So one thing I wanted to do with this blog is compile thoughts about current events some. I live in the United States, and I’ve been politically active for…well, a long time. The current situation has been a bit rough on my psyche, and I’m having to talk about it a lot, because once you understand the effects that this stuff will have, you can’t just look away and ignore it.
But some of the talk has been going off in unwelcome directions, and so I decided to try and put it here. I can speak my mind, let off the frustration and my thoughts, and people can interact if they so choose, rather than me cornering them on the phone or whatnot.
So let’s talk healthcare in the US.
Healthcare in the US, unlike any civilized country, is considered a personal thing, rather than a societal good. So we have an extensive network of for-profit entities that seek to totally vertically integrate, top to bottom, to suck off all your money along the whole line. Medical clinics owned by a corporation, that refer you to a pharmacy owned by a different branch of the same corporation, that bills your insurance which is under a third branch, and then you get denied anyways. The whole system is perverse and I could honestly go on for some time about it, but for today we’re going to cover some of my own personal experiences.
Around 2017, I was diagnosed with an eye condition resulting in gradual loss of sight. I was recommended to see a specialist about an hour away, which I did, although by then we were into 2018. He said my case required urgent surgery, and the words “medically necessary [to save your sight]” were used.
This particular condition, a friend of mine from high school had it; resulted in him getting bounced from the military. At the time, the treatment was to wait until your vision degraded beyond usefulness, and then you would receive a corneal graft from a donor, a form of organ donation. The costs of this are, of course, extreme. Aside from having to find the organ to begin with, the recovery period per eye is about 3 months, the cost is into 6 digits, both eyes will need to be done (and as you only do one eye at a time, you will need a second donor). There’s a number of possible complications, such as graft rejection, and even if you manage to avoid all of those, it never works as well as your original eyes, and you need to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of your life, to prevent your own body attacking and destroying what it perceives to be foreign tissue.
However, in the interim, a new procedure had been developed; the specialist I went to had been in the FDA trials for the procedure before it was approved, which was a reason for selecting him; nobody else in the area would’ve had more experience. In all there would be 4 total surgeries, 2 on each eye, and if they were successful, my vision would hopefully be preserved.
While I no longer remember the exact sequence of events, my insurance stepped in at some point and refused to pay for the treatment. As the treatment was FDA approved, we challenged them, and they noted that the specialist was using a ‘modified’ sequence of the procedure, which meant they classified it as ‘experimental surgery’ and would not be covering it. This is in fact true; the specialist had disclosed to me that he was working on, for lack of a better explanation, refining the procedure. His modifications made the surgery less invasive and damaging, leading to lower pain, faster healing time, and less complications.
The insurance didn’t care. They indicated that they would not be paying, and that they would gladly pay for my corneal transplants in 10 years, which was the approved method. (I will note that I feel this was a bullshit cop out; they probably figured in ten years I would be at a different job under a different provider and it wouldn’t be there problem, although they were right in that.)
I ended up paying out of pocket, and while I consider saving my sight (everything went fine!) to be a valuable purchase, it should be noted that as an IT technician, my productivity in society drops very rapidly if I am unable to see.
There’s the rub. It was much cheaper, by a full order of magnitude to get the surgery THEN, and not have to worry about the costs or complications involved with a graft. And that’s before the cost of the maintenance drugs, and the reduced quality of life for being more vulnerable to illness. But nobody cared because our entire society runs on a “that’s a next-quarter problem” idea.
A year or two after that I hurt my arm. I was at the time unable to get treatment for it, and by the time I did, which was earlier this year, the physician said that I will likely never regain full function in the arm, equivalent to before the injury, because I waited so long. While my arm is much better, I believe this will be the case. And again, I lived with arm pain for five or more years, because paying to get it treated immediately was out of my reach, and ‘taking care of myself’ was considered my burden, and not something society should handle because if I can see and function optimally, I am more productive for the capitalist machine.
Everybody gets sick. This is a statement of fact. If you’ve never had a major medical issue, I’m glad you’ve been so lucky, but it doesn’t take much. The eye condition, they don’t even know what causes it, and anyone can get injured. For me it was one bad movement.
I actually hate when “people who never are sick in all their days of school” are championed; they got sick, they just showed up sick, too. Or perseverance porn about people who have cancer having PTO donated by coworkers so they can go and get chemo. The fact that these stories are framed as ‘feel good’ triumphs, rather than abysmal failures of the entire system, is infuriating.
And if we’re not going to help each other handle the human condition with each other, what is the point of having society?
I know this is a weak ending. I’m sure this topic will get visited again.
-Arrow