The Big Deal About Universal Health Care

Here's a little story about a guy from Ohio who got a little sick one day:

A funny thing happened last week. Actually, it wasn't funny
at all. A few months ago I started getting strange stomach upsets when
I ate, sort of a weird bloating effect that hurt a lot and kept me up
all night when it happened. Then it started to happen more and more
frequently, eventually nearly every day, so I did what any rational
person would do: I pretty much stopped eating. Bad idea. I lost 15
pounds over the course of two months or so and the pain just got much
worse, until finally Mrs. Word Detective, who had been trying to get me
to go to a doctor for quite a while, convinced me to go to the
hospital. This seems a good time to mention that The Great State of
Ohio is one of those states that allows health insurance companies to
refuse to offer you coverage, which they did to us several years ago.
We had good coverage through the Authors Guild when we lived in NYC
(where insurance companies can charge you out the wazoo but can't
refuse coverage entirely), but since we moved out here we have had no
insurance.
Meanwhile, back at the hospital, it developed that I had a severely
inflamed gall bladder and needed immediate surgery. So they yanked the
little sucker out in the nick of time (it was three times normal size
and the surgeon said he didn't understand why I was still walking
around and not, like, dead), leaving me with four incisions that look
like bullet wounds, and sent me home six hours later. Total time in
hospital = 22 hours. I wasn't in intensive care, and I didn't even get
a real room, just a glorified closet with the bathroom 50 feet down the
hall to which I would stagger trailing my IV pole behind me. But I seem
to be all right now, although it still hurts when I cough or sneeze.
And then the other shoe dropped. Bills have begun to arrive. So far,
they amount to (is everyone sitting down?) a little over $22,000.
That's twenty-two thousand dollars. For 22 hours in the hospital. And
we haven't received the surgeon's bill yet.
This strikes me as absolutely insane. Twenty-two thousand dollars?
That's close to the advance on my last book, which took me most of a
year to write. We don't have anywhere near that amount of money. But
something tells me the hospital plans to get its money one way or
another. As in take away our house.

Real quick off the top of my head, here's a list of people I'm close to who don't have any health insurance:

My brother
Jonah
Amy
Ted
My Uncle Billy
Jeff

This same thing could happen to any one of them at any time. Just
thinking about it gives me ulcers. Luckily, I'm not among the 43
million Americans who lack basic healthcare coverage.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 20, 2004 at 03:23 PM | Permalink