Three years ago, I was a freshman, and I went out with some of my new older, cooler friends. We made a trip to the (late) Bennigan's nearby.
I had a bad burger.
The next day, I had never felt a worse pain in my life. An ambulance came and took me away from my freshman dorm to the hospital, yet, when I arrived, I was forced to sit in triage.
So I sat, and I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
In reality, I kept running to the bathroom. I was weak. I was tired. I was dehydrated. I couldn't even keep water down. I could barely keep my eyes open. I called my parents, who had given me permission to call the ambulance in the first place, and told them that it had been three and a half hours since I arrived, and I still hadn't been seen.
I was lying down splayed out next to the water fountain when the doctors found me. They picked me up, put me on a bed, and immediately injected me with IVs three ways til Sunday.
They probably would not have found me if my dad, who is a doctor, did not call in and express his outrage and tell the hospital to find his son.
The fact is, I was overly dehydrated, and I was suffering. These things happen to everyone. People don't choose to get sick, or have a kidney stone, or have a heart attack, or pass out, or have a baby right here and right now. Yet, we are charged for it like we teepeed a policeman's home and then shot his dog.
I look for good examples. I find Canada and I find England, and I ask myself, why can't we have what they have? Why can't America, which considers itself the most privileged country in the world, have something like free health care? Why can't we save ourselves?
It outrages me, as it should outrage you. If athletes weren't getting paid as much as they were, even half of what they are getting paid, they would never survive in America. Never. With the sheer amount of injuries they get and the types of injuries they get, most athletes would be bankrupt before 25.
And we all like to treat ourselves to a vacation. Skiing, swimming in the ocean--basically, doing something that involves risk, something active that doesn't involve sitting in a cubicle. This increases the odds of something bad happening too. We trip, we fall, we break, we dislocate, we have to pay for it. We have to pay for transport. We have to pay for pills. We have to pay for doctor care. We work three jobs and we still can't catch a break. Land of the free? I'll believe it when I see it.
In England, you can walk into a hospital, wait for 20 to 45 minutes, get seen, get treated, and walk out. You can walk into a pharmacy and pay $10 American and get any kind or amount of pills. Why? Because they have professionals that oversee that you are getting treated. Even pharmacists have to know why you're getting painkillers or large doses of medicine for certain ailments. But if it's a headache or cancer, you can walk into that pharmacy, and get your pills for $10. If it's 10 pills, 20 pills, 60 pills, or 600 pills, you're paying $10.
Are you peeved yet?
If you're just learning this, maybe you should be outraged that you're in college or older and you still didn't know something like this. You were ignorant to something better than what you're getting. I'm in school learning about orientation patterns of monarch butterflies, but I have no fucking clue that English and Canadian hospitals--ones run by government--actually PAY THEIR PATIENTS for safe rides home after their FREE VISITS to the doctor.
FACT: Sewing on a severed finger in America: $12,000-$65,000, depending on the finger.
FACT: Sewing on a severed finger in Canada: Free. No "additional" charges either. You can leave.
Where is the money going?
I'm proud to be an American, I am. But I am not proud that we live in the land of the dumb, the ignorant and the greedy. And it's all for nothing.
Coming soon, there will be more posts breaking down and analyzing the various problems with healthcare. This topic deserves more than one post, because it's important. It literally is a case of life and death, if you can believe that a cliché can be applicable to real life. The system is unbelievably flawed, which is not surprising considering it was a program approved by Nixon, and people should begin to understand that the health of our healthcare system reflects the health of our nation: Ailing.
-Dave
