Emergency on Demand

 is a readable shard in Cyberpunk 2077.

Location
This shard can be found on the foot end of the first dead body you find during The Rescue who is mistaken for Sandra Dorsett. It is on top of a shelf near the door.

Transcript
How did it happen? When and when did we as a society decide that human life is a commodity? A luxury?

My mother passed away at 45. She still had decades of life to live until it was all stolen from her by common pneumonia. If she had held even the cheapest Trauma Team policy, she could have been cured within an hour. But she couldn’t afford it. My mother died five months before her scheduled appointment with our family practitioner…

The idea of privatized healthcare is deeply ingrained in our public psyche. Already in 2020, there was widespread consensus that 500 eurodollars a month was a fair price for Trauma Team insurance. Health wasn’t something you were given, it was something you earned. The private system may not be perfect, but there’s no alternative, we thought.

BULLSHIT

Now cross the Pacific Ocean to the USSR where they also have highly trained medical technicians, high-precision nanosurgical suites, specialized antibodies, intravenous probes, the list goes on. Emergency airlifts using modern AVs equipped with cryotonic chambers? They have those, too. The difference, then? They don’t leave their people to die on the streets, at the store, in their homes. They don’t force anyone to purchase their lives from a corporation as if they’re the ones who own it.

Public healthcare isn’t some unachievable utopia. It is a REALITY.

Trauma Team, on the other hand, treats its policyholders as both potential patients to be treated and potential products to be bought. They save lives only because there is profit in it. A saved life is a returning customer. Client death can also bring in fiscal gains in the form of organ and implant resale, though of course in regulated, smaller sums. An emergency care provider can’t afford to give its managers reasons to deliberately kill off its clientele base for short-term windfalls.

Surely, you ask, these medical “professionals” are also guided by their Hippocratic Oaths?

Please…