November 30, 2007

The holidays approach and the elves are busy in the North Pole suburb of Westwood. A friend who works at the UCLA Medical Center forwarded to me the following paean to silliness, distributed to all employees:

THE GREAT PEN EXCHANGE! Once again, UCLA is leading the way. This time in adopting new guidelines for our relationship with industry. To start, we're asking everyone to bring any pens (as well as mugs or other items) that bear the imprint of a medical company or product, to exchange for a brand new, spiffy UCLA Health system pen. Don't be left out! Starbucks $5 gift certificates to the first 100 participants at each location!

So, let's see here. Quite apart from their poor grammar, the august administrators of the UCLA Medical Center---world renowned for reasons that remain curiously obscure---apparently believe that their staff will sell out the interests of their patients for... a ballpoint pen. And how, precisely, would such perfidy proceed? Well, that is far from clear; presumably, the doctors will prescribe drugs ineffective for a given patient rather than an effective alternative because their morning coffee (not from Starbucks) was consumed from a mug bearing the logo of the former. Can the UCLA bureaucrats actually believe anything so stupid?

Well, the apparent answer is "Yes." Notice that this corruption on the part of the doctors would be observed not only in the case of new gifts---shiny pens and the like---but also for such goodies already received and presumably with the removable pen caps already chewed. Why would an old gift yield continuing corruption? The UCLA bureaucrats offer no clue. And notice as well that the mere presence of a gift is not enough; no indeed, it is the gifts that "bear the imprint of a medical company or product" that raise the concerns of the UCLA green-eyeshade types. Someone might see it! The reality, that any six-year-old would know, is that it is hidden gifts that, theoretically, might provide cause for concern; gifts that advertise themselves have the opposite effect.

And, by the way, if the coffee mugs are valued so highly as to yield corruption, why would any self-respecting, corrupt UCLA doctor sacrifice it for a lousy (oops, sorry, "spiffy") UCLA pen? Moreover, did UCLA buy the Starbucks gift certificates? Or were they donated? In either case, the potential for corruption in the UCLA paradigm is immense---after all, five dollars would buy only a small latte, but a whole packet of pens---and the only difference is the identity of those to whom the doctors will have prostituted themselves.

So there we have it. Pens, mugs, and other gifts not bearing logos are kosher; so, how about some cash in an envelope? Obviously---obviously---it is not real corruption that concerns the UCLA bureaucrats; can any adult actually believe that the science and art of their doctors' medical practices are affected by pens and tissue dispensers? Instead, their real concern is that modern journalists---political science majors who couldn't get admitted to law school---are sufficiently dumb to believe in so trivial a purported appearance of "corruption," and then to report it in dark verbiage on the front pages. Just imagine the headline: UCLA DOCTORS ACCEPT PENS FROM GIGANTICPHARMACORP AND THEN PRESCRIBE THEIR DRUGS! Experts and Officials Are Concerned. And so as this corner of the medical sector descends into utter inanity, the journalists have been joined by the deep thinkers among the UCLA administrators: spineless, stupid, and supremely self-satisfied in their moral superiority.

Posted by Benjamin Zycher at November 30, 2007 09:29 AM

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Posted by: Linda Gorman at November 30, 2007 02:34 PM

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