My handicap is I'm too old to remember past days and old customs here in America. The scene is 1963, early in the year, my fiance and I are sitting in our doctor's office and we are talking about birth control We are about to be married.
Our doctor, Samuel Ellis is near 90, a veteran of the 1918 flu epidemic, trotted his horse and buggy around west Philadelphia dodging barricades of coffins piled high (folks dying so fast they couldn't bury them with all due dispatch). Dr. Sam talked of a Lanteen Cap for us, that's cervical cup to today's generation. He walked my soon-to-be wife down the hall and installed it.
Sitting in his office he discussed in detail how it was to be used, charged me $5 for the visit which he collected at the door, slipped it in his wallet and we left.
Today, August 30, 2014, it cost us $185 for a self-pay visit to an HMO doctor who is on salary and the clock who runs through a laundry list of items and rarely touches my wife. When he does, it's ear-nose-throat-glands, jokes, script for pills and as they say on the TV doc shows, " treat m and street em."
I took an employee of mine to a local Tucson hospital who was having a heart attack and got him in a wheel chair, pushed him towards the ER entrance and they wouldn't take him in until I did the paperwork. The hospital wanted a pay guarantee while my employee sat there clutching his chest. Luckily, I had everything at the ready, he got in, the docs got to him, and they say I saved his life. That was luck.
I often wonder in the middle of some nights whether, had I not been that organized would he have died?
On many occasions, I have had cancer patients on wheel chairs trying to get in for chemo treatments, doctors visits and other life savings procedures that have been held up at the cashiers desk, and entrance has been stead-fastly refused until what I call the " WALLET - ECTOMY" has been performed.
Several times in Denver, Colorado, a few hospitals delayed chemo treatments for my late wife for just such occasions.
Part of the Hippocratic Oath doctors take is " Do No Harm." I can't help wondering if MONEY gets in the way of that sometime.
###
No comments:
Post a Comment