I'm Trying, I Promise

This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.

I’ve had these same drops before living in the UK. They cost me seven GBP.

It’s the exact same drug, same steroid, same strain of antibiotic. But somehow the US gets away with charging $100 for a generic non brand version of a drug which is easy to create and widely used. It’s downright robbery, but also a form of eugenics through poverty and class warfare. You keep the poor poor by making sure basic necessities remain unattainable and then you make it seem like the norm so no one fights it.

The rest of the world is not like this.

I’m in the exam room, post diagnosis and with pill bottles in hand, and in walks the one nurse I’ve been able to speak to the entire time. She pats my hand and tells me (and this is verbatim—I will never forget this conversation as long as I live), “I’m so sorry. We had to run those tests, and they are expensive. You don’t have insurance so you will have to cover the full cost.”

I start crying.

She continues, softly, as if telling me someone has died, “It’s going to be three hundred.”

I start sobbing, certain I’ve misheard, certain that I would be absolutely fucked, broke and going into debt in a foreign country. “Thousand?” I clarify.

Her entire demeanor changed, and she looked at me as if I had sprouted four extra heads. “No,” she says, “euros.”

For example, I’m sure many of you can remember the time before AIDS medicines were not available anywhere in the continent of Africa for any price. Well, maybe to the wealthy elites, but certainly not to common folk. Now, you can hear radio stories of nonprofits running drone supply centers to send packages of medications to remote villages to treat AIDS patients. The patients may not have to pay anything themselves, or just a small fee, but you can be quite sure the manufacturers are not losing money doing this. And at the same time, you can hear stories of AIDS patients in the US who still get denied “insurance” coverage for the treatments and have to run a GoFundMe campaign to pay full price for it. Either way, it’s a scam on the concept of nonprofit and/or charity healthcare work.

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