Meditations on the Great American Experiment

GREG HENRY, MD Founder and CEO of Medical Practice Risk Assessment, Inc.; past president of ACEP. To my young friends who find my columns uselessly esoteric, I order you to stop reading right now. Last month we were able to provide you with practical insights from three brilliant and accomplished legends in emergency medicine. You have no such luck this month, as it’s just me, greased and ready to kick you in the teeth, at least intellectually. In the dying stages of my column (Oh Henry will conclude at the close of 2016), there are a few issues I need to express. So the unlikely combination of Justice Louis Brandeis, the current Presidential race and the Obama college scoreboard will all get a modicum of comment. Merle Haggard, the Dixie Chicks, Homo Sovieticus and John Paul will all have cameo roles in this piece, depending on how long the cognac holds out. In May, thousands of young people streamed into stadiums and lumbered out with diplomas as college graduates. The young today live in a virtual world of guardedness, seeing both possibility and peril. My generation was more optimistic. We assumed a respected university diploma was what you need to catapult you into both maturity and prosperity. The system worked in those days. Not so now. The Obama Administration for reasons that make no sense to me has given us the “college scoreboard.” It is a government project that provides a large number of young college graduates the job of culling data from every four-year i...
Source: EPMonthly.com - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news