There was a school shooting in Parkland Florida, seventeen dead, fifteen wounded. They were sent to a hospital to try and be saved from this monstrous act of hate. Those fifteen wounded are still alive because of doctors. They are out saving lives and giving people a second chance. A highest paid neurosurgeon will make $704,000 in a year. On the other hand, Stephen Curry plays basketball for half a year and makes 34.68 million dollars a year. He didn’t lose anyone, he wasn’t attacked in a place he was supposed to feel safe, and he for sure wasn't shot by a fellow peer. Things that affect how people get healthcare are; traveling times, amount of supplies available, the reason they aren’t getting help and discrimination. Doctors are needed everywhere, especially in rural towns and people are dying because of it.

In Minnesota, there are a total of 21,669 physicians with most of them being located in the Minneapolis- St.Paul region according to Minnesota Physician workforce demographics taken in 2015. What about people in the southwest of Minnesota? They only have a total of four percent of all surgeons or physicians in the whole state! If calculated out that equals 866 doctors to help that whole area. Looking at the metro area, they have a total of fifty-eight percent of all physicians in Minnesota. That equals 12,568 doctors for just that area. This makes it difficult for any place but the metro to get help. Imagine having to travel that far for help. Let’s say a person lives in small town Big Falls, Minnesota and they have a rare brain tumor that only a doctor in the cities can fix. The doctors near them are inexperienced and do not know how to help or have the materials to help them. According to Google Maps, this drive would take over fours hours to get to Minneapolis. This seems very inconvenient...right? That’s a person deceased because of the inaccessibility of well-trained doctors. Are city people the only people that matter? Cities have all the big hospitals with great doctors, ones like people see on TV. Instead of paying these professional athletes millions to play a game they learned in high school, we should be giving doctors and nurses a better education.

I bet most people have watched or heard of the TV series “Greys Anatomy”. They always have the supplies they need and save every life they possibly can. That’s how it is all is on tv screen anyways? About 250,000 died from doctor malpractice in 2016, but maybe it wasn’t all the doctor’s fault. Malpractice can consist of them not having everything they need. The patient could also just die or have a family member do something to make their condition worse. In trauma surgery, we never know what is going to walk through those ER doors and doctors should not be blamed for every death that occurs in a hospital. Let’s say, for example, a fifty year old man walks into the ER and complains of skin pain, fever, low blood pressure and has open red blisters on the surface of his skin. He mentions he just got back from Pakistan and while on the trip, he fell and got a cut on his arm. He later went to a wildlife reservation where he had animals touching him and eating food off his arms. This man now is diagnosed with Necrotizing fasciitis, which is a flesh-eating bacteria that kills quickly. The doctors rush him to surgery to try and fix him and get rid of the bacteria but, he goes into cardiac arrest and ends up coding on the table. Would this be a malpractice? According to the death toll of all patients, it is. The doctors are going to say they did everything they could to save him but we all know when someone is in misery they don’t believe that. They usually say “you didn’t do anything.” “there’s gotta be something else that can be done.” “they killed him!” or any other form of blaming the doctors. Just like trauma in hospitals, there are traumas in the army. People getting hurt in bombings like the ones in Syria are not getting any sort of treatment because there are no supplies to get out there! We can’t send all of our absolute best equipment because the medical field just doesn't have it. Pro athletes have all the money in the world and they for sure aren’t being bombed at their houses. We should take other people into consideration and not focus as much on our wealth. Kids, women, and men are being killed every day.These people are civilians, they are desperate for help. They can’t risk losing all the supplies in a possible bombing so they just won’t help anyone on the front line.  According to CNN articles, the civilians are not getting aid even though we and our allies are some of the people harming them. These people don’t know much they are being broadcasted live and they don’t know that people all over the world are watching them from a recliner saying “that must suck”. That person watching will then flip the channel over to the Golden State Warriors game. This person is part of the problem.

People as a whole are the reason that entertainment overrides the health industry. The viewers of these shows are the reason the athletes get paid so much. The money these companies make from live games, tv shows, and events are mainly going to the employees, which are the players. If the warriors would have won game six of the NBA finals they would have made eighty million dollars off of ads and people at the game for the 7th game. I understand that money doesn’t go directly to the players but, it does get them someway. An article was written by the Forbes Corporate Communications on forbes called “20th Annual NBA Team Valuation” says that every team in the NBA is now worth over one billion dollars. The medical industry is worth 3 trillion dollars, but only ten percent of that goes to the doctors! If medical is worth more, why are they still paid a fraction of the wage of a pro player? The only reason that this statement is true is that of the fans. They produce almost all of the revenue. There is just not enough money to pay the 970,000 doctors the same amount as 450 NBA players or the 750 MLB players. The money that these athletes are getting paid is really taking a bite out of doctors and nurses lifestyle. I think we should take that money and add it to the doctors check so they can save lives everywhere and not just populated areas. We can’t forget that there is also another factor in doctors wages. Their wage will depend on who or what they are.

Discrimination is still very real in the workforce. This includes sex, race, sexuality, and physical features. According to a CNN article called “Racism in Medicine” by Jacqueline Howard, it says that about fifteen percent of pediatric residents at this given hospital have experienced prejudice by their patients or patients families. Dr. Sachin Jain, president of CareMore health systems in Cerrito, California, was once a victim of prejudice. He was told by a patient to “go back to India”. I bet this made him not want to work there anymore. If someone was harassing a healthcare provider for their ethnicity would they keep going back to that place? The medical industry is losing money and doctors because they don’t want to workplaces that are deemed scary or old. Discrimination is shown everywhere in places society would least expect it. Discrimination in the workplace of a hospital is not taught in medical school and it should not have to be. Doctors are there to save people, not harm them. In third world countries, doctors are not as accessible as we have here in the United States. About three million people die each year from a disease that could have been prevented through a vaccine. Oh…but wait, people in third world countries don’t even have access to clean, safe water. How are they suppose to get medical help if no one is willing to help them? I understand people should want to volunteer to help, but to do a job deserves a little reward. If we were really that great of a country, why aren't we helping people in need voluntarily? Everyone's a little selfish or scared to take the risk. Pay them and they would be more likely to do the job. There are significantly fewer women who have a profession of medicine than men. Men almost double women when looking at the stats. Even in pro basketball women teams are outnumbered by men. According to cnbc, it shows that the average salary of a WNBA player maxes out at $110,000 while men's team make an average of 560,000 dollars. Don’t try to tell me that discrimination in the workforce doesn’t exist. Maybe they should even the score a little bit and pay women equal to men. Imagine what would happen then.

Doctors, nurses and any other person who tries to help people for a living should have a better lifestyle than most. People shouldn’t have to take long drives to get help. They shouldn’t have to fight for supplies while professional athletes sit on a throne of cash. Viewers of athletes should think about what them watching the Warriors game is actually doing to other people. Discrimination is still very real and this makes doctors and nurses not want to work in certain places. All of these points add up to ultimately say that doctors are needed everywhere but certain things make it difficult. The NBA should take a look at their revenue and donate some to a better cause instead of them thinking about how many t-shirts they should buy. We need to bring money to the medical industry and lower the sports entertainment so they are at least equal. Next time when scrolling through the channels on the TV and someone sees another school shooting has been reported they will stop and think about all the doctors, EMTs, and nurses who are going to save those kids lives instead of skipping over to the Warrior game. It must be crazy to think of someone else for once.