Bare Bum Hospital Gowns

WITH ALL the campaign talk about how to make health care in this country more affordable, can we offer a small suggestion?

Let’s do away with the costs associated in buying and laundering those stupid half-shirt-half-apron things they give patients in hospitals to “preserve their modesty and dignity.”  Um… just what again did you say these gowns would preserve here? While you smeared our bodies with orange iodine war paint? Or while you hung that clear plastic bag on the side of our beds so that every visitor to our rooms knew precisely how much we’d whizzed in the past 24 hours? 

Oh yeah. You're preserving patient dignity.  With a pale green, sometimes daisy-print, sometimes cartoon-print garment which ties in the back with two strings we can’t reach.  So you tie it for us using a knot so loose that even a Tenderfoot Scout wouldn’t put his name to it. This ensures that it will come undone when we’re walking in the hospital corridors like you tell us to do after surgery. The Platypus has flashed an unintended iodine-painted moon at more than one hospital patron and if it’s all the same we’d prefer to just go naked instead.

How about giving patients the option of accepting—or refusing—a “modesty” gown while offering a corresponding credit on their hospital bills when they decline?  Given typical medical rates on everything, clicking the “reject gown” option during the admission process will probably save a patient enough dough to buy a chalet in Aspen. That is, until the health insurance companies start specifying  “no open ass wraps allowed on this plan” and everyone ends up naked anyway.

Then it's County General... your neighborhood nudist resort.