Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Dooling

Dooling’s sentence is doing two things at once: it’s setting up a ledger and then flipping it into an indictment. He opens with the technocrat’s anchor - “mid-1980s,” “eight percent of our gross domestic product” - a number meant to sound sober, almost neutral. But the calm accounting is a trapdoor. Once the reader is inside the realm of budgets and trends, he pivots to the bedside: “end of life,” “excessive, aggressive,” “cruel.” The effect is surgical. If even at a comparatively modest share of GDP we sensed something was morally off, what does that imply about the system we’ve since built?

The intent isn’t just to argue that overtreatment is wasteful. “Unnecessary” would be enough for a policy debate; Dooling adds “cruel,” insisting the issue is ethical, not merely economic. His phrasing also smuggles in a quiet collective complicity: “we had the impression.” It’s a soft accusation. No villains named, no doctors singled out, but a whole culture implicated in equating more intervention with better care, even when the patient’s experience suggests the opposite.

As a novelist, Dooling’s power move is narrative framing: the 1980s become a baseline memory, a moment when denial was still possible. The subtext is that we’ve known for decades, and kept paying for it anyway - in dollars, yes, but also in suffering that gets justified as “treatment” when it may be closer to fear management, liability avoidance, or an inability to accept limits.