During the Friday night Town Hall discussion we at TBM had the good fortune to participate in, we attempted to make the point, repeatedly, that there are myriad things right and good about our health care system and so much we have to be proud of as Americans. After the forum, an attendee walked over to us and handed us a piece of paper with the words “Michael Yon/British Solder/Afghanistan” on it. We looked this up quickly and came across such a genuine emotional treasure that it has taken us a few days to get some perspective on it. Michael Yon is a former Green Beret, native of Winter Haven, Fl. who has been reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan since December 2004. No other reporter has spent as much time with combat troops in these two wars. Michael’s dispatches from the frontlines have earned him the reputation as the premier independent combat journalist of his generation. His work has been featured on “Good Morning America,” The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, ABC, FOX, as well as hundreds of other major media outlets all around the world.

At his online forum, he posted this amazing article about a British soldier wounder during combat operations in Afghanistan. He writes:

“The soldier was taken to the medical tent and a helicopter lifted him to the excellent trauma center at Camp Bastion. That he made it to Camp Bastion alive dramatically improved his chances. But his life teetered and was in danger of slipping away. Making matters worse, the British medical system back in the United Kingdom did not possess the specialized gear needed to save his life. Americans had the right gear in Germany, and so the British soldier was put into the American system.”

The rawness and simplicity of this statement is simultaneously the highest praise for the American system and a deep indictment and acknowledgment of the substantial weakness of the British system. No feelings getting hurt though and no political drama surrounding the decision. The young British soldier was put into the better system so that his life could be saved.

Mr. Yon continues:

“Two or three weeks after the injury, I was having dinner with a British Major and several Captains. The Major talked reverently about Soldiers Angels, and then about a herculean effort that the United States military extended to save a single British soldier. I had no idea about that effort. I just heard the gunshot, saw the soldier carried away into the night, and heard the helicopter roar into the darkness. I knew Soldiers’ Angels had intervened back in Germany, but the details that followed came as incredible surprise. The U.S. military had quietly moved Heaven and Earth to save a single British “Squaddie.”

We should all pause for a moment during our own political debate to appreciate the magic and the wonder of what we have all created in this country. We have so very much to be proud of. If one were to listen only to Mr. Obama and others, it is so very easy to get the impression that our system is so badly broken, so beyond salvation that we need to scrap it entirely. Numbers get thrown about saying that despite all the money we spend, too many babies die early, to many mistakes get made, quality is so poor as to often be an embarrassment, doctors work only for money forsaking the interests of their patients and in the end, we spend so much to get so little.

Hogwash. Pure and simple nonsense.

This is a listing of the known resources that were mobilized to save this mans life. These are our resources, our medical system, our world.

Aircraft:
- One C-17 aircraft to get the medical team and equipment from Germany in place at the hospital in Afghanistan.
- One C-130 aircraft to fly a pulmonologist from a different hospital in Afghanistan to the Soldiers’ location.
- A second C-17 aircraft to fly the patient from Afghanistan to Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
- LifeBird German civilian medevac helicopter to fly the patient from Ramstein Air Base to Regensburg University hospital.

Logistics Teams:
- Combined Air and Space Operations Center (SW Asia)
- Joint Patient Movement Requirements Center (within the CAOC above, SW Asia)
- Global Patient Movements Requirement Center (Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, USA)
- 618th Tanker Airlift Control Center (Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, USA)
- Landstuhl DWMMC (Deployed Warrior Medical Management Center)

The severely wounded soldier is recovering in the United Kingdom. Good for him and good for us.

If one were to dive deep and try to understand why our system is this good one would enter a world that is so very familiar to us, but so very foreign to most average people. That world, the world of medical practice, is one that through all of its trials and efforts, through the many successes and many failures, through all of our learning, and hours spent away from our families and friends, all of THAT, each day we get better and better at doing things that were unthinkable even a few years ago and are still largely unthinkable in other highly industrialized countries like our cousins in England. To an outsider a failure may seem intolerable and certainly to the patients or the families of people to whom we have failed, such a thing is intolerable. But when we talk about utilitarianism and what is good for the greatest number, these failures teach us so much. Importantly, we do “do better” after we fail. We do learn, we do progress and we do innovate. This progression does not come easy and it does not come cheaply. We risk losing so much if you throw away our system right now. Four months and thousand page bills and a timeline to get ‘it done’ is so absurd when viewed through the eyes of this young British soldier helping us to fight our war in that country.

We had better be careful.