Years ago, a former client of mine, who had gone to work for a major insurance company, called with an assignment. I didn't think much of it and accepted the job, happy to get the corporate gig. Turns out, I was writing denial letters to sick people, as in, “Dear So-and-So, Big Health Insurance won't pay for your cancer treatment. Give St. Peter our best. Sincerely, Dr. Asshole, Medical Director.”
I'm embarrassed to say I wrote the letters. I did so because I had made a commitment. But the proper course of action would have been to decline once I realized the nature of the work. The next time she called, however, I was too busy. (Yeah, too busy napping and playing with the cats.) I would rather write computer manuals or suck sewage out of a plane than work for those evil sons of bitches.
So yesterday we saw Michael Moore's latest film, Sicko. Though he presents a heavily biased argument, it's hard to quibble with the data. Canada, France, Germany, England and Costa Rica have higher life expectancies than the United States. Our much-touted best-in-the-world health care system doesn't translate over the aggragate. Or maybe the stress of fighting with insurance companies brings our numbers down? Countries much less wealthy than us provide their citizens--all their citizens--with outstanding health care. England, in the aftermath of the Blitz, did it. Cuba, which has nothing, does it. Are we such unrepentant individualists that we don't care about the sick and infirm? How can we be satisfied with a system that enriches insurance companies at the expense of our bodies? Seeing the kind of benefits the Canadians and Western Europeans enjoy is like traveling to a city with a great transit system. You wonder, how did they do it? And why can't we?