2009-10-07

I haven't seen Keith Olbermann's Special Comment on health care yet, since my laptop is a powerless hunk of plastic right now. But other people's posts on it reminded me of an entry I've been meaning to write for some time, and now is as good as any (even if I'm writing in the computer cluster right now). So:

My mother is self-employed as a landscaper/gardener - her job description is fairly fluid, but she does a lot of weeding and pruning, removing stumps, planting trees and flowers, just generally heavy-duty yardwork (a lot of it for older people, especially women, who aren't comfortable having a strange man on their property for hours at a time). Her boyfriend G was, when she met him, a bouncer at a club, but that job ended some time ago and for the last year he's been doing landscaping with her. What this means is that a) they do not make very much money, and b) they do not have health insurance.

Early this summer, G developed a problem with one of his teeth. I was going back and forth between her apartment and my dad's house about once a week, and every time I saw it he was complaining about it - it hurts, his face is swollen, he can't eat, he can't sleep. But it wasn't bad enough to put him out of commission, and they didn't have the money for the dentist if it wasn't an emergency, so he popped pain pills and smoked weed and tried to wait until it went away.

In August, it was finally apparent that this wasn't something that was going to fix itself, and after a week straight of being unable to eat anything from the pain G dragged himself to the dentist. Where he was told that the swelling around the tooth was too bad for them to be able to remove it. He was given a course of antibiotics and told to come back in a week. A week later, when he went back, they told him to go straight to the emergency room.

At the emergency room they told him the infection from his tooth had moved into his jaw. The swelling in his throat and mouth was so severe that it was restricting his breathing, leaving his oxygen saturation in the low 70s (by contrast - my grandmother, who is on permanent oxygen therapy for a collapsed diaphram, almost never goes below 80). The surgery to extract the tooth and drain the infection took four hours. And he spent almost a week in the Intensive Care Unit, in a medically induced coma, with a breathing tube down his throat. More than a month later, he still doesn't have all his strength back. His doctor said if they had waited to go to the emergency room that night, instead of that afternoon, he would have died.

The medical bill for all of this emergency intensive care treatment for what should have been an easily fixed tooth infection: $60,000.

And you know the really frustrating thing? I can understand exactly what was going through his head, this entire ordeal, because I WOULD DO EXACTLY THE SAME THING.

This is something I'm not sure people who are used to having health insurance can understand. But if you grow up in, or you spend a long time in, a situation where you cannot afford medical care, you think about it differently. I can count on my hands the number of times I've been to the doctor in my life - not because I've never gotten sick, but because in my family, in my experience, doctors are for emergencies only. Doctors are the last ditch solution, if you've tried over-the-counter medications, and the antibiotics you didn't finish the last time you got sick, and just ignoring it and hoping it will just go away, and nothing's worked. No 'I just want to make sure this isn't anything serious.' No 'I was wondering if you could do anything about this rash.' No preventative care. Because that isn't what doctors are for.

Proper medical treatment should not be a luxury. Being healthy should not be a luxury. Being alive shouldn't be a luxury.

2009-10-07

BLOODY HELL

An Argument For The Public Option