COMING SOON TO A HOSPITAL NEAR YOU

PART 1: NO COUNTRY FOR SICK MEN

'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
 The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
 The best lack all conviction, while the worst
 Are full of passionate intensity" – W.B. Yeats

Well, gentle reader, now that B---s J-----n has been noising Scotland up aboot taking away the NHS from our clearly frighteningly inept (note heavy sarcasm) running of the much-cherished institution, I thought it was time for me to do my first post since last August (been busy – life just gets in the way sometimes) and write something aboot this whole deeply contentious and controversial subject.

I will not be posting any links to clips of the American troglodyte slavering and havering his pish – I cannot stand the sight of the cunt’s face, or even hearing or reading his name. You’ll just have to excuse my purely subjective journalistic memoir’s lack of balance, or frightening images of a haystack-haired Donkey Konger peering back threateningly and vacantly at you. I will just have to scare you with some facts and figures and a perfectly pertinent anecdote instead, if that’s alright with you.

It is?

Good. Let’s move on.

East Rogers Park, Chicago, 2011. I woke up in the early hours of the morning for no clear reason. You know what that’s like. My left hand felt odd, and, after scratching it for a few moments, I got concerned and switched the light back on and sat back down on my bed in confusion. I looked at the offending appendage. My fingers were curled halfway round into a C-shape, and I couldn’t straighten them out. My hand was also...blue. I’m not a doctor, I thought, but this doesn’t look too good.

As blue skin is a shade desired only by Smurfs and necrophiles, I drove myself over to Evanston Hospital five miles away along Ridge Avenue. I made sure to park my car in the free public parking lot facing the emergency doors, so I wouldn’t get towed, or get a ticket. That would just have added insult to injury, and Evanston traffic cops are notoriously prickish, bored people. There are too many cops of all stripes in that mollycoddled middle class enclave, and they have to find ways to fuck motorists constantly (if you park more than a tiny set distance from the sidewalk you get a ticket! Got one my first fucking day there, when I knew nothing aboot that arcane bylaw) to pay for their salaries. So I was always been extremely leery and aware of those cunts lurking in the background, after living there for six months the year before. When you're living someplace, that feeling of always being scrutinised by arseholes just looking to fuck your vehicle over is really horrible and regimented. Never kept to the speed limit so much in my life!

I had to fill out reams of paperwork because I didn’t have medical insurance, and knew fuck all aboot that side of things. Quite simply, I couldn’t afford it. I was working on-and-off caregiver jobs, and even in some of those shitty, low-paying gigs it would have cost me nearly $400 a month for insurance. And this was after the 2010 Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) had been implemented the previous year. It was meant to make medical insurance much cheaper and more accessible for people, and it did lift millions of people out of not having insurance. 

But…affordable my bahookie! When you’re on $11 or $12 an hour (a wage which still hasn’t increased, which is fucking scandalous. I just checked; the average Illinois hourly rate is $11.82 right now), nearly $100 a week is a huge chunk of your income. Or it would have been, had I been paying it, obviously. Luckily, all this shit was taking place before March 31^st, 2014, when it became absolutely mandatory for you to have medical insurance, or you faced an income tax surcharge! Talk aboot giving with one hand, and taking away with the other! Helping the low-paid by extorting medical insurance or tax money from them! Genius. That penalty got dropped this year by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, I just learned, which is a good thing. Fucking horrible position to put penny-pinched people in.

So I filled in the paperwork and sat in the clean, sterile, practically-empty waiting room. I looked at my weird-shaped-and-coloured hand. It looked like it had been frozen in the act of doing some nocturnal shakespearing, only with a spear that was a lot thicker than mine to shake, and that my cobalt blue hand had somehow been locked in a strange, strained wanker’s cramp.

It was totally freaky, and I fretted that I might have to resign myself to a life of appearing in shit children’s cartoon films, finding magic flutes, fighting off Gargamel and being given sage advice by the wise hirsute village philosopher Papa Smurf. Wouldn’t have been much worse than what the fuck I was doing at that point in time, mind you. Looking after elderly and often dying people with money in their own homes for next to fuck all (I accidentally learned one agency charged three times what I was paid for my services, the thieving, exploitative, white middle class parasite cunts), in a country where I had no support system and knew hardly anybody, was not a pleasant thing.

Anyway.

I got seen fairly quickly. The place was clean and the staff were pleasant. They had to be, or they’d get turfed out the door with no questions asked. I had been through the exact same dancing monkeyboy training regimes they had been through back at my old hospital job in Glenview, because Evanston was part of the same shitty network of hospitals. They were corporate fucks who did not give a damn aboot their staff, and always bowed and grovelled before the always-right customer. Because Glenview is an affluent area (as is WASPy police state Evanston), staff were expendable, and the mentality was to basically treat the customer as king. I once half-jokingly said to my prick of a manager that if a customer came in and stabbed a member of staff, the hospital would apologise to the customer for getting blood on the customer's shirt. The thick Midwestern hick looked at me somewhat dimly. No change there, then.

The hospital I worked in resembled a hotel more than a hospital, and customers – sorry, patients – could order up any food they wanted in total luxurious comfort. After all, they were paying through the fucking nose for it. The customers were often fairly obnoxious – money will do that to somebody – and just talked to you like shit. I used to smile and say “Fuck you very much” to their faces. Their brows would crinkle (I am laughing recalling it) but they would say nothing, not being able to believe that somebody would say something like that to their faces, and thinking it was probably a trick of my strange foreign accent. It wasn’t. There’s a confession for you, you horrible Yank white middle class cunts. I told a few of you to fuck off right to your blank faces and it felt really good.

(Whispers in my ear)

Aye, right, anyway. Back to the patiently-waiting story from above. I got seen by a doctor, who ascertained that I had been bitten by some form of insect, and the wound was infected. I had been down for a walk by Lake Michigan earlier that day, and some plague-ridden wee winged fucker must have sunk its scabby shite-covered fangs into my hand. Still, potential death or Smurfdom were a small price to pay for living a four-minute walk from an incredibly beautiful lakeside stretch. The building I was living in was full of freaks kooks loonies zoomers crazies psychotics drunkards deviants drug addicts halfwits oddballs homosexuals students, not to mention a displaced Scotsman, but that was fine. After all, East Rogers Park is the most integrated hood in Chicago, and that building, 1145 W Morse Avenue, was just basically the area in a microcosm.

(More ear whispers)

Alright, alright, I’m getting to it. I got taken upstairs into a room after my emergency room diagnosis and put on an antibiotic drip. I was there for thirty hours, and it was a pleasant, clean, well-cared-for stay. Was slightly odd to be on the other side of the Great Medical Divide, having worked as a medical receptionist for two-and-a-half years, but I wasn’t complaining. I was always very pleasant to the staff, knowing what it was like for them. The caregivers and menial staff are always black and Latino and Filipino. I liked these people better than most of the white middle class people I encountered (though I still have some good white middle class friends out there, but they are the exception to the general social group rule) because they were more real, had been through more, had a sense of humour and were not lost in the whole ‘American Dream’ opiate reverie.

After thirty hours of being pumped full of fuck-knows-what, they let me go. Before I went, a fucking (not Native American) Indian chaplain came in and tried to convert me to Jesus, the cheeky chappie!

“What is your religion?” he asked me.

“I’m an atheist,” I said. My god, even calling myself that out there freaked some people out, saying they had never met one before. I would call myself agnostic now, cos who fucking knows or cares, but back then I was saying atheist. Atheism hadn’t really hit America, and it still hasn’t much caught on.

“This is a Christian hospital,” he said, “You won’t find any atheist hospitals.”

Ya cheeky godbothering cunt, I thought, get yersel tae fuck ya pompous, intrusive prick, but just smiled and nodded and told him I wasn’t hugely interested, instead of punching the patronising jobbie guzzler in the smarmy preachy chops as I wanted to do. I had just been through an extremely unpleasant, somewhat scary experience of near-Smurfdom and here was this miserable fucking wretch trying to turn me into an assholy roller! All I wanted was to get the fuck out of there, get some cheap beer, get home, put on some music and just unwind. But common etiquette allowed his shite-squeaking jaw to stay untanned. He can thank his well-hidden god for that.

Before I left, a doctor tried to have me visit another doctor a few days later, so they could ascertain just exactly what sort of insect had bitten me and blah blah blah. I knew then what sort had bitten me: a spider, trying to drag me deeper into its corrupt financial drainage web. If I was cured, why go see another doctor, except for if it was to just make the medical industry (cos it’s definitely an industry in America, there is no soul or heart or therapeutic spirit in it) more money? What a total fucking bloodsucking gyp. America is just a scam to suck every cent they can out of you, then you can go die in a dumpster for all they care. It’s a country with absolutely no respect for human life whatsoever.

I remember I once had to visit my own ER at the hospital I worked in, because I felt a sharp pain in my ribs as I bent over a crib, and wondered if I had broken them. I went to the doctor for a check-up. I got an X-ray taken by my pals in radiology, where I was the receptionist and medical secretary, and they did what was called a ‘wet read,’ where you can get it instantly looked at. They told me I hadn’t broken any ribs or anything, and the X-ray cost me a hundred-odd bucks. Well, it cost my insurance that, because at that point I was still married and had insurance for myself.

My ex-wife told me it was good insurance because it was through the hospital. I was clueless cos I had only been in the country a couple of years and had no frame of reference for this whatsoever, so took her word for it. But I had also been given an order for a CT scan by the same doctor, who told me that he wanted to check if my ribs had maybe scratched my internal organs. I asked one of the young, amiable guys in CT how much it would have cost, and was told $3,000! I just told him to forget it, and if the x-ray was fine I was fine. And I left it at that. I am sure the doctor could have called it a cover-your-ass manoeuvre, but really it was just to generate more profits.

That truly is how cold and horribly clinical health (don’t) care is over there. I was told by the CT guys that they were given a set target profits-wise they had to reach each year, an amount of scans they had to do, and this just increased incrementally year after year. Utter madness, but they had no choice in the matter. All just part of the utterly inhuman American consumption factory from life until weary, empty-pockets death. No fucking way was I helping them fill their pockets any more than I had to; good old-fashioned Scottish working class common sense saw to that.

So I got home alive, unSmurfed. I was a wee bit depressed, mind you, the way you are when you get out of hospital, especially when you live alone. I was pondering it all and nothing, unemployed, going for walks on the beach. My bank balance went up and down with each caring gig that ended, when a client was hospitalised or died, and it got depressing stopping and starting again. I was growing to hate a country I had naively grown up loving, and I didn’t even want to get out of bed some days. 

And then, swooping out of the exploitative blue, as (un)expected, came the bill for my treatment:

$17,000.

Aye, you read that right. Oh, actually, sorry, I should say they only wanted $15,000, because they took off a couple of grand as they were a fucking ‘Christian hospital.’ Hilarious! You can’t even write comedy that black and bleak. Being totally skint and unemployed oddly actually worked out for me, because, after filling out another shitload of paperwork, they dropped the bills. You can’t get blood out of a stone, after all, though if they thought you could they’d be the first ones down the gravel quarry with greedy eyes profit-glinting and exploitative malice in mind. If I had any money whatsoever, I would have been totally fucked. Then again, I would probably have had insurance if I had money, so it’s all swings and roundabouts, and they would have gotten paid one way or another.

Being sick in America, and getting treatment you get charged through the nose for, is like somebody saving your life by pulling you out of water when you’re drowning. Only they hold you there, not letting you out, putting their foot on your head and telling you they will duck you under with it and drown you if you don’t pay them a lot of money. It’s straight, brazen extortion, basically theft, but that, once again, is what America is: one big money-sucking, butt-fucking con. Its conman current leader is really only the country incarnate, in all its confused hopeless inglory.

The year after this horrible, America-educational event took place, I was told by a no-nonsense Russian nurse that I worked beside that after three years medical bills just basically disappeared. I suppose she would have known, but I was glad I didn’t have to put that particular theory to the test, and never will. I don’t know what happens if you don’t pay and don't have money. I never had to find out. I don’t even want to do any more research for this story than I have already done (see part two), because it’s just plain depressing, and brings back really bad memories.

Plus, to be honest, it just makes me want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head to think that the horrendous American style of health exploitation may soon come here too, if J-----n sells the NHS to his old countrymen. Makes sense that an American-born cunt like him would be the man to do it – exploitation of the populace is in the American blood from the word go, when they expensively crawl out of the womb into an empty shellshocked playground of blood and death and impotent-against-corporate-exploitation fury.

And that will never change.

PART 2:  A FEW FACTS AND FIGURES

In America, it’s basically a truism that if you don’t have medical insurance (and you also have to have dental insurance too, that is a separate entity) you just don’t go to the doctor. I remember when I was skint I just wouldn’t go to the doctor even when, say, I found a lump in my armpit. I seemed to recall having had it once before in Scotland, going to the doctor, not having to pay $60 for the privilege of the appointment (cos oh aye, you pay to see a GP, too, of course), and being told it was something to do with my deodorant and a blocked sweat gland or something. At least I thought I remembered that, and didn’t go to the doctor, and eventually the thing went away. But that’s just a general example of what I am talking aboot– neglecting something that could potentially have been something much more dangerous because, quite simply, I could not afford it.

Now. America is an insane country, there is no getting round that fact. It has no sanity base whatsoever. Only an insane country would treat the health of its citizens like a consumer good, a luxury that you could only afford to maintain if you had money. Growing up in Scotland, where you don't have to pay for health care, that sort of madness does not compute. At all. But in a place that absolutely does not care if the less privileged in society live or die (even though I was skint, I was still lucky in that I was white, and spoke English with a so-cute-ohmigod accent, cos that afforded me a degree of leeway in a racist city in a racist country), that makes absolute deranged sense.

‘Darwinian' Americans (mainly right wing, it has to be said) call it, as if they even believe in Darwin or science or fake meaningless crap like that. Darwinian to many Americans means that anybody who is poor and dies deserves it, because all poor Americans are just temporarily disadvantaged millionaires, and the poor schlub who died deserved to because he just didn’t work hard enough to survive. The cold, sociopathic illogic of that mindset is very hard to grasp. It’s why many poor Americans don’t want to tax the rich, because, in their deranged delusion, they believe that they, too, will be rich someday.

Aye right.

Anyway. Speaking of money. Having just given you my own very personal American medical industry ill-health experience, here’s a brief overview of a few angles on the whole hotel fire of a pay-to-breathe subject I dug up. I’m not going to go too far into it, because it’s a massive, and massively contentious subject. I just want to give Scottish readers some things to think aboot if a corporate slash-and-burn-man English PM takes the NHS away from us. Actually, I shouldn’t say if, I should say when – this has been on the cards for years and, despite their lies to the opposite effect, the Scottish NHS still outperforms the its English counterpart. This is precisely because it’s not been subject to the same purposeful defunding that the now-falling-apart English NHS has, to soften it up and make it ready for total privatisation. 

After all, remember that the hugely inept previous English Tory Health Secretary crackpot Jeremy Hunt co-authored a book entitled Direct Democracy: An Agenda For a New Model Party in 2005, which is aboot the NHS being replaced by an insurance system. So this corporate plunder scenario has been on a slow heat for at least 14 years now, probably much longer. After all, privatising things is what the Tory scum do, and the profits to be made from such a national symbol of Labour innovation (after all, it was them who brought it in after WWII) are too ripe and rich to ignore. And of course they personally won’t be affected by any negative changes in the service, because they’re all rich and have private health insurance anyway. So it’s just skullduggery and thieving, profiteering business as usual for those shrivel-souled ratsoup-eaters.

Right. So, it's a future Scotland with a privatised NHS, and you get sick, or injured, and don’t have medical insurance. You will pay for prescriptions, of course. I am only going to make a few observations from an uninsured perspective – it’s much more academic if you have the health insurance, obviously. Though even then you still can have problems.  Even the best, most expensive insurance plans will only cover up to 90% of your expenses:

https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-will-obamacare-cost-me-3306054

So let’s just say you end up somehow having to pay, say, £50,000 for treatment.  I’ll let that sink in for a minute. It’s by no means impossible, although to people who have grown up not having to pay for health care, it’s utterly unfathomable and psychotic. And it can be much higher too. Minus 90% of that fifty grand paid by your very expensive insurance, you will still have to come up with five grand yourself. They will have gotten money out of you twice. Brilliant scam, eh?

Now. You’re short of five grand. You can maybe have a whip-round with family or friends, but if you’re poor your friends are likely to be too, so they won’t be much help. So you turn to that new, time-tested American SOS tradition, the crowdfunder. Medical bills encompass one in three American crowdfunders according to GoFundMe, and they do 250,000 fundraisers a year, encompassing $650,000,000:

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/medical-bills-account-for-1-in-3-gofundme-campaigns.html

There are different tips and tricks to doing a successful fundraiser, as delineated online for the savvy promoter. They want you to evoke emotion in the potential donor: dance like a monkey for your life, dance, motherfucker, dance! Tug those heartstrings, open those moth-eaten wallets! Invoke those tears! Provoke those fears! Ignore those jeers! “Add a bright main image, or make a video! Write a catchy and descriptive title!” And if you can have a celeb endorse you, that’s the jackpot moneymaker:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ritarubin/2017/08/31/how-medical-crowdfunding-widens-disparities-in-access-to-care/#3f4d8c867310

So you have just debased and degraded yourself in public, revealing very personal information you may not know the whole world to know. But you’ve had no choice. However, only one in ten of those fundraisers even reach their target, so your chances of getting the money you need are pretty fucking slim:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/eric-zorn/ct-perspec-zorn-gofundme-medical-health-shame-0824-20180823-story.html

But it’s all good in the capitalist hood anyway, because GoFundMe (the world’s biggest crowdfunder site) are making 2.9% from every campaign, and $0.30 from each donation, so that vulture has taken its peck at your sickly flesh (estimated at around 8% of final totals):

https://www.gofundme.com/pricing/

You could always get a bank loan to help you keep breathing. Americans borrowed $88 billion(!) to cover health care costs in 2018, so you’re also helping keep the wanker banker fatcats in teenage hookers and coke and caviar:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gofundme-health-care-system_n_5ced9785e4b0ae6710584b27

If you come out of all this alive, somehow, and still can’t pay your bills, you can always go bankrupt. Imagine that: you get a severe injury or illness, demeaning yourself by going online to beg for financial help, you don't get enough money, so you're still left with a huge bill you can't pay. Horrifying prospect. Imagine the bitterness and sadness that would engender, making you think that the general public was as uncaring as the health care system. Shake your worldview right down to the radically weakened core. There is a graphic floating around in cyberspace claiming that 643,000 Americans declare bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. This is disputed, being based on somewhat wonky figures, but the bottom line is that huge amounts of Americans do indeed go bankrupt through not being able to afford their medical treatment:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/643000-bankruptcies-in-the-u-s-every-year-due-to-medical-bills/

If this topic interests you, and it damned well should, please read it up on it further. There is a huge amount more information in the stories linked above than I alluded to, and much more on the net. I just wanted to give the average, totally unaware Scottish person an idea of what it was like to be on the receiving end of horrendous medical bills first-blue-hand. And mine wasn’t even a worst case scenario, it could have been much, much worse. People lose their sanity, their homes, their families, their fucking lives over this whole subject. There is nothing in the world worse than being made to feel like the latest cow to be plucked from the corporate pasture of consumer cattle to be made into a tasty profitable cheeseburger. Make no bones about it: this is absolutely 100% what is coming down the line towards us, and sooner than we think.

 J-----n has now bared his nippy wee sharp bloodsoaked Dracupuncture fangs, telling us what is going to happen – and we, quite simply, cannot let it. Otherwise what happened to me above will happen to others, and much worse. People will die because they don’t go to the doctor’s cos they can’t afford to, when their health problems might well have been treatable had they been able to go. Knowing that you are nothing more than a pound sign to a pack of voracious corporate psychopaths is a helluva frightening, strange, almost unbelievable thing. But it’s the straight truth, and we better start believing it, and planning for and against it, right now. 

From my own perspective, the NHS is probably the single most unifying force we have in this country, almost a religion, an article of blind faith that will serve all masters and mistresses, no matter what our sex or race or sexuality. Antibiotics know no racial or sexual boundaries. You couldn't get this semi-abstract vision of social cohesion in America, because there are a lot of people over there who don't believe in free health care for all. They have been brainwashed to think it's un-American, and don't want to spend a single cent to help others. This makes an odious kind of sense in a country with a modern history as fractured and alarming and fascinating as America's: if the people across the hall or prairie from you aren't from the same country, aren't the same colour, don't speak the same language...why, they're no-good socialist chisellers who don't deserve to live! Why help somebody out just because they're a human being, and you can? What kind of damned fool nonsense is that? 

The demographic makeup of the USA, coupled with their recent history, are the reasons why there can never be true social cohesion over there, only shallow pockets of it, even though there has been a wee bit of advancement in that arena since the late 1960s. Many - absolutely not all, I am not saying that - Americans don't like helping others who don't look like themselves. Scotland's population demographic now includes people from round the world, but we don't share the same slavery-built past (with its still-present ramifications) that America does, so our outlook on race is hopefully very different at least in some ways.

That's a whole different can of worms I will not open up here. Suffice to say, the NHS is, and can continue to be, a powerful community-builder for the populace...if we don't get it sold off to the country that shows us the way health care should never, ever be dealt with in the first place. Our doctors and nurses do a damned fine job, and should be respected. They're not just medical tools to operate with on people then be ground into the dirt with long hours and low morale, and should never, ever be treated as such. As for what Brexit is going to do to our health care services...well, we'll cross that bridge when we burn it, fuck it.

If the loss of our health and safety net doesn’t wake people in Scotland up, nothing will. This is civil disobedience-making stuff. And if the information in this article makes you feel like you’re about to have a heart attack, you better soft-shoe-shuffle  along to casualty right now, while you can still afford it. Cos you sure as Hell won’t be able to soon enough, if the lunatics get their way and sell us to America to treat us over here like they treated me out there.

We know the only real way out of this tragic, disgusting, and anger-making dystopian future scenario, of course: ballot-paper X marks the G-spot of free health care for all forever.

Talk amongst yourselves.

“The darkness drops again but now I know
 That twenty centuries of stony sleep
 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
 Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” – WB Yeats.

                                   
                                     “Please sir, can I have some health?”

END OF THE BEGINNING