Explorations of Healthcare Untethered From the Ever-Expanding 8 to 5
Hey there, outlier.
You know how you keep wanting to find out if that nagging pain in your wrist is carpal tunnel, but you’re afraid it is and you’re going to turn out to need surgery, and can you afford that with your insurance or your health sharing ministry--or without insurance--and if you take that kind of time off work, will your clients come back? Can you afford to schedule time off for surgery, should you do it one hand at a time, will you be so slow typing with one hand it won’t be worth the trouble ‘cause you’ll be putting yourself at minimum wage, you can’t use your off-hand like that on a Wacom tablet anyway, should you just try and save for the time off? What if you do the operation and it gets worse? What if you don’t do the operation and it gets worse?
You go to the hospital and you get discharged with a sheet of paper that has the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all these different doctors and medical groups on it, so you can pay them. And then half those numbers are disconnected. And it’s not even the doctor’s phone number; it’s their revenue cycle management provider, whatever the heck that is.
You Google and Google, trying to find one doctor so you can give him his $1100 that your EOB says you owe him--whatever the heck that is, because it also says THIS IS NOT A BILL, and you never get a bill--did he write the debt off and you don’t really owe it?
Or is it going to hit your credit report any day now, because it turns out the hospital took down your address wrong when you showed up at the ER sockless in your bathrobe confused and half-coherent?
You know how months after you’ve gotten out of the hospital, the bills are still trickling in, and they never all get to you until one day you find out some remote radiologist you never met has sent a $900 bill you’ve never seen to collections and now it’s a $1267 bill with collections charges and a note on your credit report?
You know we can dress wounds with bandages that use cold plasma to kill bacteria and speed wound healing like we’re on Star Trek? We can treat disabling, painful, eye-stabbing chronic migraine with monoclonal antibodies instead of those drugs with the stroke risk and brain fog, but it’s really freaking expensive. We can make prosthetic feet with flexible ankles for natural strides and specialized for dancing, spiked ones with feet narrower than any pure biological athlete’s for mountain climbing, and wheelchairs for murderball.
Why is it in America we can keep people alive without breathing for a month with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation and get them back to running marathons, grow functioning liver cells in lymph nodes, but in the same country, a woman named Nikki White who could only sometimes afford treatment died a completely preventable death of lupus, a disease with known therapies?
William Gibson said it, the future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.
But the future is accessible.
I stole that from Annie Elainey Segarra, except that you can’t steal a movement, you can only join it.
Yeah, yeah, miracles are expensive. But not as much as you’d think. Not as much as your prescription warehousers and hospital Group Purchasing Organizations and everyone else setting your prices behind the scenes want you to believe. Expect miracles.
Notice I didn’t say “expect normal.” Normal shoots too low. You don’t really live your life between weeks in casts and braces, or in the gaps between flare-ups and doctor’s office stops on the diagnostic journey, because those things are part of life too. And while not being in pain is nice (it’s really really nice--I remember it, I think), a lot of life is spent figuring out how to do the things you want to do with the body you—and I—have.
This space will explore what that means from the perspective of paying for healthcare, with occasional digressions of fangirling Hugh Herr and kind of wanting to try the SugarBEAT to see if I can fix some more mood effects, but being irrationally afraid to.
Stay dangerous, my loves. And watch this space.
In the meantime, tell your friends!