Health Care Story

I met an interesting man the other night. I decided to go to the restaurant bar where I stay in the Silicon Valley for a glass of wine and dinner, while watching the news. No sooner had I settled in to watch the news, when my neighbor on the next stool decided he wanted to strike up a conversation. It was only a bit of a conversation – he talked, I listened. He was an older fellow (80 years old it turned out), who was living at the motel for awhile. He had come from Hawaii to take care of getting health insurance for his wife from his union. Therefore, he was kind of “between homes” at the moment. He was originally from the area, so was not a stranger in town.
As his health story unfolded it became clear that he had some chronic problems that needed to be fixed. He has cataracts and needed the second eye to be repaired (the first had been successfully fixed some time ago). He also had an ongoing problem with swallowing, something about his throat needing to be “opened up” to allow him to swallow solid food – he appeared to be drinking his dinner so that problem wasn’t interfering with him that night. He had some other on-going problem which I can’t seem to recall at this time. Whatever it was, it was a minor irritation rather than a real health problem.
He was telling me how great his insurance was. He had a combination of medical and union insurance which took care of his health care needs. That sounded pretty good. Then he told me his plans for the weekend. He was going to enter the hospital by going through the emergency room. He complained that it has become harder to get in that way, you can only do it with a call to 911. So he plans on calling 911 on Friday evening, and take an ambulance to the hospital. He could easily walk in, but they don’t allow it so he will ride in instead. Once there, he knows that they will be too busy to take care of him on the weekend, so he plans on staying there until they can get to him on Tuesday or Wednesday, which will save him five or six days of living expense at the motel!!! Then he figures they will take care of his eye, his throat and whatever else he has wrong and that will be that. Since he has medical, all of his expenses will be covered by the State and he will save five days living expenses by staying at the hospital. Not only that, but the nurses will take care of him and change his bed for him.
I thought this was a very telling story. And we wonder why we can’t seem to afford to take care of the medical needs of Americans. What an amazing abuse of the system, and what a huge waste of money and resources. I am not sure that his plans will all work out, but it was clear from his stories that this is his normal approach to health care, and that he had no concept that there was anything wrong or unusual about it. It seems that his approach is the common approach among the people that he knows. I asked him why he didn’t take the route of going to a doctor and setting up a normal appointment for these things. He said that it would take far too long to get treatment that way. He would have to do it three different times, which could take months (or years) because of the delays associated with getting treatment for such things. His approach gets it all taken care of at once in less than a week.
I don’t exactly know what to do or say about this, but I found it to be interesting, and disturbing.