Dr. Mitchell Gershten of Paonia had a letter to the editor in the Daily Camera last Saturday certain to have set atwitter the heart of every oil company hater in Boulder County.
The letter, which appeared under the headline “Enough!” deserves to be quoted in full:
“It is long past time to hold polluters responsible for their failures. The public is time and again asked to shoulder the burden of toxic spills occurring as a result of carelessness, ignorance, shoddy workmanship or cutting of corners in service of the bottom line. Oceans, rivers, streams, lands and air are routinely fouled with toxic chemistry and for too long, American citizens have been asked to socialize the costs of corporate pollution while oil and gas companies privatize the profits. Enough.
“How many more blowouts in the Gulf, spills into Yellowstone River, or tank roll-overs into Parachute Creek must we endure? How much more benzene in our water, or methane in our air must we accept to support the illusion of a sustainable economy? No more. Enough.
“It is well past time to put some teeth into the law and into enforcement of the law. It is time to assess polluting companies with fines that have real sting and which will be noticed by shareholders who might just demand better performance and greater accountability. It is time to revoke the corporate charters of companies who fail to protect the public’s assets. It is time for petroleum extraction and transport companies to do things properly, 100 percent of the time. Period. No exceptions. If they cannot or will not, they must be dissolved.”
Yes! Splendid idea!
But why stop with oil companies?
There is another U.S. industry raking in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits annually while killing hundreds of thousands of Americans — the health care industry.
How many people does the health care industry kill every year? Between 210,000 and 440,000, according to a study published in the Journal of Patient Safety in 2013. And that’s just in hospitals. It doesn’t include errors that occur in doctors’ offices and elsewhere in the health care system.
That makes “preventable medical errors” the third leading cause of death in the United States (after heart disease and cancer). Moreover, the study said the number of patients who experience serious harm due to preventable medical error but survive could be 10 to 20 times more.
Enough!
To paraphrase Dr. Gershten, it is well past time to put some teeth into the law and into enforcement of the law regarding medical malpractice and negligence. It is time to revoke the licenses of mal-practicing doctors and the corporate charters of hospitals and medical practices who fail to protect the public’s health. It is time for hospitals, doctors and health care workers “to do things properly, 100 percent of the time. Period. No exceptions. If they cannot or will not, they must be dissolved.”
Of course, there is a small problem with attempting to apply Dr. Gershten’s standards for regulating the oil and gas industry — do things properly 100 percent of the time, period, no exceptions or have your business dissolved — to the health care industry, which makes 440,000 fatal mistakes a year: Before too long most of the hospitals in the U.S. would be out of business and a huge number of doctors would have had their licenses pulled. The wait time to be admitted to one of the few remaining hospitals or to see one of the few surviving doctors would be measured in years. Most people wouldn’t even bother to get on the list. The cost of medical care — and medical insurance — would price people out of the market. New hospital corporations wouldn’t spring up to take the place of the old, because no one would invest in a business whose survival depended on an impossible-to-achieve level of performance.
And the American death rate would soar, of course.
It’s the same with the oil and gas industry. Apply the Gershten standard — do things properly 100 percent of the time, period, no exceptions or have your business dissolved — to oil and gas production and transportation and before long most of the country’s oil and gas corporations, including the ones who import foreign oil, will be out of business and what was left of the industry would be collapsing. The price of oil and natural gas would soar. Lots of things we take for granted would dis appear or turn into luxuries — like driving to the grocery store and finding groceries there. Much of the population wouldn’t be able to get to work or live in an auto-dependent suburban sub-division. And so on.
What Dr. Gershten is doing is demanding a level of perfection from the oil and gas industry that no human enterprise, including his own, can achieve — and insisting that if the industry can’t deliver that level of perfection it should be destroyed. It’s the same sleezy, dishonest strategy greens used with great success to derail the U.S. nuclear power industry.
Well it doesn’t matter if you are in the oil business or the health care business. Mistakes will be made. Corners will be cut. Shit will happen. Because human beings are involved. Yeah, roughnecks screw up and make a mess of things from time to time. So do doctors.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
