How great is it when med students crash your cafe, coloring their research volumes with neon markers and telling their mandatory wacky cadaver stories? It really gives you confidence. It makes you think, “Hey, I’m gonna be sick some day and hungover-looking Dale there in the cap is gonna look into my guts with a critical eye and a head full of ideas and cure what ails me. Whatever Dale decides to do to me is gonna be worth a few hundred thousand dollars— or whatever’s left of grampa’s money!”

I agree with the politicians: we should make choice the heart of any future national health care plan. By which I mean we should be able to choose our doctors before they’re doctors, when they’re still in, like, high school. I want a nice kid who reads literature and is a really good communicator. Someone who doesn’t make jokes about body parts— or at least someone who makes good jokes about body parts. In fact, in place of arranged marriages, Americans could arrange their future medical relationships by choosing the sons and daughters of people they like— or who they think are really good parents— and with their hard-earned tax money pay for those kids to become the doctors that would see them through their twilight years. That’s not socialized medicine. That’s social medicine. That’s traditional family values medicine!

TV shows about doctors in such a future America would be like The Wonder Years and 90210 and Grey’s Anatomy all rolled into one….

Mad-crazy ranting or innovative policy formulating? Let the med students dive-bomb your cafe and see what you think!