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Would you pay $60,000 to re-attach the top tip of your middle finger if it had been cut off in an accident?
P says, "yes."
I say…."I really don’t know"… Heaven knows I like my digits intact, and I’m quite fond of my middle finger in particular.
But 60K could support my mom for an entire work-free year, or buy another Rav4 and then some, or pay several college tuitions, or "sponsor" maybe hundred of third world children to eat (it only cost a $5 donation in Nicaragua to provide milk to numerous children) for a week. Or, my ENTIRE doctoral education cost about 60K, not counting all the stuff I already paid off with the 2-3 part time jobs I worked those years (tutor, PG&E contractor, office staff, student interviewer, research assistant.)
Why do I ask such a gruesome question?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BJyyyRYbSk&mode=related&search=
We saw Sicko today, after about 3 weeks of my nagging P. Not that he is insensitive to the importance of healthcare, but he has not witnessed its cruelties the way a health care professional has (well, and there is that matter of more pressing summer movie fare such as Transformers….).
The matter of lack of healthcare in this great country hits close to home for me. Please do see the movie, it speaks SO much truth. And despite the solemnity of this post, that’s just me and my dourness. The documentary itself is quite funny.
Back at UCLA I worked administrative tasks for a psychiatrist.
Much of what I did was fax patients’ extremely personal information to HMO’s and beg and fight for more services for patients. Thus I learned by the tender age of 20 that one could have Bipolar disorder, and Lupus, and a couple other diagnoses all at the same time and still be coldy denied "unneccessary" care from the HMO they paid and trusted for years.
I witnessed the anguished of patients who could not afford medicines. My boss was a compassionate man, given to offering ice cream bars to anyone who entered the office (heck, no wonder I worked for him!). He would give handfuls of sample medications from to try and help clients out.
I’ll never forget one proud and practical woman. A handsome African American lady who had conquered a severe mood disorder. Dr. Tolwin advised her of a medication that was new, better, could maybe be what it takes for to make it back to full recovery, go back to work. But she couldn’t afford it. He offered her all the samples he had. She cried silently and shook her head. "I’d rather not try - it if I just know that even if it works, I can’t ever buy it. I’d feel better for a little while and just know I was gonna get sick again"
My mum and I basically work for almost no other purpose than securing health benefits. I want mom to stop working, certainly she’s earned it and could maybe make it with our help if she had no salary. But there’s NO way we could cover U.S. healthcare. I myself had an unexpected surgery in my 20’s. I still had healthcare then under dad since I was a full time graduate student - if not, I surely would have been bankrupted by the ultrasound, surgery, and hospital stay.
I have seen patients with hospital plastic bags of their belongings, wearing plastic bracelets, sometimes still in flimsy hospital gowns, walking, or more like trudging or literally falling down on Broadway in Oakland. Just last month it was an elderly man in a gown pushing a walker across the street at a rate of about 3 inches a minute, his Highland hospital bag of meager goods hanging from a thin wrist.
It made me ashamed to be one of the hundreds of citizens carrying $3.00 espresso drinks who rushed past him into my office, without offering help or asking if he was OK, or admitting that we are witness to such cruelty. I know how it feels: "what can I possibly do?!" I don’t know. But I wish I had at least said something. At least tried.
A few months ago another man fell straight off the steps of a bus that discharged him, and he lay on the sidewalk in a crawling heap on 8th street until a teen boy from China called 911. I came out of the office and witnessed this. The boy spoke little English. But he found it astounding that no one would help this old man on the ground who bore hospital wristbands. I helped him call 911.
We stood there like dorks with this guy sprawled before us. Time ticked by.
"In China, 911 would be here in 5 minutes", he said proudly.
In the U.S. we waited and waited. And when the firemen finally came, I knew that probably they’d throw him back out of the hospital soon. Sort of like most of my clients.
My friend Sara served for weeks in NYC following the 9/11 attacks. She is someone whose integrity and compassion astonishes me. It’s amazing to know a real, in the flesh heroine. She still suffers a "9/11 cough". The government isn’t helping her out at all. In fact, she volunteered her time yet again to serve post-Katrina which is how I had the privilege to meet her. I wonder sometimes, I fear: will my friend die one day from the toxins in her lungs?
In the 90’s, my father got deathly ill with a mysterious raging infection in Germany. Those Germans saved his life. I am eternally indebted. An M.D. did a home visit, ascertained he was too sick to return to Taiwan, and sent him to the intensive care unit of the hospital.
My dad stayed in ICU for days. His speech was slurred, they couldn’t find the source of the infection. I had to consult with my advisor about whether to leave school and fly to Germany with my Dad looming near his deathbed. For days we were terrified as the infection raged. After he emerged from ICU, he stayed more than a week in a pleasant regular hospital bed with ‘a window with a tree" he reported. His total tab for home visit, ICU, med, hospital etc.? About $2,500 USD. A teeny fraction of what we’d have paid for ONE day of hospitalization in California.
Of course if he had made it home to Taiwan healthcare would have been free or near free as well. In Taipei I have often had to see the M.D., and my co-pay for a same day visit and meds is $15. In Costa Rica it cost me under $30. And quite honestly in both of those countries the M.D.’s had fantastic bedside manner and time for one on one patient talk that I have rarely enjoyed at home.
There are things I love about Los Estados Unidos, but healthcare ain’t one of them. It’s not Ok to me that we roam like a pack of zebras who do nothing to help one another when illness drags one of us away from the herd. We just duck our heads and thank God it wasn’t us, or our child, or parent. But things in our collective house are so nonsensical right now, we need to pull together or there will be little worth saving. Rampant disease will fell us all equally. I am a healthcare professional. I know the HMO’s want to pay me for denying proper care. I know they would love it if I said I cured major psychosis or life threatening eating disorder in 6 hours. I can’t ever do that, and face my patients, and live with myself.
I want to remain proud to do what I do, not walk around with blood and suffering on my hands. In reality, this finger, these hands, are worth more than $60,000.
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