> From: Mike Lazzari <watershed@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Don’t get me started!
I consider myself a “health care refugee” from the US.
When I permanently left the corporate world in 1982, I had ridiculously-priced
COBRA coverage for the allowed six-months, then “rode bareback” for some 30
years, and luckily didn’t come down with anything bankruptcy-worthy during that
time.
My brother came for a visit, and came down with a nasty sinus infection. He
went to my doctor, who charged him $150 and prescribed $50 worth of drugs.
After six months of haggling and paperwork, he eventually got about half of
that back. He is self-employed, and his insurance (including wife and two kids)
cost him about $600 a month at the time.
I caught the crud from him, and went to the same doctor. She knew I didn’t have
insurance, and whispered, “Will you be paying cash?” She charged me $50, and on
the way out, went to a “sample cabinet,” and filled by pockets with small
packets of drugs that the pharma “pushers” had given her.
That tells a lot about the inefficiency of the insurance system. If a doctor is
willing to see a patient for 1/3rd as much if she doesn’t have to deal with
insurance, that means that insurance consumes 2/3rds of the health-care money,
no?
Fast-forward ~20 healthy years, with nearly nary a doctor visit. While hauling
bins of photographs out of my van at an art festival, I ruptured a disk in my
back. I was flat on my back for eight weeks, waiting to see a “specialist.”
Ordinary doctors gave me Vicodin and other addictive things, which didn’t help
much and just made me feel dull and stupid. (I have never been much of a drug
user, but the one thing that really seemed to help the constant pain was
marijuana, which, of course, was illegal at the time.)
I finally got to a back specialist. I can easily recall the date for obvious
reasons: September 11, 2001. After an hour wait, someone gave me a gown and
told me to strip. After another hour of lying on the cold tile floor, with my
butt hanging out of the gown (I could not sit nor stand), a doctor waltzed in
and gave me a 10-minute exam. She disappeared for yet another hour.
She came back in, and said, “We think you’re a good candidate for surgery!”
To which I replied with four words I had learned were automatically good for at
least a 50% discount: “I don’t have insurance.”
“Well, we can try something more conservative, first,” charged me $180 (a
dollar a minute for “chilling” on a cold tile floor), and she put me on a
course of anabolic steroids, which cleared things up 90% in a week. (I still
have a bit of a limp.)
So, $50 of pills saved me $15,000 worth of surgery and probably twelve weeks of
recovery. And from my research, of all back surgery patients, 1/3rd get better,
1/3rd are the same, and 1/3rd are actually worse after the surgery.
People speak in glowing terms of America’s supremacy in health-care technology.
But based on my experience, I wonder how much of that technology is necessary,
and how much is pushed on people (people with insurance!) in order to make
money?
That, in essence, illustrates the problem with the corporate-welfare health
insurance industry: the healthiest people remove themselves from the risk pool,
driving up the costs for everyone else.
Like education, health-care should be a non-profit enterprise. Sure, pay the
professionals a decent wage, but take the profit motive out of it, please.
Canada’s health care gets a lot of bad press in the US. But I can call my
doctor at 9 AM and see him before 11. And if you live on under ~$20,000, it
doesn’t cost a cent in BC. And it consumes less than half as much as the US
system, based on percentage of GNP.
‘Nuff said.
I warned you about getting me started… :-)
:::: Jan Steinman, EcoReality Co-op ::::
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