Falling Back, 44. Value for our Money.

Yesterday afternoon I had an appointment at the local hospital for a mammogram. 

There really is nothing special in that, except for the fact that I was scheduled for one automatically, upon having passed my fiftieth year. For several years, our regional health service programs mammograms for all women fifty years old and over, as an attempt to cut down on the death rates for breast cancer, by catching it early. A few years ago, they began on another project to prevent colon cancer, as well, in both men and women.

It was simple. I received a letter telling me of the appointment. I showed up, followed the line to Radiology, and waited. It turned out that the waiting room for mammograms was in a different spot, as a nurse cleared up after a few minutes, by coming out and calling anyone who was scheduled for one to follow her.

After a few minutes, I was called in, and answered a questionnaire. I was also told I would receive the results at home within a month or less. If the radiologist had any doubts about anything that showed up, I would be given an appointment at the larger hospital in Santiago, but that I shouldn't worry if that happened. Many of the shadows that appeared tended to be absolutely benign. 

Then I went through the uncomfortable procedure and left when I finished. As I left, I was thinking about luck.

For this, I'm lucky to be living here and now. The appointment is automatically set up for me, and I pay absolutely nothing. Just as I would pay nothing if anything is found, and I have to go through surgery and chemo. Yet, in the United States, healthcare has so crumbled, that families can go bankrupt even having insurance. But this problem is one that is less than thirty years old.

When I was growing up, my father had Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts health insurance, wholly paid for by his employer. It covered every visit we made to the hospitals in those years, from my first pneumonia, when I was ten, to my mother's stroke when she was fifty. We didn't have to pay anything, back then. In later years, when my father changed jobs, his new insurance covered all of us until my mother got a job with her own health insurance. It, too, paid everything. My mother's accepted her even with her pre-existing condition, and paid eighty percent of her prescriptions. My father's paid for his stomach cancer wholly, even though he hadn't been working long at that job when he was diagnosed. I had my own insurance when I started working, first at Blue Cross, Blue Shield, for which I was paying every week I think twenty dollars. I had a hundred dollar deductible. After a few months, I switched to an HMO that was much cheaper and which I never got to use. The only out-of-pocket expenses we ever had to pay were a portion of our prescriptions. 

That was in 1991, when we moved here. Now, from what I read, it costs thousands of dollars each month to have decent health insurance, and, even so, it doesn't cover everything, and the deductibles are horrendous. People have had to set up Go Fund Me pages to help pay for medical expenses. Where has the humanity gone in the country that saw me grow up? And how can people criticize the European (and Canadian) health systems? We don't pay anything extra for our health system, just our taxes. And, no, our taxes are not that much higher than in the United States. 

Yes, the biggest problem we have are waiting lists. It took my father less than a month to be diagnosed with stomach cancer, receive surgery, be declared a surgical cure, and be sent home in Boston. Here, it would take from three to four months. The biggest problem here is waiting to see the specialist for something not life threatening. It can take up to a year and a half or two years to solve annoying health problems, sometimes. But we never have to pay anything except a small percentage of prescription medicines.  

If my decision depended only on healthcare, I would not return to the United States now. Our system has flaws, and is being underfunded by too many right-wing governments that would prefer to privatize large parts of it. We haven't got enough doctors and nurses, and too little infrastructure. But it works, and it's an example of our taxes returning benefits. The philosophy behind socialized medicine is not to make money, but to save lives. Isn't that what the Hippocratic Oath is all about?

Life continues.