Earlier this month my wife had a surgical procedure performed at a fairly new hospital in Fort Worth. The doctor was remarkable, the nurses and staff were great, and every step of the process was made as simple as possible.
Since my wife has good insurance, she didn’t have to save for months to afford the procedure or wait until the last minute and stagger into an emergency room. There was no crowd and no waiting room filled with the bloody, dazed, or urgently infirm. She got red-carpet treatment. The hospital even offered valet parking in the patient drop-off area.
I was grateful, but it also made me uncomfortable. It was almost like a country club.
My wife and I are barely on the middle side of middle class. The only reason she received this superb treatment is that her employer offers an outstanding benefit package.
Without her job, we might have wound up at a cheap clinic or over at a public hospital where the closest you get to valet is an ambulance.
The other day, as I was watching my youngest son play soccer, I looked out at all the boys and wondered what kind of treatment they would receive if a serious ailment arose. What if their parents didn’t have good insurance? What if their parents didn’t make enough money?
Who in good conscience could stand up and say one person and his or her children deserve better medical care than another? Who would do that?
That’s easy. The good ol’ U.S. of A. That’s how our healthcare system is currently run, right now, every day.
If you have good insurance, you get VIP treatment and valet parking. If you have bad insurance, they get to you as soon as possible, but the cost is often more debilitating than the injury you get treated for. If you have no insurance, you get there the best way you can, and they treat you when they can.
My mom’s father was involved in one of the forward campaigns of D-Day. He got shot in the upper part of his thigh and lay on the battlefield, probably thinking he was going to die. But he didn’t. A German combat medic treated his wound. My grandfather didn’t speak German, and I don’t know if the German medic spoke English. But I doubt he asked my grandfather if he had money for the procedure or good insurance so the Third Reich could be reimbursed for his life-saving treatment. My grandfather – the enemy – was wounded. And the German medic simply did his job, regardless of uniform, nationality, class, etc.
American combat medics are instructed to do the same. In fact, such treatment is mandated by the Geneva Convention. But it doesn’t apply to American civilians, except in dire emergencies. If you have a pre-existing condition, most insurance companies will refuse to cover it. If you want to keep your insurance premiums reasonable, insurance companies simply stick you with savings-demolishing deductibles. If you work for small companies that offer health insurance and one of your co-workers gets cancer and requires expensive long-term treatment, the company’s insurance carrier raises the entire company’s premiums until it can no longer afford to offer the benefit.
Arguably, my grandfather received better and fairer treatment on the battlefield from the enemy than many Americans get from their own healthcare system today. And make no mistake: The medical industry and the insurance companies that discriminately dole out access to the medical wares too often treat the poor and disenfranchised with less respect than they would afford a (well-insured) enemy.
I don’t blame the doctors or nurses or surgeons. I blame the system. Any system that offers better or worse treatment for my child or any of his soccer teammates because they have more or less money or better or worse insurance is wrong, unconscionable, and ultimately evil.
The Declaration of Independence clearly states that we are all endowed with certain unalienable rights, among these “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The right of “life” is made alienable by our healthcare system. So think real hard before you laud the status quo or oppose a major overhaul in the inflated, bankrupting nightmare that serious medical treatment amounts to for millions of people in this country. If you don’t have much money or insurance and you get sick, you’ll find yourself tossed onto the health insurance industry’s class battlefield. And there might not be any Nazis around to save you.
E.R. Bills is a local freelance writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications.
