The rise of the hand-held medical database in the early years of the twenty-first century combined with advances in testing and scanning meant the achievement of affordable medical care for all.
After the President Jeb Bush made universal health care a Republican priority, it became a right wing sacred value, and was implemented within a year.
They took advantage of new technology to set up a parallel medical system, a corporation that was based on completely voluntary participation at very reasonable prices as well as cost to the government. Those who could afford to of course could continue to see a doctor directly, but this luxury was used less and less as the government medical facilities got better and better, and cheaper and cheaper.
The hand held databases of both known diseases and symptoms integrated with individual patient files gave the paramedics an important advantage -- no doctor could memorize the billions of medical facts the database had available, nor could they instantly combine them with the total picture of each patient along with their history, DNA, symptoms, and the results of hundreds of cheap standardized tests and probes and come up with the same informed diagnoses.
They had an extensive data gathering and data analysis structure and an incredibly accurate diagnostic engine that would immediately come up with the medical regimens most suitable for the patient's circumstances, with enough commentary to provide meaningful choices for the patient and Pharmacist to discuss. The large number of tests done on the large number of patients also meant that important research data was reliably gathered on a huge number of patients, and research was aided immeasurably and continued to contribute to refining and improving both the knowledge base and the testing procedures most useful.
Emma reflected that the trip to her semi-annual checkup had become in some ways more like a trip through a car wash than the doctor's visits she remembered from her youth. But there were sometimes perks as well.
She was not extraordinary looking, but without being fat she had full hips and ass, long legs, big tits, and long blond hair; all of which tended to lead to more sexual harassment than perhaps was her fair share. As a result, she had mixed feelings about the medical assembly line that was staffed with a mixture of trained technicians and minimum wage workers of both sexes, all of whom would be viewing and some treating her.
One change that came about in the twenty-first century was the increasing desensitization of the population in general to nudity and sex. As everyone grew up exposed to the internet and peer pressure caused steadily more precocious sexual behaviour among the young, the population that had grown up with the internet and widespread access to sexual images became less and less concerned with issues of modesty and privacy. And with the almost brutal demand for efficiency and the economies of mass processing demanded by the new medical system, these issues of privacy and modesty were sacrificed early to the new medical monolith.
On entering the front door Emma waved her wrist ID chip at the reader as a way to electronically say hi to the computer and let it know who was entering the "assembly line". She stripped off all of her clothes and put them in a locker, which closed when she flashed her chip at it, setting the combination for her alone. She then went into the main examination and testing area, much akin to a huge factory, and lay down on the first examination frame.
The frames were essentially rectangles that she was strapped into spread-eagled and naked. They were important in that they could hold her in a variety of positions for all the different tests and scans and procedures. Some scans, for instance, needed her held firmly at a certain angle in a certain position. Also, there were stations like the enema station where she could essentially be filled up and dumped out quickly and efficiently, without any assistance or fuss. The frame also contained various connections, both electrical and mechanical and fluid. She would eventually have IV, electrodes, monitoring probes of various kinds, and other functional connections. But first she had to get cleaned up.
A rather attractive young man came along and strapped her naked body spread wide in the tilting frame, checking that she was bound firmly and securely. Machines automatically tested and registered her weight and height and a few dozen other body measurements. The frame then started to move down the line, eventually leading to the various work stations for each different set of tests, where she would often be probed and prodded by people at each station.
Most of the workers were fairly nonchalant about it. Men doing the breast exams would probably have paid to do the job at first, but they did so many that eventually it became just another job, and the workers became somewhat bored and impersonal. Similarly the enemas were administered by others, sometimes men who at first were intensely interested in the process but after a few hundred and then a few thousand repetitions was as bored as one could get, even considering they had a job that involved inserting large tubes up women's assholes. Of course the men did the men too, and women did men and women as well; the assembly line worked because it used principles of mass production and most of the treatments were applied to everyone.
