Sicko

This summer my mother was in the hospital.  She'd been at a swimming meet with my sister to watch her grandchildren compete, and another parent, who happened to be a nurse, overheard a conversation in which my mother described the symptoms of an illness she had been suffering through, mainly stomach pain I believe.  The nurse ascribed the symptoms to something serious and insisted that my mother see a doctor, which she did, the next day.  The doctor took a test of my mother's pulse, noticed that she had an extremely elevated heart rate and called for an ambulance.  They sent her to Underwood Hospital in Woodbury, NJ, the closest hospital to where my parents live, although not the closest to where the doctor's office was located.  Why did she end up in Underwood - a smaller, less renowned hospital, especially for heart conditions, than the closer Kennedy Hospital in Washington Township, or the more renowned Cooper Medical Center in Camden?  Because that's where her insurance company told them to take her.  That's where the doctors in her insurance company's practice were.  Doctors didn't make the decision.  An insurance company did.

My mother arrived on a Thursday, was diagnosed with a rapid and fluctuating heartbeat, which the doctors on duty at Underwood did a wonderful job to control.  And I'm very grateful that she went to the doctor's that day seeking help and that these doctors and nurses did their best to treat her for such a serious condition - but despite their best efforts, they could not diagnose a proper treatment solution and the heartbeat remained high through the weekend, where only a skeleton crew was on duty and only limited resources were being used to solve the issue with her heart.  On Monday, the long-awaited visit from a specialist occurred, a friendly Indian man who came up with a technical diagnosis for her condition and prescribed a drug treatment to reduce the heartbeat, as opposed to a surgical method.  The drug he gave her, though, reacted badly within my mother's system and she got very sick that night, passing out in bed, and needed to be revived by the great nursing staff at the hospital.  I arrived for my third time at the hospital on Tuesday morning - which was supposed to be her day of leaving - to find my mother a hysterical mess, after the experience the night before, and being met by a doctor that morning - not the specialist again - who chastised her for not being able to handle the drugs and gave her a bunch of scary scenarios for dealing with the problem now.  My father had to have this doctor barred from further interaction with my mother and they were waiting - near panic - for the specialist to return from surgeries at other hospitals.  The nurses were great.  The other doctors periodically appearing were sympathetic.  But there appeared to be only one guy in this entire hospital - or at least only one approved by my mother's insurance company - who could help her.  And my mother waited four days to see him the first time, and then over 24 hours to see him again, during which she'd had a horrible experience with the drugs he'd prescribed.   

I finally watched Sicko the other night, the Michael Moore documentary on America's health care system.  I would highly recommend it to every single citizen of the United States, and anyone who watches it and isn't appalled by our health care system is either working for the insurance industry or drug companies, or is one of the brain-dead 24% still supporting President Bush.   Through a series of extended anecdotes, Moore shows just how horrible things go within an HMO system that is designed to make Blue Cross, Aetna, Cigna, and Kaiser Permanente profits - huge, massive profits - by limiting or denying medically required procedures.  He lands interviews with people on the inside, who detail how they received bonuses and promotions for denying claims, from a woman's ambulance ride from the scene of a car accident that left her unconscious (but was not pre-approved... by whom? we're not sure, since she was unconscious) to several more serious incidents, including a bone-marrow transplant that would have saved one man's life, but instead left him dead, according to his widow.  One former employee of one of the HMOs admits that his actions probably killed several people.  He at least was remorseful.

The drug companies fair little better, and the influence of both Big Pharma and Big HMO on the government today is staggering.  There are four lobbyists living in Washington for every Congressman, just in the health care industry alone.  And the donations to politicians are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Bush himself received nearly a million dollars from the health care lobby alone.  And even an old foe, Hillary Clinton - whose universal health care attempt in 1993 got slammed by Republicans and a willing media as something akin to communism - is now the second highest paid senator by the health care industry.  No wonder her new health care plan works through the same horrible insurance industry we have today.  The whole thing is just appalling.

The rest of the film takes place in foreign countries - Canada, England, France, and Cuba, where the state of medical care is dramatically better than in the U.S.  The film's take is obviously biased, and everyone filmed in these countries seems to love their system - which I'm sure is not an accurate take.  But the results speak for themselves.  Every single western democracy has universal health care paid by the government except for America.  Every single one.  And we spend per capita the highest of all of these countries.  Do we get what we pay for?  Not exactly.  We are the 37th healthiest nation in the world, just ahead of Slovakia and the aforementioned Cuba.  Number 1?  That would be France, a country that our president and a compliant media has labeled as evil.  So evil that an extended interview with a bunch of American expats living there has them embarrassed and ashamed at all of the incredible medical care benefits they have received by moving to France, while their relatives struggle at home within a system that is providing profits for a few major corporations, but no one else.  How did it come to be like this?  How come we are not on the streets demanding universal health care?  How come no major presidential candidate has proposed a system that eliminates the insurance industry's influence on the current system?  Why is anyone who isn't paid as a shill for the industry against this?  Why would you be against having free medical care?  We can pay for it.  It will be cheaper than the care we are currently paying for.  And your treatment will not get worse -- it will improve.  Dramatically.  You can go to the doctor you choose, for the treatment you require, without pre-approval by some insurance company underling who is getting paid for trying to deny you coverage, or to make it as difficult as possible for you or your doctor to get paid.  Why is this happening?  Michael Moore asks the question, but he doesn't provide the answer.  I think we're all just a bunch of idiots here, but I can't say we're dumber as a people than Canada or France, can I?  Are we just dumb?  I don't know.  Go watch the movie.

My mother's heart specialist finally showed and did his best to calm my mother down that Tuesday afternoon, and he put her on a new drug that wouldn't react as strongly with my mother's system.  A fortunate  effect of the previous drug's limited treatment was that the heart rate had been reduced, so the new treatment only needed to keep it low.  My mother was discharged on Thursday - a full week after she entered the hospital - but she struggled with the new drug all weekend, feeling sick for several hours each time she took it.  She met with her general practitioner on Monday, described her symptoms - which seemed to be worsening - and the doctor assured her she was just adjusting to the medication.  But another bad incident overnight landed my mother back in the hospital on Tuesday, and she refused to take any more drugs.  The specialist finally saw her sometime Tuesday night - now five days since he'd last seen her - and took her off his second drug treatment and put her on a third - which happened to be the same drug that the first doctors who treated her put her on - now some two weeks later.  My mother had taken that drug without adverse effects before, and since the heart rate was normal now, she was told this other drug would work.  And it has, I suppose.  She was released from the hospital at the end of that week and hasn't had any significant problems since.  Some fatigue and some headaches from the medication, but for the most part, her life is back to normal now, and for that, I am thankful.  And I appreciate the help that the doctors and nurses at Underwood provided.  Perhaps it takes three different drugs provided in multiple doses over two weeks to get a rapid heartbeat under wraps.  Perhaps that was the treatment she would have gotten at any hospital, or anywhere in the world.  Perhaps the only heart specialist available in France or Canada or England or Cuba would take four days to see her initially, nearly a full day to see her after a major reaction to the drugs he prescribed left her unconscious, and another long weekend to see her after the second drugs he prescribed were also having adverse reactions.  Or maybe - just maybe - the insurance companies and the drug companies have so much control over our system that we don't know what the fuck we're doing with our medical care in this country. 

My grandmother suffered a stroke some years ago and ended up at Underwood, where she seemed to be relatively recovered when I visited a couple days later.  She died a couple days after I saw her, succumbing to another stroke while still in the hospital, and they were unable to save her.  I never doubted that she was being provided with the best medical care available.  This is America, after all.  Every possible measure must have been taken to save her life.  Right? 

Comments

[Jan Aronson]

Very well written and most importantly glad to hear your mom's doing well.

[Bill]

Thanks Jan. I take back all the bad things I said about you during the softball season. Or maybe, just some of them. F Switsky.

[Jan Aronson]

A little advice........DON'T KISS A$$..........

[Switsky]

Just so you know I have never said a bad thing about Jan.

[Jan "Buy One Newspaper Get One Free"]

F switsky