each other on how to take the test. They get past copies of the test, and lots of prep books (sometimes annotated in Chinese). By the time they take the real test, it's as if they've taken it for the 10th time. This is not unlike people who take SAP Prep courses, but they just do it on the cheap. As with any system of "teaching to the test", you will probably get good test results, but applying the material is a different issue. (Of course some of them actually cheat, but not most of them in my experience).
Most people are better off Googling their symptoms, a GP doctor is pretty much worthless and that knowledge could be accomplished in a two year degree.
Doctor: "So your stomach hurts eh?"
Me: "yes"
Doctor: "You should go see a specialist"
Me: "ya think? asshole."
Do
Well, that does happen, but that's what the technical portion of interviews are for. Get a group of three or four engineers asking simple, rapid-fire questions about the field. You'll find out real quick whether or not your candidate knows their stuff. I swear to God, I've seen "engineers" who couldn't solve a quadratic equation without a calculator, or who thought Ohm's law was V = I/R.
Passing the MCAT does not give one a license to practice medicine, it only allows them to get into medical school.
Cramming and test strategies might be able to move you up a bit, but they still can't match knowledge base on most of these. I also kind of laugh at the idea that the GRE is some kind of high value test - anyone interested in the sciences will pretty much destroy the math section and verbal/writing don't really matter since half the department will be non-native speakers anyway. In the humanities, no one cares what your math score is and if you can't write or have a limited vocabulary, you aren't likely to pursue the subject. The SAT and ACT matter much more for undergrad because you are admitting students that could pursue degrees that require any of the areas they test as prerequisites, but for grad school, you know which of the parts are important and if you aren't going to ace the proper part from knowledge rather than strategy, you have badly misjudged your preparedness. I guess the one possible exception is adjusting to the weirdness of having such a limited word processor in the writing part - removing copy/paste is rather silly as restructuring a paper as it is being written is a very natural thing to do.
While I cannot justify someone who lies to get what they don't deserve, I do have a certain level of respect for those who change the rules. There are individuals who do not 'test well' but are more than capable of practicing.
I would have been appalled by this except for the fact that those dirt bags are dealing with admissions douche bags. I might point out those are the same scum balls that said I wasn't serious when I applied even though I basically blew in excess of 100 grand to try to live out my dream of getting into med school. (True story btw. I went back to school when I was older and to take a chance for once in my life and go for the brass ring. I put in a couple years of my life and the opportunity cost was well north of $100K. I suppose I could also mention the same fellow also said that I didn't know what I was getting into less than 2 weeks after my dad died and yes I was there when he died and yes I helped take care of him in his last few months at home.) I say more power to them.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
It depends on the ailment - for serious cancer treatment, I'd be appalled if the regimen were designed in under an hour without consulting some reference. For trauma surgery sure it is do or patient dies, but what fraction of health care does that represent? Many diagnoses require some type of lab test (again, outside consultation). What the MCAT is trying to do is make sure that you can deal with the terminology to learn enough to build off of as a doctor, no more, no less.
Although I don't entirely agree that MCAT is just testing regurgitation (it's much easier to learn everything on the test if you understand everything than if you just use brute force memorization), I don't agree with your concepts of what's necessary for being a doctor.
Doctors don't need to be "thinkers", most doctors really do need to be automatons based on all the research done by others. Their ability to remember the variety of possible diagnoses and use various data points to determine the most likely one is paramount. Doctors for the most part don't really need to be innovating and thinking in creative ways.
Note: I'm not saying what doctors do isn't useful or hard, I'm just saying that deep critical thinking isn't a a primary necessary skill.
Think about it.
I am more than happy with the govt medical here in Australia, it is excellent.
I feel sorry for those in the US who believed the stream of Republican lies thay are told about socialised medicine. No accountant of beurocrat gets to decide my treatment, only my doctor.
So by all means go on believing the lies you have been told Archer B.
You only get two choices. The doctor who thinks he knows and won't check and the doctor who thinks he knows and will check. And apparently your preference is the doctor who refuses to consult reference material before making a decision.
Learn to love Alaska
The abstract of the article about Canada doesn't say anything about how they corrected for the fact that many more poor Americans wouldn't be good subjects for a clinical trial since they are just not being treated for their health problems (as noted in the UK article: "Just 9 per cent of low income homes say they have unmet care needs, compared to 52 per cent in the U.S. and 24 per cent in Germany.")
Or were you assuming that this selection bias would actually make the results more accurate for someone who regularly reads Slashdot? This, ironically, could very well be the truth....
Oh, and BTW, invariably after anyone posts an article from The Daily Mail, a bevy of UK Slashdotters point out that its standards of journalism aren't exactly stellar. Doesn't necessarily mean the information is wrong, but.... I'd double check it before using it for a serious personal decision.
Let's face it.
Cheating in college is rampant, it's just that most people are good at it.
Like how you'll study your ass off at a test and get a 30, which was pretty high all things considered, then there's a group of Chinese students that get 100 on it but can't answer even basic questions about the material if you come to them and ask them since they did so.
Or how companies complain that they'll hire an engineer who will have a degree and good GPA but doesn't even have a basic grasp of how their field of engineering works.
Not always cheating.... but more broadly: poor grading design. College in general does a really poor job of discovering truly smart/perceptive people that have a deep understanding of their field, no matter what major. What college rewards is doing the homework and memorizing before the tests.
Which is all fine and good, rewarding motivation is how a lot of the world works, but motivation doesn't always last.... and even if it does, the particular kind of motivation that does well in college isn't usually the kind of motivation that does well in the real world. Motivation to discover new knowledge or even apply existing knowledge is much different from motivation to study existing knowledge for 10 hours a day.
Taking my cue from the summary, you might be missing the "brains" axis.
I think that cheating is very high up on the abohorrent list ... because "done right" it grows epic. The media likes to parade the dumb cheaters as a cheap schadenfreude ad-click generator. The smart cheaters blend it in better. So in your examples, the never did want to be a doctor - he just needs his degree to become a senior med insurance adjuster. His knowledge is good enough to know the vocab, and then using power plays he gets to cheat some more, Robin Cook style with his cohort in Pharma.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
since he didn't want to cheat, he had trouble keeping up with the statistics of those who did cheat.
'course, you have some super-students who can put up good numbers the right way.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The MCAT is just part of what it takes to get you in to med school. Ok well and good but you still then have to make it through med school, residency, and all that jazz. I suppose in theory someone could cheat their way all the way through but it is very unlikely. Most likely someone who managed to cheat on their MCAT and get in would fail out.
While the cheaters thought getting in to med school was the hard part, it isn't. It is just a weed out like anything else in university.
Same shit with SAT scores and general university admissions. Getting the SAT score required to get in isn't the hard part, all the rest is the hard part. It is just a weed out so that they don't waste their time on people who really can't handle it.
Next time a "doctor" is about to put you under and saw through your sternum to operate on your heart, ask yourself the same question.
I hope if I get to that point (heart problems run in my family) I've another citizenship besides USA in a country that doesn't try to shoehorn capitalism into medicine.
I realize that the article and not the summary mentions that this occurred in *Richmond, B.C.*, but the icon for this article is a Canadian flag. FYI, I don't think the Canadian system is the shoehorning capitalism type. ;-)
I'd put it more down to what you know at test time doesn't translate to what you know a month later. I've had a conversation with someone from old classes where they couldn't remember a goddamned thing about the subject from a class we'd had together the previous semester. I studied with him, he knew the subject matter plenty at the time.
Admittedly, the class wasn't in either of our majors, but it still seemed strange as hell to me (my recall may not be perfect, but I know some things as a result of every class I took).
As for the piss poor grading techniques, essays have to be an even bigger offender. A lot of classes I took your grade was about 95% how good you were at writing.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Allopathy (as in 'allopathic schools') is a derogatory term used by purveyors of 'alternative' medicine (or quacks) to describe evidence based main stream medicine.
It is true that the Chinese study for the test, and only the test; but, they also cheat at levels that would make an Americans head spin. I could tell many stories; but, they would be dismissed as the anecdotes of teaching in China since 2006. However, enough anecdotes and a trend becomes apparent.
I remember on class that declared that we no longer needed to prepare for a particular national level exam because they had pooled their money and purchased the answers. I was incredulous, I asked them who they had purchased the answers from.
They told me that there was a man near the school gate that had a friend in the testing office and he was selling the answers. They had paid quite a bit of money for this list.
I asked them the obvious question, do you think he is going to be at the gate to give you your money back if those answers turn out to be wrong? Let alone the personal loss that you will suffer if you fail one of your, only, two chances to pass this test?
I then told them that I can sell them a list of randomly selected As', Bs', Cs', and Ds'; but, I I wouldn't because the list would be worthless. Just as worthless as the list they had purchased.
I then went on with the lesson to prepare them for the exam, as if nothing had happened. Several of them stopped coming to class as they no longer need the information. After all, they already had the answers.
You know where this ends; and that is exactly where it did end. The ones who stayed in class, less than a quarter of them, passed the test. The others, who stopped coming to class because they already had the answers, failed.
I tell this story at the beginning of each Sophomore year (the test is in the second half of the Sophomore year). Yet, every year, a tremendous number of students fall for the same scam, and fail the test. Cheating is so deeply ingrained in the culture that they can not see any other way of doing things.
Again, this is just one of so many stories. Further, note, in class the students told the teacher that, and and how, they were going to cheat. The teacher, me reported it, and no one cared. the school would have been perfectly happy if the students had successfully cheated because it would have bumped up their pass rate.
Cheating is not victimless. If an unsuitable candidate gets into medical school and later drops out, the education system will be out a huge amount of money, and if there are student loans which go into default, there will be even more money lost that might be difficult or impossible to recover. That's without even considering the opportunity cost for a better candidate who won't be admitted because the cheater took up a seat.
I do not think that is how thinks work. It will just benefit the ones that have recent experience related to the question. To put an example, an engineer doing work about unscratchable materials will quickly remember the hardness of quartz, while another one who has been working designing a power plant might not remember it just because it is not use.
Speaking for myself, I have not had need to solve a quadratic equation in a long, long time. I think I still remember the method from back at high school, but if THAT is what proves how good an engineer I am.... OTOH, I do not remember how to manually calculate square roots, do that makes me unemployable?
Why can't
I am more than happy with the govt medical here in Australia, it is excellent.
I feel sorry for those in the US who believed the stream of Republican lies thay are told about socialised medicine. No accountant of beurocrat gets to decide my treatment, only my doctor.
So by all means go on believing the lies you have been told Archer B.
The "lies" I have been told have come in the form of raw statistics and "scare" stories about hospital overcrowding (does the Manchester Evening News count as a Republican controlled outfit?). I've also spoken to some of my Canadian friends who have been forced to come to the US for quality, expedient treatment. They could have gotten treatment in Canada, but were unwilling or unable to wait or would get better quality here and they were wiling/able to pay for it.
I am very glad you like you the Australian run system and I sincerely hope you get to keep it. I don't think I've ever heard anything negative about health care in Australia so it must be top notch. Tell ya what... you stay there and keep your top notch government funded/run health care system and I'll stay here and keep my top notch, privately funded health care system. That way, we can both be happy. And when you see people bitching about a gov't run system, you tell to come to America where they can pay for themselves if they so desire and I'll send the people that want that gov't run system to you guys. See, we can all win here. I really don't understand why people would want to take away what I have in order to gain what they could easily obtain by moving to someplace that already has it. As a bonus, I get to keep mine too!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
oblem?????!!!!!
Is ventracle big bit or small 1? Please do needful and revert.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Good luck Googling for the answer when your Cisco router is down. I have never used a vendor supplied documentation CD as heavily as the ones that came with my Cisco gear.
A person who cheats is called a cheat. A cheater is a fucking leopard.
One of my small pleasures in school was foiling cheaters. If I noticed someone cheating by looking at my answers on a multiple choice exam, I would shift all of my answers by one and when I finished I would shift them all back to the correct answer. :)
That's you Dr. Nick isn't it?????
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
The problem is that the tests are defective in that they can be readily gamed. The SATs are particularly notorious for being best predicted by the income bracket of the test taker due to all the prep classes out there. You're not going to do the students any favors by taking the moral high ground here. The tests just don't reward that sort of thing. People take the tests, get their scores and hopefully gain admission to the school of their choice.
Now who lets people take iPhones to a college exam like an SAT exam? Back in the days I took such exams as ACT or SAT, we could not even take a calculator or digital watch with us. Now people can take an iPhone and trick others into answering for them?
Seriously? Why not buy an eBook on the SAT and use that to look up answers, much cheaper and can study it before taking the test.
"Hey belcher, what'd ya get for #31?
"I don't know Moose, someone wrote in 'kiss my grits' for the number for answering the hypothesis." :)
The difference archerB is I care about the fate of those who can't afford your private health care which is claimed to be so good, and dont get reasonable prices for medciation (one regularly hears of americans travelling to Canada to buy medication at reasonable prices) Why do we constantly hear of Doctors being sued in the US for malpractice if the system is so good I wonder.
My point was that governments can and do run very good public health care systems, with great doctors and nurses.
I am sure there are times when the same inadequacies you mention happen in the US health system,
but hey its probably only poor people why should you care?
Remember, your govt spends more pre capita on health care than mine does and still has
no decent free health care, its just a reflection of a greedy and selfish societal attitude in the US of I"m all right stuff you".
You're not going to do the students any favors by taking the moral high ground here.
I consider I've done them a favor in not becoming a teacher - even if, by qualification, I should - and switched career about 20 years ago. If I can't fight this stupidity, at least it is not me to damage them. (like in "First, do no harm"; if you can't, then do nothing)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
"Poor people" get cared for in the US, regardless of their ability to pay. It's not like they are just wheeled out of the hospital and thrown onto the street. Hospitals must treat patients by law. Whoever told you otherwise is lying.
And still, it's easy to get health insurance. Hell even Walmart and McDonald's full time employees get health insurance. Even the old guy on a walker that greets you when you walk into Walmart has full coverage with a $20 copay and premiums that are the exact same as everyone else who works there. It's not hard to get health insurance. Oh, and company offered health insurance can not deny you because of pre-existing conditions. That's another lie I hear so often. (If you try to get health insurance yourself you can be denied, but not on company or group plans.) George W. Bush tried to eliminate that by allowing groups of people to join together and purchase health insurances like large companies do, but the Democrats shot it down because it was proposed by George W. Bush.
And finally, I have lived under socialized health care. In the US Army, I got to experience what it was like to have the government pick my doctor, choose my procedure and how it would be carried out. I still remember the US Army dentist holding me down with his knee on my chest as his pried my wisdom teeth out with pliers. Sure, I couldn't feel what he was doing to my teeth because of the local anesthetic, but I could sure feel the cramp in my neck from trying to hold my head up. See, the doctor didn't care what I though about his bedside manner. It made no difference to him, his career or his life whatsoever. He was going to get paid and move on to his next patient. If I wasn't happy, tough. I had no recourse. I guess I could have filed a complaint with someone, but this is the government we are talking about here. The best I could hope for would be for whoever his superior was to have a talk with him. I would have no satisfaction. I was given the weekend off to heal with a bottle of Vicodin for the soreness in my mouth and neck.
I had my other two wisdom teeth pulled after I left the Army by a civilian dentist. I walked into a clean waiting room, sat on a comfortable couch and watched TV for my five minute wait. I was then given a pill and went into the room with the dentist chair. Next thing I knew, I was done. I woke up on a small bed in a sleeping room by my girlfriend who was there to pick me up. I don't know what the doctor did and I don't care as I don't remember a thing. I was given my prescription for pain pills, a long list of do's and don't's and was even given a couple of courtesy calls throughout the week.
See, there is a dentist on every corner. These guys want me to come back and be THEIR patient. They will do everything they can to make sure I have a pleasant experience... AT THE DENTIST!!!
So, yeah. I've lived through socialized health care and it sucks. Even for the Army wives who had a short list of civilian doctors they could take their kids to said their health plans sucked, so it wasn't just the way they treated soldiers. When the government pays for something, it usually turns to crap, in the US at least.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I just read about the Austalian health care system, Medicare.
There seems to an awful lot of people with private health insurance in Australia. Why is that? If the government pays 100% and gives such good service, why would anyone buy private insurance? And if you care about the fate of the poor who can't afford private insurance who have to wait at the public hospital, why are you not doing anything about? Why is the Australian government not paying for private insurance for the poor? Why should the rich get better coverage than those who can't afford it?
BTW, here in the US, poor people can get Medicaid to pay for their medical expenses.
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