It’s amazing that the worst pandemic in modern history hasn’t led to any meaningful change in our healthcare system. We still don’t have universal healthcare, insurance companies still rip us off, and institutional racism in medicine still causes higher mortality for black women.

All we do is literally worship doctors like gods and praise our unjust system because we’re scared and afraid to question anything. But the American people deserve better than this crap. This is unacceptable, outrageous, and inhumane. It’s okay to be scared yet still demand more.

In fact, all this doctor hero worship, which is performative in nature and fleeting, doesn’t even help the doctors on the frontlines who want to create real change from within and fix the problems in heathcare. Many of these doctors still get fired by hospitals for speaking out.

The media amplifies only the status quo doctors who have benefited from our broken system for their entire careers. They know how to praise the large hospital systems, insurance companies, Big Pharma, and the big wigs in order to keep their comfy jobs and that’s all we see on TV.

Also, many patients of color, especially black women, get substandard care compared to rich whites. There’s a great deal of racism within medicine, and many doctors have subconscious or even overt biases about believing white patients but condescendingly questioning black people.

Worshipping all doctors as heroes gives a free pass to the racist doctors who contribute to the inequality and inequities in medicine that hurt people of color. Doctors are human beings. Some humans are good. Some are evil. Judge us by what we do, and hold us fully accountable.