20th
Getting Sick
About six years ago, I got sick.
I know that doesn’t seem like a profound statement. Everybody gets sick eventually. But the difference is that I got REALLY sick.
At that point in my life I was playing music full time, which meant that I was starving. In order to pay the bills I started substitute teaching. I was parachuted on a daily basis into a pit of squealing, screaming, self-centered and hyperactive children, all of whom were little more than mobile collections of sickness. You can also factor in that as an idiot bachelor and working musician, my diet at the time consisted of black coffee, cigarettes, bourbon and meat. My immune system was the Jonas Brothers. The germs were the Wu-Tang Clan. And all of their cousins.
What I thought was just a sore throat got worse and worse, so much so that after about four days I couldn’t talk or swallow my own spit. I crawled into the emergency room at midnight and wrote down what was wrong with me on a random piece of paper. After getting x-rayed and poked and prodded, a doctor finally came in and stuck a fiber optic camera up my nose and down the back of my throat and told me that I had an infected epiglottis. For those of you who were stoned during high school biology, the epiglottis is a piece of tissue that automatically closes over the windpipe when you are swallowing food, which keeps you from choking to death. Mine got so swollen that it kept me from swallowing at all. The doctor told me it was like a garage door that got rusted shut. They put me in a bed and gave me intravenous antibiotics that were strong enough to kill the infection, and they fed me jell-o and broth and tea, and I stayed there for three days.
Did I mention that at the time I didn’t have health insurance?
The initial bill was $10,000. I’m not joking. They allowed me to “plead financial hardship,” which knocked the bill down to $7,000. It took me about two years to pay it all off.
I’m bringing this up because about a week ago I was down in Richmond and ran into a guy that I used to play music with at a bar in Shockoe Bottom. We had a few beers and reminisced, and then he mentioned that he had just gotten out of the hospital.
“What was your problem?”
“Uh, well…do you know what the epiglottis is?”
Turns out my buddy had the exact same problem, but that isn’t what I found interesting. See, he has a pretty good job, and he has health insurance. I asked him how much his out of pocket costs would be, and he told me that it was going to cost him around $7,000. His insurance company was refusing to cover all sorts of tests that were run on him, and were only willing to cover a little bit of the stay in the hospital. He told me that the folks at his company were appealing and doing everything that they could, but it looked like he was going to have to get a second job in order to pay the bills.
To recap, the exact same illness cost uninsured me the exact same amount that it cost my insured buddy.
This was somewhat of a serendipitous conversation, considering that as I write this, Obama is trying to move forward on health care reform. On the drive back from Richmond I was tuning around on the radio, but if you happen to be between Doswell and Fredericksburg it’s either Jesus, country music or the right-wing radio circus clowns. So I listened to this shrieking little pipsqueak named Mark Levin, who sounds like a Munchkin would if they were trying to conquer the Land of Oz instead of pointing Dorothy in the right direction. Mark seems to believe that not having your party in charge is “tyranny.” Or, as he puts it, “TYRANNNYYYYYYYYY!!!!!”
He went on to say that if the government got involved in health care, then that would be “tyranny” because (and I am paraphrasing here, but not by much,) “WHHOOOOOOOO are THEEYYYYYYY to TELLLLL US WHAT TO DOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! Do you want some FACELESS GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRACY to tell you WHAT DOCTOR YOU CAN SEE???? Or WHAT TREATMENT YOU CAN GET? Or WHAT PILLS OR PRESCRIPTIONS YOU CAN HAVE???? Because THAT’S WHATS GOING TO HAPPEN WHEN THE MARXIST COMMUNIST OBAMAS TAKE OVER HEALTH CARE!!!! TYRANNNNYYYYYYYYYYYY!”
Call me crazy, but I don’t really think that Mark is describing some horrible Orwellian future. He’s describing the status quo. I don’t think a “faceless government BUREAUCRACY” has anything on the bureaucracy that runs my health insurance company. I mean, they aren’t faceless when it comes to collecting their premiums. They are friendly and sunny and offer all sorts of easy ways to pay. But when it comes to actual questions or problems that I have, it’s worse than the DMV.
And why is it so bad when the GUBMINT tells us “what doctor you can see” when the insurance companies do the exact same thing? Have you ever tried to see an out of network doctor? Ever broken your leg in East Nowhere, Vermont and gone to see a doctor outside of your insurance plan? Have you paid off that enormous, not-covered-by-your-policy bill yet? I bet you haven’t.
Nor am I afraid of the TYRANNICAL LIBERAL GOVERNMENT telling me “WHICH TREATMENT I CAN GET.” I can get whatever treatment I want under my insurance company, but whether or not they will actually pay for it is pretty much fifty/fifty. More like sixty/forty. Actually, seventy/thirty is more accurate. Completely accurate if you consider my friend in Richmond, who has to pay $7,000 out of a $10,000 bill.
I have no worries about somebody telling me “WHAT PILLS I CAN HAVE!” I actually went in to get a prescription filled about two years ago and expected to pay $10, which was what I thought was the going rate on my insurance. Turns out the bill was $210. The reason was because the pills I needed weren’t on the pre-approved list. I asked what was on the pre-approved list, and the answer was basically anything that’s old enough to come in generic form. So I can have any medicine that I want, as long as it isn’t, you know, the latest and best medications. That stuff is EXPENSIVE, man! When I asked how much extra it would cost on my policy to cover the latest stuff, they told me it would be an extra $75 a month.
I’m not afraid of the government getting involved in health care, Mark. I’ve seen how they do medicine, and they do it pretty well. I grew up going to Rader Clinic on Fort Myer. Every time I got sick my Dad would take me there and I would get free treatment and prescriptions. In fact, when I think about all the thousands of ways that insurance companies and HMO’s rip us off, I get downright nostalgic for how uncomplicated getting sick used to be.
Maybe there doesn’t have to be health care reform. But if there isn’t going to be any, there damn sure better be INSURANCE reform, because as far as I’m concerned, insurance companies are engaging in behavior that is nothing short of criminal. Right now, it’s impossible to get sick or injured in this country without damn near going broke, regardless of whether you have insurance or not. And that scares me way more than “BIG GOVERNMENT.”
