Yesterday, I was reading an article on Alternet about nine countries that are better at taking care of their people. While it was a great article, I saw it repeating a narrative that strikes me as untrue, yet that many liberals are happy to just go along with.
If you have access to the best health care in the United States, then you have some of the best care in the world.
Many liberals talk about how our access to healthcare is terrible, but those that can afford it receive some of the best healthcare in the world. While I've never experienced healthcare in other countries, I've experienced first hand this countries healthcare system. I've experienced the total lack of care, and the healthcare providers trying to get away without actually providing healthcare. I've witnessed them make such simple, easily prevented mistakes that it cost people their lives. This article isn't an attack on healthcare providers, but the system that allows them to be so careless and provide as little in the way of actual care as possible.
My Story
For much of my early life I was rather well off. My mom was an OB/GYN advice nurse working at Kaiser Permanente. She was unionized, and was making enough that she could work three days a week and still afford to send me to private school and buy me everything I wanted; even though she was a single mother.
When I was in elementary school, my behavioral problems made it necessary for my mom to take me to a psychiatrist. Naturally, she took me to Kaiser, the place where she herself worked. Their findings showed that I had ADHD, a common diagnosis at the time, and I was prescribed Ritalin. I was also put on anti-depressants, even though I wasn't actually depressed. At the time, I was only 8 years old. Gradually, they kept upping the doses of Ritalin, until I was taking 5 pills two times a day. In addition to seeing a psychiatrist every couple months, I also weekly met with a therapist. We'd talk for a little bit and then just play chess or checkers. The fact that these therapists I was seeing mostly played games with me rather than provide me with actual therapy should have raised a red flag, but I was young and didn't have many friends so I just enjoyed having someone to play with.
The psychiatrist was the one that prescribed me meds, and when she would review the meds I was taking, she'd always get the dosage wrong. Since she was looking at my chart and still getting the dosage wrong, that should have been a sign that something was wrong; but my mom and I wrote it off as she saw a lot of patients. It wasn't until my psychiatrist went to work at a different Kaiser and I got a new one that we learned the truth. When the new doctor got there, he reviewed my chart and talked about the meds I was taking. When I told him I was taking 5 pills twice a day, he was shocked. That was not what was written on my chart, and 6 pills was the absolute maximum any person should be taking in one day. That explained why the psychiatrist was always wrong when she read my chart, because she couldn't legally prescribe me the amount of pills I was taking, so she wrote a legal amount on my chart.
After that I would see an ever changing roster of therapists and psychiatrists. When I reached the 4th grade, my grades began to sharply decline; from A's and B's to F's. It wasn't because I couldn't figure out the work; I was always exceptionally bright and would repeatedly score in the 99th percentile on standardized tests. It was that I wasn't able to focus, pull myself together, and do the work. The meds weren't helping me concentrate anymore, and my mom could ground me and take away my privileges all she wanted; she couldn't get me to do my work. Rather than reevaluate my diagnosis, the psychiatrist would give me a stern expression and give my mom new ways to discipline me, which never worked. I myself was baffled as well. I could sit there, try to force myself to do my work, but my mind would drift and I would just sit there and get nothing done. Eventually this happened more and more until eventually my grades sunk to straight F's and I was kicked out of private school and forced to retake 6th grade in public school.
After sixth grade we moved from San Francisco to Sacramento, and I stopped seeing therapists altogether and just saw psychiatrists; who continued to go along with the diagnosis I'd been given when I was 8 without question. In 8th grade, when I was 14, I was suddenly suspended from school pending an expulsion hearing for sexual harassment. The charges were bogus, but the school had a 0 tolerance policy on sexual harassment, had just gotten new principals who wanted to make a showing, and due to my unusual behavior patterns I was an easy target. Before my expulsion hearing, I sat down with the school psychiatrist, a public sector worker, and it took her one hour to diagnosis me not with ADHD, but Asperger's Syndrome; an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. That discovery got me sent to a non-public school that was supposedly for treating behavioral problems and mental illnesses like mine, but in truth it was really a detention center where they'd sit on you (literally) when you screwed up.
The problems I had in focusing on doing work has spread to all aspects of my life, making it so just getting out of bed can be a chore for me. I can no longer afford healthcare or medication, so I continue to go untreated, living each day struggling to perform even the most simplest of tasks, and getting a job being totally out of the question. I can only wonder how my life would have been different if in those six years of seeing nearly a dozen different therapists and psychiatrists; they had taken the time to give me a proper diagnosis and treatment; and worked with me to overcome my disability rather than letting it progress.
My Mother's Hell
In the summer of 1999, we had moved from San Francisco to Sacramento. My mom, who had worked as an RN at Kaiser for twenty years, suddenly found herself without a job because, to save money, they replaced all the RNs with less qualified LVNs who they could pay less. So, my mom wound up taking a job at the new Kaiser call center up here, at a significantly lower salary than she had been paid before. Late that year, while looking over her shoulder as she backed out of her driveway, there was a snap in her jaw. 20 years earlier my mom had major reconstructive surgery stemming from a birth defect, and after that snap my mom could feel that part of the bone was gone.
The pain for her was terrible, unlike anything she had ever felt. Kaiser tried to deny that anything was wrong, and prescribed my mom pain killers. When the pain continued to get worse, to the point she couldn't go to work, she continued to go to Kaiser for answers. They took X-rays, which they never showed to her, and continued to insist nothing was wrong. After 6 months of being unable to work, she was laid off from her job, and she'd never work again. She was only 50.
For two years my mother would continue to go to Kaiser, insisting something was wrong, and each time they'd prescribe her more pain killers and tell her to go away. Eventually, my mom went and got a second and third opinion from non-Kaiser doctors, which was outside her Kaiser insurance and she had to pay out of her own pocket. They showed her the X-Ray of her right jaw, and it showed that the bones on the right side that connected the jaw to the rest of the face had disintegrated, and that her jaw was just hanging there. They explained that there is no way any doctor could miss something so obvious, and in all likelihood Kaiser intentionally deceived her. My mom confronted the Kaiser doctors with the evidence, and they finally relented to performing surgery. Even after the surgery, they refused to admit that there had been anything wrong, even though they had to spend hours picking out fragments of bone before reattaching my mom's jaw to her face.
After surgery, my mom returned to one of the doctors she got a second opinion from, and he gave her disturbing news. In one final effort to stick it to my mom, they had done something they shouldn't have. In surgery, rather than working from the outer cheek, they'd worked from within the mouth, exposing all their work to the bacteria in the mouth. The doctor told her that this guaranteed infection, and that all the work they had done was compromised. My mom got terribly infected, to the point where puss profusely leaked into her mouth. The pain she was in at this point was more intense than it had been before the surgery. Kaiser refused to admit wrongdoing, and prescribed antibiotics for the infection and more pain killers. My mom lingered in this pain for a few years before the infection finally dissipated, but not before eating away at the work they had done and leaving her jaw hanging once more.
After all that, and Kaiser refusing to even admit that there had been anything wrong in the first place, much less that they had (intentionally) botched the surgery, my mom gave up on having it fixed. Her condition has gradually deteriorated since then. Without that jaw being correctly attached, her teeth all broke and fell out. She can't eat solid foods anymore, and she is in constant pain. At some point, Kaiser, who continued to insist that the surgery which wasn't necessary had been a complete success, decided that my mom was merely "imagining" her pain, labelled her as a drug addict, and cut her off from Vicodin. She is now 60, unable to work, her retirement account and savings drained, and continues to be in constant pain.
The Death of My Uncle
A couple of years ago, my uncle was diagnosed with cancer. There was a tumor on his kidney. The doctors decided to remove the kidney, and afterwards, to prevent the cancer from spreading, they were going to give him chemo. All in all a pretty routine, low risk procedure. Unfortunately, the doctors botched it, and sealed it up without noticing their mistake. His blood pressure gradually dropped, all while telling the doctors he didn't feel right and something was wrong. The doctors felt they knew better, and ignored his complaints for a few days, until he finally sunk into a coma. It was then they realized their mistake; they had nicked the spleen and he had been bleeding internally since the surgery. They removed the spleen, but his diagnosis was grim; they weren't sure if he'd recover from the coma.
After a couple months, he awakened from his coma. It took several months for him to recover enough to leave the hospital, where he then had to go to a rehabilitation center to relearn how to walk and talk. It would be well over a year before he was in any condition to have chemo, and by that point the cancer had spread. My uncle was in the process of suing the hospital for malpractice, but he died last New Year's Eve before he ever got them to court. I suppose the one small blessing is that he died before he could see what the new Republican governor would do to his beloved state of Michigan, because as a staunch liberal, seeing what's going on his state now might have killed him.
All of us had access to healthcare. We weren't poor, we had insurance, and received care. The problem was the quality of that care was terrible. When I hear people say that if you have access to health care in this country, you have access to the best health care in the world; it ticks me off. My life is a testament to the failures of the American health care system. Even rich celebrities and VIPs aren't immune to easily avoidable mistakes that might not have happened if doctors weren't overworked and were required to do a simple checklist. Martin Short had surgery, and the doctor performed it on the wrong side of his body. A couple years ago a congressman passed away because he was nicked during surgery and they didn't notice it in time. These are incredibly stupid human errors that should have never happened. The for-profit system doesn't just make access to quality health care out of reach for most Americans, it lowers the quality of health care for all Americans.