Steven Wells
Here’s his first piece on dealing with the US health care system (Steve was british). Not for the faint of heart or stomach, but a must-read anyway.
The ER doctor says he wants to drill a hole in my back, stick in a tube and suck all the blood and gunk and puss out from under my lungs. I’m like, “Yeah, like, whatever, man.” So he does. And half an hour later I’m staring at a plastic bag filled with two and a quarter liters of what looks like Bloody Mary mix.
But the story doesn’t really start here.
Hey, I do have a good ending, though. That bit I just wrote about the “free drugs”? Total nonsense.
Weeks later–weeks during which I nearly die, become hideously deformed and then spend entire days crying like a baby–the wife and I are in the elevator in our apartment building when she opens the bill from our bat-shit crazy American insurance company.
“How much?” I giggle.
“$51,000,” she snorts.
…and it starts and ends just as ugly and just as bleakly hilarious. I say hilarious, because what else can you do but laugh when your body’s gone insane and is trying to kill you and the companies that are supposed to prevent this from happening are trying to accomplish the same thing?
I will add an editorial comment to all this.
America needs single payer health care NOW. Not some bullshit, phoney-baloney “public option”, not some toothless “health co-op”, but actual real national health care so no one has to go through this again.
Could Steven’s life have been saved? I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.
But when you spend your days dealing with “Kafkaesque data chases, a scrotal sac swollen to the size of a football, glimpses of oak-paneled $300-a-night posh-patients’ rooms where protein shakes come in silver salvers, the horror of the catheter they stick down your cock (and this is legal, why?) and the nightmare foot-long scented candle of compacted fecal matter that was so hard to shift that I collapsed and had to be given oxygen the first time I tried”, the last thing you need is a bill from the insurance company saying YOU owe THEM $51,000.
Ironically, if Wells’ earlier articles about his cancer are any indication, he seems to have died of the same cancer that affects Senator Arlen Specter: Hodgkins Lymophoma*. The difference is that as a government employee, Specter participates in the Federal Employees Health Benefits plan, in which 75% of his premiums are covered by you and me. In the FEHB, there is no such thing as a “pre-existing condition”. You don’t even have to take a medical exam. You cannot be denied service. When Specter retires, he carries his coverage for the rest of his life. I know this is true because I called up the US Office of Personnel Management, which handles the benefits plan, a couple of weeks ago and they walked me through the way the plan works.
If government provided health care is good enough for everyone in the House and Senate, it should be good enough for you and me.
*Update: someone notified me that Wells died from intestinal cancer, not Hodgkins. apologies for the error, but my point still stands.
June 25th, 2009 at 11:52 am
[...] See the original post: Steven Wells [...]