On Saturday night, as we were heading home, John stopped by to feed the animals and give things a quick check. He ate some takeout Chinese food from a local joint and then, as he was about to head back home, he suddenly began feeling very ill.
As he later told me, he became nauseous, then he started shuddering with chills, which meant he had a high fever. He wanted to throw up but for some reason he couldn’t. Then things really got scary. His lower regions began to swell. He drove back home -- a mile and a half away -- and feeling still worse, made another frightening discovery: there was blood in his urine.
John, it must be pointed out, is like the rest of us musicians, writers, and other underemployed folks in America. He doesn’t have health insurance. This sort of situation would be terrifying enough anyway, but under the circumstances it was pure hell for John.
Because he doesn’t have insurance, John rarely sees a doctor. He can’t afford it. However, he didn’t feel he had a choice in this case. The fever and nausea, the swelling, and finally the blood, convinced him he had to go to a local hospital emergency room. So he drove himself to the nearest hospital, a couple miles away in Port Jefferson. There he was kept waiting around for seven hours while he was given an exam and a sonogram. The doctors finally told him he had a bacterial infection. They gave him prescriptions for three drugs, including one for Cipro (the antibacterial drug used to treat anthrax), and told him to go home and take it easy. Nothing else. No real discussion of the problem, no information about how the infection may have started, no advice on how to prevent it from recurring.
Evidently, as an uninsured person, they didn’t feel John deserved anything more.
The script for the Cipro alone cost more than $200. With the other two drugs the bill came to almost $250. I don’t know how John paid it, but he did somehow. He is still nervous about the bill for the sonogram and ER visit, because knows it will be sizeable and he doesn’t have the money to pay it when it arrives. He said he’d probably ask the hospital to give him a payment schedule.
From my standpoint, the more I think about the obscene unfairness of this situation, the angrier I get. When I was diagnosed with cancer in 1998, I happened, by sheer luck, to still be on my ex-husband’s medical insurance policy. If I hadn’t been, the odds are I wouldn’t be alive today. As it was, I received very good treatment at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, including a six-week course of state of the art radiation treatments which in all probability saved my life. The bill for those treatments, plus major surgery and several days’ stay in intensive care along with several more days in the cancer ward, came to more than $200,000. Who the hell can pay that kind of money? If I had been uninsured, my only option would have been to go to County General’s emergency room, wait the customary 12-plus hours to be seen by a doctor there, and if I were extremely lucky, maybe be scheduled for surgery or treatment months down the line. If I died in the meanwhile, well, life’s tough when you’re uninsured.
Why are there so many uninsured Americans? Why is there no affordable health care for the self-employed, the unemployed, the underemployed? What the fuck are we supposed to do when we get sick? Do we deserve to die because we can’t afford health insurance?
Other things to wonder about: Why did John’s prescription for a week’s worth of Cipro cost $225? In Canada, where big drug companies have far less clout than they do here, that script would run more like $40 -- still pretty high, but at least not as outrageous. The cost of manufacturing ciproflaxocin hydrochloride in the lab does not even come close to the lower figure, let alone the high one. Who gave Bayer (the manufacturer of Cipro) the right to traffic in life and death? Does the whole “terrorist” anthrax scare, and the fact that the Cipro is used to treat anthrax, have anything to do, by chance, with the fact that our current Administration is very cozy indeed with big drug manufacturers?
How much more plain does it need to be? We need to make single-payer, national health insurance for everybody in the United States a major priority.
John Tabacco -- like everyone else who is uninsured -- is a precious, irreplaceable human being. For him to have had to undergo the nightmare he did a few nights ago is unthinkable...the fear, the insecurity, and now, the realization that he has incurred further debts that he may very well not be able to pay. Part of that nightmare -- the most horrible part -- came from sitting in that waiting room alone, his pain and fear infinitely compounded by the uncertainty of not knowing whether his problem was something serious -- and knowing all the while that if it did turn out to be life threatening, he had no way to pay for treating it and might very well die.
A possible death sentence, and just for being a poor musician. And if you don’t care for people in the arts, if the word “musician” is synoymous with "shiftless" in your lexicon, then try “substitute teacher” instead. Eric is a long-term sub at a high school here. He works a regular schedule but does not receive benefits, so he has no health insurance (he also doesn't get paid for snow days or holidays). He -- an 19-year educational professional -- could just as easily have been in John’s shoes at the hospital if he had happened to fall seriously ill. And in fact when he contracted cancer more than 20 years ago, he happened to be without insurance. Fortunately he was able to borrow some of the cost of his treatment from his then in-laws. It took him more than sixteen years to repay the debt.
John and Eric work harder than almost anyone I know. Neither John nor Eric want something for nothing. Neither, I’ll wager, do the vast majority of the uninsured in America.
We just want to live and be healthy, even if we can’t afford to belong to an HMO which is run for profit.
If there’s something wrong with that, something un-American, I’d like to know what it is.
