The Monster of American “Healthcare”
By Don Jeffries, I Protest
I was raised by much older, chronically sick parents. I saw far too much of hospitals as a youngster. My father was a hospital patient as often as he was at home with his family. For instance, as a seven year old rock and roll fanatic, I had to watch the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show on a television in the hospital lobby.
Every time my father underwent his latest surgery, he came out the worse for the wear. They never made him better. They never healed him. But they made a lot of money off of him. My mother was hospitalized several times during my youth as well. Again, while she was never as sickly as my father, they never improved her health, either. The same kind of hospital that has killed so many almost killed my sister at age thirty. They gave her the Last Rites of the Catholic Church, and she almost left six small children behind. Miraculously, she pulled through, only to be abused by them repeatedly decades later. She is in constant pain, and has never really recovered from a broken hip eight years ago. The doctors just shrug in their patented manner. What do you want us to do? Heal you or something? Healing is apparently for faith healers and witch doctors. I’m not sure that witch doctors aren’t superior to allopathic medicine.
I could share stories that you wouldn’t believe, just from my own personal experience. How they almost killed my father once when he underwent an incredibly simple surgery for a deviated septum. How they put the metal pin in wrong when he broke his hip, causing him excruciating pain and another unnecessary surgery. How the nurses took so long to bring my niece Denise, who has Down Syndrome, a bedpan that she fell and reinjured her broken hip. And, of course, you all know about how they killed my brother Ricky with their hospital COVID protocol. Is it any wonder that I have done everything I could to avoid doctors and the medical profession in general? Just give me another vitamin, please. I hear others talk glowingly about the treatment they received, or the wondrous accomplishments of their doctors, and I simply cannot believe it. I have seen nothing but the worst in them my entire life.
When I worked in a hospital, and interacted with nurses regularly, I heard patients screaming from their rooms for help, in vain. One nurse said, with a smile on her face, that she wished a particular patient would hurry up and die. A pediatric nurse joked to an orderly bringing a child to surgery, “Tell them not to try too hard. We are already full as it is.” I saw security called on an elderly mother who was so understandably grieved over her daughter’s death that she wasn’t leaving promptly enough. Her daughter’s dead body was visible in the ICU bed. The woman tried to explain that she had no one to pick her up. The nurses didn’t care. Security didn’t care. The system doesn’t care. You’re a piece of meat to them, to be carved into and exploited for all the money you have. I still feel guilty that I didn’t have the courage to chew out those nurses for treating that poor woman like that. I was too afraid of losing my job.
All this is on my mind because of what my friend Chris Graves experienced recently at Boston Medical Center. I think that facility might have been the setting for one of those laughably unrealistic medical shows on television. Trust me, there are no Marcus Welbys or Dr. Kildares out there. Chris was in a very serious one car accident on December 1. He is very fortunate to have survived, as you can see from the photo below. He doesn’t remember anything about the accident, except that he ran into a telephone pole. The state is expecting him to pay to replace it. Since he could only afford the required liability insurance, his totaled car won’t be replaced. He was taken to the Boston Medical Center, a supposedly esteemed part of our impossibly magnificent Medical Industrial Complex. That is where the trouble really began. Chris was just as lucky to survive their “care.”
When Chris first called me from the hospital, he had no idea where his wallet, his cell phone, or his eyeglasses were. Naturally, neither did the hospital. Despite him telling them that he couldn’t really see without his glasses, no one at BMC was motivated to simply ask him for the doctor’s name, and contact him about sending a new pair of prescription lenses. So Chris sat there in that hospital, basically blind as a bat, until a couple of Good Samaritans sent him pairs of reading glasses. As he told me, he could at least kind of see the TV after that, and make out the faces of his nurses. Good Samaritans also sent him two new cell phones. These were all people who know of Chris from his own podcasts, or found out about his situation through my own “I Protest” show. Without them, Chris would have been essentially blind, and without a way to contact anyone. Thanks very much to Harland Stonewall, Mr. Anderson, Jason Barker, Angry Tiger, Melissa Arterburn, Peter Secosh, Raybo, Jenn Rindler, Carlos Rex, Weezy, Russ. Chris is forever grateful to all of you.
Special thanks go to Eric Goodhart, Robin Lee, and Sue Freeman. Eric heard about Chris’s predicament from a listener, and since he lives in Massachusetts, he was kind enough to visit him in the hospital. Eric saw first hand the kind of “care” that Chris was given. Sue is a retired cop that discovered my show through the great David Knight, and volunteered to help. She contacted the Taunton Police Department, and was shocked at how shoddy the police work was. They were as rude and unhelpful to her as the hospital personnel was to everyone who called. Sue knows about my low opinion of law enforcement, and doesn’t seem to hold it against me. If only all cops were like her. Robin is a real angel, and made numerous calls on Chris’s behalf, as well as talking to him regularly, as Sue and Eric did as well. All three left messages for his slippery social worker, who never returned any of their calls.
Having advocated for both my brother and my niece, I know how bad the system is. Bad beyond anyone’s imagination. Bad beyond description. You have be relentlessly persistent with everyone involved in the rotten system. Because neither I, nor anyone else, could speak to the social worker, we couldn’t prompt him to do what he should have done without prompting; start the paperwork, make the phone calls, and get Chris raised to the top of the waiting list for both Social Security Disability and Medicaid. His serious physical injuries included a broken lower back, a fractured arm, fractured ribs, and a shattered eye socket. Because of this, and his inpatient status, he should have been bumped up the list. But the social worker apparently did nothing. And in the meantime, Chris lost his invaluable food stamp benefits, since he’d never gotten the message about updating his pin. Because they didn’t retrieve his phone.
I know from previously advocating for others in facilities, that they are legally obligated to have a safe discharge plan. I told Chris to stress this to everyone he spoke with. While it had worked for me in the past, evidently BMC doesn’t feel it necessary to have a safe discharge plan. At least not for Chris Graves. Chris was summarily thrown out on the street on New Year’s Eve. They wouldn’t even help him put his back brace on. With such injuries, Chris obviously needed to be sent to a rehab center. Instead, he found himself on the very cold streets of Boston, forced to Uber back to a place where he was desperately unhappy. Chris was released without any paperwork. He doesn’t have his own medical records. More incredibly, he was released without seeing a doctor for the past week. Releasing a patient without the personal observation of a doctor? Even in this system, that is incomprehensible.
And now, Chris must face the legal system, which is just as awful, and just as corrupt as the Medical Industrial Complex. Chris was charged with a felony and three misdemeanors. The “felony” was assault with a deadly weapon. What was this deadly weapon, you might ask? An empty water bottle. Yes, the court will actually be wasting taxpayer money on prosecuting someone for throwing an empty water bottle at a family member. What next- capitol punishment for rubbing a nerf ball on someone’s head? The police never even questioned Chris’s sister, who can verify his account. And Chris will have to depend on a public defender to help him avoid jail time. You know, the same public defenders that spend an average of five minutes with their clients. Unless you are wealthy enough to hire an expensive attorney, this is what you get. Just as there are no Marcus Welbys in real life, there are no Perry Masons, either.
Chris Graves exemplifies the kind of people I write and talk about so often. The Invisibles. Chris is a great guy. He’s very intelligent and knowledgeable. He would make some company a great employee. But he was forced to earn what little money he could as a Door Dash driver. With a crack in his windshield that resulted in a rejection sticker from his state inspection. Fortunately, the same brave police officers who harass citizens every day are not exactly Sherlock Holmes’ types. Chris might have driven around with that rejection sticker for a few more years, if the car hadn’t been totaled. If Chris was born into an affluent family, he would be helped by the corrupt system, not punished. Money talks, and the Chris Graves of the world don’t have it. He doesn’t have a single family member in a position to advocate for him. No one, other than Eric, visited him during the month he was hospitalized.
I really don’t know how to help Chris. He is in the clutches of pure evil. He is as unlikely to get a lenient judge as he was to find a caring social worker. The medical profession itself is the third leading cause of death in this country. That’s according to all those fine, upstanding mainstream sources that the “normies” trust. I think it’s a certainty that, after the COVID psyop resulted in both an unknown number of deaths by protocol, and deaths by the warp speed vaccine, the medical profession is now the leading killer of all. Allopathic medicine is a disaster. Slash and burn. Big Pharma. Lots of Big Pharma. That’s their answer to everything. Their FDA raided countless health food stores in the 1980s-1990s. They outlawed Laetrile. You still have to go to Mexico or somewhere even farther away to try chelation and other forms of treatment which have proven effective. They clearly, indisputably, don’t want you to be healthy.
When you look at those commercials advertising various Big Pharma poisons, with their litany of dire side effects speed read by the announcer, or the advertisements for various law firms, who are there to help you fight The Man, and juxtapose that against reality, you cannot become anything other than deeply cynical. Ask your doctor! Tell your doctor! It’s completely ridiculous. If you are experiencing a really unfair legal situation, as seemingly millions of Americans are at this moment, try phoning one of these law firms. I know. I’ve tried. They won’t be interested. They should be fighting each other to take on Chris as a client. If he doesn’t have a malpractice lawsuit, I’m not sure that anyone ever has. What kind of cases do these lawyers accept? Maybe Chris should go to McDonald’s, and spill some hot coffee on himself. Or claim Donald Trump raped him during some unspecific year.
We often hear about “ambulance chasers.” Lawyers who are desperate to get a piece of the financial reward from some victim, dubious or otherwise. But I just don’t see these kinds of attorneys anywhere. None wanted my case when I was fired for helping out a handicapped co-worker, after working for that company for 44 years. None wanted to help when my brother was fired for nodding off at his data entry job, when they had demanded he take medication that would make him drowsy. Usually the best you can hope for is to get something out of a class action lawsuit after waiting several years. After the lawyer’s cut, it won’t amount to much. Or you can be a decidedly unworthy “victim,” like the two Georgia election workers, who were awarded nearly $150 million from the now pathetic Rudy Giuliani. The truly victimized are never compensated. Their stories are unwelcome, and they’re punished like whistleblowers.
This case has all the elements. Every part of this collapsing Banana Republic failed Chris Graves. The social worker failed to recognize he was all alone, with no one to advocate for him. The hospital failed to at the very least obtain his personal effects (wallet, cell phone, eyeglasses) from the accident. Every patient has a bag with his/her/they/them special effects in it. The hospital failed to provide Chris with a safe discharge plan, as they are legally required to. Apparently. Maybe I got it wrong several years ago, but at least that term worked then. They threw him out without any papers, or any doctor personally observing him for the last week he was there. They failed to ensure that he wouldn’t simply collapse somewhere on the street and freeze to death. The police failed to obtain his personal effects and send them to the hospital. And now the court is going to charge him with what must assuredly be the most preposterous “felony” outside of the January 6 “insurrectionists.”
Chris has no income. I’m not even sure he has any medical insurance, but he if does, it won’t cover much of what will be an astronomical hospital bill alone. Now he has no transportation. And they have cut off the water in the trailer where he’s staying. And he is left to his own devices in rehabbing himself. Charles Dickens would have a field day with Chris’s story. Those who want to help him with a donation can contribute to his PayPal at [email protected]. The best way to support Chris is to call the Boston Medical Center’s Patient Advocate Office at 617-414-4970. Tell them you’re outraged, after hearing his case discussed on a national radio show (true- I talked about it on Jeff Rense’s show). If they hear Chris Graves’ name enough, maybe something good will happen. Or if you know an attorney who might actually want to help, please let me know. We need to stand up for each other. Love thy neighbor.
