American medicine
We leave a piece of ourselves at the doctor’s and steal it back at night, recomposing ourselves in our sleep, trying to recover the dignity we lost in impersonal, antiseptic offices. It may be a sample, a tissue, or dignity, or privacy, or hope; but we are somehow diminished by health care that is neither.
What in our present discourse about insurance, efficiency, socialism, and cost acknowledges this—that we sacrifice so much of what we are to be cured, and it is difficult for us to recoup the loss, to repair the emotional damage done by the indignities and heartless paperwork? What in this discourse acknowledges our humanity?
Does anyone observing the bureaucracy of a doctor’s office or hospital or laboratory or insurer think it’s about healing, compassion, fellow concern?
Our medical system, which should rightly be called insurer care, is death-haunted precisely because it’s so patently, so invasively about money. It should be like our concern for children, but it’s about buying and selling and dunning—and this pushes us deathward even in our youth and much more so in old age. Our system is as predatory as the banks and credit card issuers. We are hounded to our graves. And then our heirs are hounded to cough up for our last moments. In this most church-going nation what about this service to Mammon is religious?
What did you expect? the system asks us. And we are at a loss to answer because the question is so crass.—DM
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