Health Careless

“I don’t know what alarms me more, the state of our health care system or the fact that we accept it the way it is.” Thus spoke a friend of mine as we discussed the health problems of those dear to us. What follows is less of an essay and more of a series of vignettes that raised my blood pressure recently.

I was in the lobby of our local hospital recently, on my way to visit a friend who had broken his ankle rather badly. There was a large sign in the emergency room that said that the hospital is legally required to treat you even if you don’t have any money. There was another like it in the main lobby. This goes under the second clause of the initial quotation above. The fact that this isn’t simply understood by everyone tells a story about how hoodwinked people are about our basic human rights.

The friend who uttered the opening quotation also told me about an interview she heard on a British radio show. The guest was an American woman who had been diagnosed with cancer the day after her insurance had lapsed due to a clerical error by her employer. The woman spent a tense few weeks trying to rectify the situation, literally a life or death effort. Apparently the British interviewer had to keep reminding her to define her terms. “What is a co-payment? Our listeners wouldn’t know.”

Then there is the story of another friend who spends time in two different states, one in the east and one in the southwest. Her health insurance only works when she is in the eastern state. If she were to get sick in the southwest she would be on her own.

Getting back to the friend with the broken ankle, I was recently looking into bone growth stimulators. There is a class of devices that emit low intensity ultrasound directly into the affected place and stimulate bone growth. These are especially useful in cases where bones fail to heal rapidly.

I found one made by a company called Smith and Nephew. The Exogen 4000 appears to be a standard electronics box about 3” by 4” with an LCD screen and a cord leading to the small cylinder that emits the ultrasound. Apparently it retails for something between hundreds and thousands of dollars, depending on the source. This price spread is weird in itself. The real outrage, though, is how they power the thing. It has a non-rechargable, non-replaceable battery. The purchaser gets about 350-400 uses out of it and then it is junk. Used devices show up on eBay, with the sellers noting how many times it has been used and how many cycles should be left. It’s akin to buying a disposable laptop computer. It’s obvious that the device could be rechargeable or have a replaceable battery, or could even be plugged into the wall. However, Smith and Nephew, in its corporate greed, decided that profits should win out over affordability, effectively denying the use of their device to a class of uninsured. No way are these things going to be passed on from patient to patient indefinitely. It makes perfect sense financially, and it is a perfect crime against society.

Meanwhile, on the Vermont end of things, we put the call out through the neighborhood for various necessities for someone with a bum ankle, including a walker. Emails and calls came in and we found a couple who runs a free medical appliance exchange out of their garage. These good people spend their spare time maintaining and distributing walkers, wheelchairs, crutches, and the like. We all pitch in around here.

It’s a bright spot in the gloom, but not a solution. It looks as if the nation’s bought and sold “representatives” in Washington will do the bidding of the insurance and drug industries. Vermont will have to navigate its own path to a rational health care system and let the rest of the country follow along.

In the meantime, try not to get too sick, ok?

Update: Just when my blood pressure was returning to normal, I read about another symptom of the recession. Some companies are cancelling their employee's health insurance plans without telling them. The first that people know about it is when they present their insurance card to the nurse and it gets handed right back.