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While working out today, I was watching this program on the Science channel called 2057: The Body. As a segue between the segments, they present the story of some guy being badly injured: His sensor-augmented clothing calls for help, the ambulance takes the form of a flying car, and it proceeds from there. The scenario was peppered with the usual futurismic details, lots of viewer-friendly interfaces and unnecessary blinkenlights. The hapless segue victim is even injured by tripping over a cleaning robot (which causes him to fall down the stairs and through a third-story window).
What struck me, though, was that the future monitoring center employee made a point of checking the guy's insurance before dispatching the ambulance. At first I was amused, viewing it as an ordinary case of futurist's anachronism*. But then every one of the medical personal in the scenario checks the guy's insurance before doing anything (even the EMTs who arrive to find him lying on the ground bleeding to death check his insurance first), with repeated remarks about how fortunate he is to have the "platinum coverage", and I began to wonder if the show might have a bit of a bias.
* Causes swelling and the insertion of significant quantities of present circumstances into (at least sometimes) otherwise-well-thought-out future scenarios.
Addendum: Checking the plot summary on Wikipedia reveals that all the insurance company stuff was setup for the dramatic plot twist that I missed by not watching the latter half of the episode. The victim is committing insurance fraud (unrelated to the fall) by circumventing the obligatory insurance company monitoring device in his toilet (an Olin SCOPE team from this year was working on one of those, coincidentally). A doctor saves the guy's life by falsifying records and committing more insurance fraud. The moral of the story (presumably) is that socialized medicine is bad because it makes the future less dramatic.
What struck me, though, was that the future monitoring center employee made a point of checking the guy's insurance before dispatching the ambulance. At first I was amused, viewing it as an ordinary case of futurist's anachronism*. But then every one of the medical personal in the scenario checks the guy's insurance before doing anything (even the EMTs who arrive to find him lying on the ground bleeding to death check his insurance first), with repeated remarks about how fortunate he is to have the "platinum coverage", and I began to wonder if the show might have a bit of a bias.
* Causes swelling and the insertion of significant quantities of present circumstances into (at least sometimes) otherwise-well-thought-out future scenarios.
Addendum: Checking the plot summary on Wikipedia reveals that all the insurance company stuff was setup for the dramatic plot twist that I missed by not watching the latter half of the episode. The victim is committing insurance fraud (unrelated to the fall) by circumventing the obligatory insurance company monitoring device in his toilet (an Olin SCOPE team from this year was working on one of those, coincidentally). A doctor saves the guy's life by falsifying records and committing more insurance fraud. The moral of the story (presumably) is that socialized medicine is bad because it makes the future less dramatic.
