This will be a necessarily brief post this week. Like many in our country, my family is aging. I am several years past my white male sell-by date, which focuses the mind.
I am now involved in health care and the reality of death at a new, more personal level. For the second time in two weeks, I am flying to support a family member who is now in a new stage of life as the result of an unexpected fall.
The first week I spent with them turned out to be a drumbeat of accident, illness, and death.
One of my family member’s best friends, whom I called with an update, told me that their spouse had suddenly died the night before. Another friend got scan results that gave them a year to live. Another fell and broke their left arm and faces a long, difficult recovery.
I could say it was a hell of a week, and it was. A wakeup call for all of us who at one time walked on the path of life and heard older trees falling in the forest, far ahead. Today the trees are falling behind me, beside me, in front of me.
I am engaged, as a result, in many ways with a health care system in America that is crushingly dysfunctional. I have been told by senior medical professionals that some pieces of information are not given to older patients in the facility because they won’t understand and will just be upset. Takes the patient, whose life it is, right out of the picture when it comes to “who decides.”
I have been told by administrators that they can provide little help in making arrangements for home care – support for the practicalities of life like bathing, cooking, cleaning – because Medicare does not cover that, but can help schedule occupational therapy and physical therapy appointments because Medicare covers it.
I could go on, but so many of us, of you, have lived through such experiences that it is no surprise, especially for older people. Think, too, that such dysfunctionalities and poor practices are happening at a first-rate medical facility. Do you have to imagine what happens in emergency wards, smaller hospitals, poorer and minority neighborhoods, to people who do not have the resources for proper care?
Over the years I have asked my own practitioners whether they like the US medical system, the one they work in. Almost uniformly, from MDs to nurses, to orderlies, they hate it.
This will not be an essay on all our health care problems and how to fix them. There are reasons why US health care outcomes and coverage rank toward the bottom of the 38 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, while US health care costs vastly outstrip any other country in the world.
But I haven’t time right now to fix it. Just time to go advocate for one patient.
Oy vey! The sick society's diseased health "care" system is killing those who doesn't die naturally with dignity. And hastens degeneration and despair for those who can't pay cruel fees... if services are even available such as in the peripheries, rural zones, and Red regions where populations are judged unworthy since preconception. Israel's universal health insurance privileges all citizens. Thank you for your sobering post describing at the micro level WHERE WE LIVE AND DIE. Your family and friends are fortunate that you can reach them to support, comfort, and cheer as able.
Preach, brother Paul.