“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
~ Benjamin Franklin
I had a very odd dream last night about the state of health care in our country. It was a futuristic glimpse into the medical clinic where I go to see my doctor for sickness and also for wellness checkups. He helps me monitor my bl0od pressure, which thankfully is fine since I lost 60 pounds, and he helps me monitor my cholesterol, lipids, and diabetes. I’m supposed to see him every 3 months, but sometimes, I stretch the visits and go for 4 or 5 months before I see him.
In my dream, I went into the clinic, and I felt the heat and noticed the poor lighting. When I asked, the receptionist told me that the air conditioning was broken, and they couldn’t afford to get it fixed. And the lights were out in some places for the same reason: no money. There were people being turned away because they had no health insurance and could not pay for services. When I got to see my doctor, he said that we would have to decide which test I wanted to have because he was limited to only one test for each quarterly visit. So, I could choose to have my AlC checked or I could choose to have my triglycerides checked or I could choose to have my cholesterol checked. Thank goodness I didn’t suspect any kind of infection or anything like that, or I would have had to make that my choice and not the others. I asked my doctor if this was what government controlled health care had come to, and he responded, “What are you talking about? There is no government control; this is the insurance companies running things for huge profits.”
It would have made an interesting dream to relay to my congressmen and women, but instead I share it with you. I’m not trying to make a political statement one way or the other. I’m just saying that even though things are not this bad for me because I do have health insurance that does not put those kinds of limits on my medical care, at least not now, they could get bad for me, and they are already bad for a lot of folks. I do know people who are without health insurance and who face every day the choice of whether to try to get well on their own or whether they risk begging to be seen by a doctor that wants and needs to be paid.
I have a student who admitted to me that she has severe asthma, and when it gets bad, she uses her child’s medication to try to get better. She said it wasn’t good enough, but it was better than nothing, which is what she can afford. She called me this morning and told me she was very sick and wouldn’t be in school today. I could hear her wheezing as she left the message. She won’t be going to the doctor unless she ends up sick enough to go to the ER and see if she can be seen without medical insurance. It’s a sad situation that faces many people. She had insurance until her factory closed down and her job was sent away overseas. Now she does the best she can, which isn’t nearly good enough.
But back to my dream. When the doctor told me I’d have to choose just one test, I looked him square in the eye and said, “I choose to lose this excess weight, get rid of my diabetes medication and my cholesterol medication and my triglyceride medication. I won’t have to make choices then.” I seemed resolved in my dream to not have to rely on medical care when my doctor has already told me long ago that I could avoid every bit of this stuff if I would just lose weight. Somehow I haven’t been quite as resolved in my real life as I was in my dream life, though.
The health care reform issue is complicated and very controversial. The current bill before Congress gets bigger and bigger and more and more complex. I frankly don’t know if I support it or not because there is so much of it, a good portion of it, I’m sure, not even pertaining to health care reform at all. Unfortunately, that’s the way our very disturbed and disturbing Congress operates. But whether we choose to let the government run our health care system or leave it to the insurance companies, it’s for sure that we need to reform it in some way.
That reform may not be up to us, but there is something every single one of us can do to help: we can see to it that we are as healthy as we can be so that we don’t have to use the health care system anymore than we absolutely have to. We can eat better, exercise more, take preventative measures to avoid passing contagious diseases, and fortify ourselves to be at our very healthiest. What a reform that would be! My student with the asthma could quit smoking and help herself out even more than her child’s medication could!
Every thing we do affects other things in the Universe. The greed of big insurance companies may well affect the state of our health care system adversely. But our unhealthy lifestyles also add to the problem. We may not be able to do it all, but we can help reform our health care system just by vowing to get healthier. The impact of a healthier nation would be immense.
