78-08-B3

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Foolishness

Transcript The scene is an emergency room in a large midwest metropolitan hospital. An ambulance pulls in to the emergency entrance. Now if you instantly pictured in your mind attendants flinging open the doors, a stretcher being wheeled in and doctors being paged on the loudspeaker, forget it. An elderly woman disembarks under her own power and walks into Emergency to see a doctor about her chronic sinus condition. The doctor treats her and writes three prescriptions, fuming all the while. Ambulance rental is about $40 or $50. It costs $35 just to walk into the emergency room. Then the lady calmly called for an ambulance to take her home. Total bill? Probably $115 to $135. No, she was not an eccentric individual of great wealth. She is on Medicaid. You and I paid the bill. According to the doctor, this should have been an office call - it certainly was not an emergency. Cab fare would have been about three dollars. The doctor says this is not an unusual thing. One man arrived in an ambulance and his ailment was a toothache. Ambulance arrivals get priority so there is no waiting as there might be in the doctor's reception room. Sometimes (if anyone cares enough) they can send the patient home in what's called a medicar - that only costs about half as much as an ambulance. This next item has nothing to do with medicine, except that after you hear it, you might want to take a tranquilizer. Do you remember that our government sometime ago appropriated money to go into the automobile business - well at least for one car? The idea was that Washington would build a safe, non-polluting, economical, low-gas-mileage car to prove the automobile industry could (if they would) produce such cars using existing technology. Well, Secretary of Transportation Brock Adams has unveiled the department's $250,000 ideal car. There was quite a ceremony to show off the re-built Impala. It gets 27-and-a-half miles to the gallon with a Volvo engine mounted crosswise and meets all the long term clean air laws. As for passenger safety it protects them in the event of a 40-mile-an-hour head-on collision and a broadside of 30-miles-an-hour. According to the Secretary and Joan Claybrook, administrator of the National Highway Transportation Safety agency, the government had proven that the automobile industry could achieve all of the federally mandated requirements if it really wanted to. Indeed Ms. Claybrook made a speech to the Economics Club of Detroit claiming the $250,000 car could be produced at roughly present day production costs. But guess what? The magic car has never been tested to see if all those accolades and statistics are true. The California company that did the job for the government says there was no money in the budget for testing. The Secretary is blaming Mrs. Claybrook and Mrs. Claybrook's staff says she was not fully briefed and that her claims were - well - exaggerated. Oh well - at $250,000 it'll look good in the Smithsonian. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.		Details Batch Number 78-08-B3 Production Date 06/05/1978 Book/Page Online PDF Audio Youtube? No
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