Medical care for everyone is a pipe dream, the kind that robs people who aren't…

posted by Bill Arnett @ 10:59 PM Permalink

…even poor of their dreams, financial security, dignity, and their ability to lead ordinary lives not subjugated by back-breaking medical bills that have gone absolutely, insanely, out of control.

I'm one of the "lucky" ones I guess, if you call years of suffering from Agent Orange caused cancers, months of chemo, six weeks and 6,000 rads of radiation therapy, ending with a radical neck dissection (a term of art in the medical field) meaning they put me out, opened the left side of my face, neck, and shoulder with a single l-o-o-o-n-n-g cut from up behind my left ear down to my collar bone and then started cutting out cancerous-looking material, sending it to the lab, and kept doing this until 8 1/2 hours later the lab sent back word that the sample was cancer-free. They removed almost everything, closed off several veins, severed irrevocably my fifth and 11th cranial nerves and the long thoracic nerves, leaving me in eternal pain. I have a block of muscles beneath the "winged scapula" on my left side that are permanently cramped and cannot receive a reciprocal signal from my brain that everything's o.k., relax, because of the severed nerves the lines are down. Imagine Barry Bond whacking you at the bottom of your left scapula repeatedly over and over, never stopping. The severing of the fifth cranial nerve has resulted in a necrotic (dead) jawbone and they told me I would probably lose all my teeth by age 50. Ha! I fooled them, I still have almost 16 complete teeth left!

And I'm one of the lucky ones. I still have many issues of the mental kind, but I AM one of the lucky ones and here's why:

About two weeks ago I was having trouble breathing, something not unusual in light of every cartilaginous structure in my throat suffering from radiation scarring, but usually manifesting itself as difficulties swallowing.

My Warrior Woman wife, Mila, wouldn't let me rest until I went to the VA clinic to see my doctor. My doctor immediately sent me to urgent care, urgent care doctors there sent me to our County Hospital. I was put into a private room (received all my morphine intravenously. Yee haw! first true relief from pain in months). I'm one of the lucky ones.

Double pneumonia was the diagnosis, so loads and loads of medicines through the I.V. and a 'script for some very powerful antibiotics and I was sent home.

I m one of the lucky ones. In today's mail I received a copy of the billing to the V.A. from the County Hospital, which caused my heart to drop to somewhere around my ankles until I read the admonitions that they were not to bother me or attempt to collect the bill from me, that the V.A. was picking up the whole tab. I really was one of the lucky ones.

The total tab: $17,500.00 (seventeen thousand five hundred dollars) One night in the hospital that would have broken me even if I was healthy and working. How do people pay these bills? Do the hospitals really pack the bill when they know they are going to get paid by a government entity? The destitute would not have gotten either the quality of care, the individual room, nurses checking them every twenty-thirty minutes, in fact, the only thing that would have been equal(ly) bad would have been the disgusting food, half of which I could not identify. This one night would have bankrupted every single friend I have, and many of those are affluent, but, as with most of the affluent, their money sunk into mortgages, swimming pools, BMWs or Mercedes, plummeting stock markets and sinking money market accounts, and the two or three of them I've talked to said this would be a major, major setback for them and probably catastrophic.

I'm one of the lucky ones. Cradle to grave free or even low cost health insurance as provided by every major industrial country on earth to its citizens is a pipe dream, a fantasy, a fairy tale told to help subjugate, pacify, and keep the masses from learning the true cost of health care and the reasons for which universal health can NEVER come to fruition in America, despite anything our "elected representatives" say to the contrary Big Medicine charging a years salary or more for a one night stay and Big Pharma, which sells cheap drugs everywhere and to anybody but the poor bastards living in America, you know, those of us close enough to be told to drop our drawers, bend over, and grab our ankles while we get screwed without a kiss, dinner, or a movie.

I'm one of the lucky ones, although I paid a terrible cost in the past that gave me the entitlement to future care, I am one of the lucky ones.

Lucky. Ones. My country being destroyed by the millionaire white man's club (the senate) and other politicians without a care other than safeguarding their jobs, no matter how awfully they sell out the people who sent them there. After all, when a politician has been bought that S.O.B. HAD BETTER STAY BOUGHT, without regard to the destruction of our beloved country, one interest group at a time, and with republicans praying for Obama to fail and doing everything in their power, these meager, sub-standard, ugly-spirited, uncaring, mindless cowardly traitors to America and Americans.

I. Am. One. Of. The. Lucky. Ones. Somehow. That. Gives. Me. No. Comfort.

Labels: Barrack Obama, betrayal, big medicine, big oil, big pharmaceutical, hypocrisy, rant