Doctor Obama’s Waiting Room
Monday, August 17th, 2009
I started these sketches in the waiting room at my doctor’s office a while ago, sitting there thinking about what a crisis our nation’s health care system has become.
Later I kept adding to the drawings, so it’s kind of become a series. I’ve been thinking about some of the narratives I’ve heard from people about their experiences with health care, and how it has affected their lives. Some of these stories are from people I know personally, and others I’ve read in the news. I started writing fragments of these different “broken narratives” down in my notebooks, and then adding them to the drawings. One day I heard someone call President Obama “Dr. Obama” and it suddenly occurred to me that, for many people he is kind of like the “doctor” that everyone hopes will be able to heal the “broken system” that we have now.
Whatever one thinks about the healthcare debate, one thing seems certain: the present system is not really working for many of us, and it can’t continue. Whether we manage to come up with a single-payer healthcare plan, or some other public option, or some radical overhaul of the existing setup, something has got to change. It seems like we’re all sitting in the doctor’s office, “waiting for Health Care Reform,” and at the risk of sounding naive, I am hoping that President Obama will turn out to be the “doctor” that can make the necessary changes happen.
