OK, so I've rarely spoken about this touchy topic in too much detail, and I actually won't today either. However, I need to weigh in.
Six weeks ago, I went overnight from being able to walk normally, to having such excruciating pain in my left thigh that I virtually couldn't walk at all. It turned out to be an IT band inflammation. Age has caught up with me, as my fall last Christmas should have completely illustrated. Being over sixty doesn't seem to be conducive to having no health insurance, which has been my norm for most of the last thirty years. I have started the wheels in motion to do the inevitable, even though my spirit didn't do it lightly. What seems sensible to most people is painful for me. I don't know if it's possible to list all my objections to our current system -- so I'll just say that my main ones are that it is largely based on duality ("fighting disease") and on some people profiting from others' illness and accidents. I don't find any of it sensible or ethical, but then again, my thinking finds few reflections out in the world.
But to receive an invoice for physical therapy at what appears to be the rate of $600 an hour (minus a small percentage because I am paying for it) is so stunning, it's hard to fathom. I am so grateful for this therapy, and it has helped enormously. I can pretty much walk normally again, although I am still having trouble with some stairs. I have nothing "against" anyone involved. As always, for me, it's mostly the philosophy of the thing. How can anyone, anywhere, stomach asking a person who has rarely made more than ten or fifteen dollars an hour, to pay sixty times what they have ever been paid per hour, for one hour of anything? Sorry, folks in the health care world, this isn't "caring" for anyone.
Sure, I'll call, check to see if there's been a mistake, and if not, maybe I'll get some eventual reimbursement. I'm willing to eat ramen noodles from now till Christmas and all the other ramifications of a sudden financial shock like this. My life has been a succession of such shocks. People wonder why I don't "fight" for better wages or health care or housing. Well, it's simply this. I don't believe that any of the current systems in place around the world can ever provide solutions to this kind of thing, so fighting will never produce a better outcome. These systems are not based on love. They are not based on beauty, or wisdom, or any of the attributes that are important to me -- which is why I've not been paid properly, or cared for. It's as simple as that. It's a vicious circle, which will only spin faster if I "fight" it. The only way forward for me is to act as lovingly as possible, and as honestly as possible. Writing this blog was the honest part.
