I WALKED DOWN A CORRIDOR...
TO A SERIES OF DESKS where I was asked to pay first and be tested later. All of this was new to me, and oddly strange; it was like a chophouse demanding payment before serving me food. At every step of this process, money came first. There was a cynical assumption behind each and every contact in this unfamiliar world: All of you are deadbeat parasites, and I was amazed by the fact that nobody else in the surgery center waiting room seemed to be neither shocked nor stunned by being called a rip-off artist.
So I paid to have my blood pressure taken. I was then asked to breathe into a machine and to pay in advance for the anesthesia. I had now begun my private tour into the bizarre and secluded domain of the pay as you go diseased and debilitated.
I am one of those fortunate human beings who are almost never physically sick. Over the previous 60 years, I had been in a hospital only twice as a patient: for the repair of a broken nose and for a bout with mononucleosis. As a former Lutheran minister, of course, I'd been in dozens of hospitals, tending to the ill, serving emergency-room death watches, comforting family, all of which were part of my craft, but not my life. And even though it was only a minor procedure, I found myself filled with a sense of dread. I was on a gurney. I gazed up, seeing faces distorted by my point of view and by anesthetic. The doctor entered my eye. In a minute or two, one eye of the cataract surgery was completed. One down and one to go.
Late that night, alone in that drowsy fog prior to falling asleep, I began to think about the eye surgeon, who had yet to charge me a penny. Hell, this goddamned thing is probably going to cost me an Arm and a Leg, no matter how much insurance coverage I have! It seemed absurd, even outrageous, that I had to be thinking about the almighty dollar when it came to the salvation of my own health, God bless America.
I then began thinking about folks who are truly ailing. Maybe something had gone wrong on the operating table, some stupid failure of their body or the doctor's skill; it had happened to people I knew. Even with the Affordable Care Act, those with chronic deceases still have to pay insurance. I began to think about the people I would miss if my life ended: my son and daughter, my granddaughter and grandson and my friends. Their faces moved in and out of my mind; I spoke to some of them and hugged others. Then I saw and heard some of those other people, places, and things that made my life a life. I thought about never again being able to see the the light spilling above the valleys of Colorado like it had done when I was young, of never again having the ability to read Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mark Twain and Elmore Leonard, or ever again seeing another World Series. And what about all the words I hadn't written or said to the people I really cared about, people I didn't see much...
...Only because I happened to reside in the one industrial country in the entire world that did not have a universal health care system?
TO A SERIES OF DESKS where I was asked to pay first and be tested later. All of this was new to me, and oddly strange; it was like a chophouse demanding payment before serving me food. At every step of this process, money came first. There was a cynical assumption behind each and every contact in this unfamiliar world: All of you are deadbeat parasites, and I was amazed by the fact that nobody else in the surgery center waiting room seemed to be neither shocked nor stunned by being called a rip-off artist.
So I paid to have my blood pressure taken. I was then asked to breathe into a machine and to pay in advance for the anesthesia. I had now begun my private tour into the bizarre and secluded domain of the pay as you go diseased and debilitated.
I am one of those fortunate human beings who are almost never physically sick. Over the previous 60 years, I had been in a hospital only twice as a patient: for the repair of a broken nose and for a bout with mononucleosis. As a former Lutheran minister, of course, I'd been in dozens of hospitals, tending to the ill, serving emergency-room death watches, comforting family, all of which were part of my craft, but not my life. And even though it was only a minor procedure, I found myself filled with a sense of dread. I was on a gurney. I gazed up, seeing faces distorted by my point of view and by anesthetic. The doctor entered my eye. In a minute or two, one eye of the cataract surgery was completed. One down and one to go.
Late that night, alone in that drowsy fog prior to falling asleep, I began to think about the eye surgeon, who had yet to charge me a penny. Hell, this goddamned thing is probably going to cost me an Arm and a Leg, no matter how much insurance coverage I have! It seemed absurd, even outrageous, that I had to be thinking about the almighty dollar when it came to the salvation of my own health, God bless America.
I then began thinking about folks who are truly ailing. Maybe something had gone wrong on the operating table, some stupid failure of their body or the doctor's skill; it had happened to people I knew. Even with the Affordable Care Act, those with chronic deceases still have to pay insurance. I began to think about the people I would miss if my life ended: my son and daughter, my granddaughter and grandson and my friends. Their faces moved in and out of my mind; I spoke to some of them and hugged others. Then I saw and heard some of those other people, places, and things that made my life a life. I thought about never again being able to see the the light spilling above the valleys of Colorado like it had done when I was young, of never again having the ability to read Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mark Twain and Elmore Leonard, or ever again seeing another World Series. And what about all the words I hadn't written or said to the people I really cared about, people I didn't see much...
...Only because I happened to reside in the one industrial country in the entire world that did not have a universal health care system?
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