Letter to the Editor #2 11/3

To the Editor,

Articles like Molly Green’s “Vaccinate against swine flu flights of… To the Editor,

Articles like Molly Green’s “Vaccinate against swine flu flights of fancy” are a large part of the rampant medical costs in the United States.

We hear politicians clamor for reform from the bottom up, but no one can point to concrete steps in our path to frugality. Green’s article demonstrates one of the contributing factors to our medical spending explosion.

Green properly silences the doomsayers by presenting the miniscule swine flu death toll against the typical seasonal flu (1,000 vs. 36,000). She then advocates an astonishing “happy medium” between the statistics and the Chicken Littles: vaccinating the entire United States.

After reading her research on the shortage we face on 30 million doses, she must see the sheer impossibility of expanding that program tenfold.

But that is hardly the root of the problem.

Even more frightening is that people are going to their health care providers and demanding that they cover a vaccination for symptoms my mom used to treat with chicken noodle soup and a cold compress.

It’s the flu, except seemingly less dangerous.

Green justifies her fiscal explosion in the popular trend as of late: Spending now means less spending later — in this case, by way of saving on future medical bills.

What Green and many others fail to realize is that unnecessary treatments for overblown “epidemics” do not cut down on medical bills — they are the medical bills.

Ben Denissen

School of Arts and Sciences