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Do you wear goggles around the house when doing the cleaning?
I certainly don't ů but I will handle household chemicals with much more caution in future,
since I learned that a simple splash of alkaline fluid could put you in deep debt, in a blink
of an eye, so to say, as it happened to me this January.
I was in a hurry to clean up the basement. Naturally, things go wrong under pressure,
and so it happened that the bottle of Clorox refused to open the lid. With powerful and
determined movements I ripped off the lid, and, to my very astonishment, the fluid came
out shooting right into my wide open left eye.
Instinctively I ran to the faucet and flushed the eye with warm water.
While I kept flushing I remembered that our tap water is slightly alkaline, and Clorox
is alkaline, too, hence I knew I would need to get an acid to neutralize the pH in my
eye. I couldn't think of any acid in the house, not even an old lemon or such.
But quickly I realized, as a graphic and web designer, that I do need both my eyes for
this line of work, and so I decided to drive to the next hospital and have them drip a
little acid into my eye. My solutions are always straight forward,
logical, and mostly simple, and so I assumed that the hospital would be helpful in similar
ways, just to find out, that logic, fairness, and the patient's well-being are not the center
pieces of the American health system. With a burning eye, red like tomato juice,
I kindly asked the receptionist to help me get a small amount of weak acid for the neutralization
process. I made it very clear, that I neither have
any monetary resources nor do I have insurance, and asked:
"Can you help me anyway? And what will it cost to pay it on my own?"
"Uh, don't worry" said the clerk, "We can help you. What is your name, address, and
social security numberů" And there, I repeated, "I do NOT have money,
I don't have insurance. What does it cost to have someone drip a little acid into my
burning eye?" "Uh, don't worryů let's start with your full
nameů" And so I did fill out the form ů and waited.
And I waited. I waited with the ugly grinding awareness that I had given away my self-determination
by signing their papers. Then a nurse looked at my eye, moved me to
a different room and made me wait again. Finally, indeed, I saw a doctor for perhaps a minute
or two. She looked into my eye, said to the nurse, "Flush it with sodium chloride!" and
moved away; and I just thought: "Really? Sodium chloride? A weak acid, who
knew?" While the simple solution of water and salt,
worth maybe 50 cents, was flushing my eye, the financial person came and offered me an
unforgettable deal: "When you pay $100 or more today, we will
give you a 40% discount on the upcoming bill." With a stupid look out of the one healthy
eye I asked the clerk, "Do you think this water solution could possible cost more than
$100?" Of course, she did not know, and nobody else
could answer my questions regarding the cost. But a few weeks later, my answer came in two
separate letters. First, the hospital charged $1200, which still left me with $720 to pay
after the 40% discount. And the second invoice came for the doctor, who claimed another $216.
All in all I have paid almost $1000 for just a little salt water dripping into my eye.
This is wrong.
Health care should never be for profit. Health care needs to be in the hands and in the control
of the community and it must be a non-profit institution, which has only one purpose: the
health and well-being of the community. For this reason I have outlined the basic
philosophy about community hospitals at http://communityhospitals.wordpress.com/ that you might like to study on your own terms.
Together we can build something brand new, so that "becoming healed" and "going broke"
are no longer part of the same equation!
Thank you for listening.