I'm fully recovered from my health scare, having spent a solid three weeks dealing with the pain and irritability of how modern medicine does miracles by keeping us alive, but cannot seem to fathom that there is a world in which everyone is not thoroughly steeped in the mechanisms of modern medicine.
Short version: I have a medical situation in which I cannot pass kidney stones on my right side, and lo, even the world's smallest stone necessitates a series of embarrassing surgical procedures involving straws, scopes, baskets, and lasers all inserted into your bladder through one’s pre-existing apertures.
I am grateful for this, but it is an endless frustration. Something bothers me about the late-stage capitalistic nature of asking me, "Would you like to fork over your $2,600 co-pay before you go under?"
It’s not that I don’t want to pay for the service, although I don’t. If one is insured against this kind of expense, it should be explicitly a negotiation between insurance and medical automata. I should be largely uninvolved. And frankly, one shouldn’t be pushed for the close before embarking on a future wherein the man will put a curly straw into one’s peen while you’re sleeping. Look, I get that a mere $2,600 is a paltry sum for the actual costs being levied against me in this arena; however, I don’t think the words “actual” and “cost” should ever appear near one another when discussing medical services. I used to beg for hospitals to put a price tag on a procedure, naively thinking that would allow a savvy shopper to benefit from the stabilizing nature of “market forces,” which are alleged to “keep things competitive.” But the truth is, competition doesn’t stabilize anything-- it creates hierarchies and keeps necessity and dignity miles apart from one another. Medical providers who offer “up front costs” are only doing so because the government makes them; they have not yet figured out how it is to their advantage.
However, if there is an advantage to the medical provider, they will figure it out forthrightly. There will be a present in our lifetime where the smiling desk technician at the emergency room will ask prospective patients for a credit score and whether they would like to supersize their procedure. It is as we learned in the dot-com boom; just because you are the product, doesn’t mean you won’t pay someone for the privilege.