A Tale of Three Injuries

Greg Sargent reports that Organizing for America, the Obama campaign successor organization, is planning to compile a vast database of health care anecdotes. I thought I might offer a few of my own:

During a short-lived stint as a summer camp counselor, I was playing basketball on one of those short hoops—this one must have been 6’6″—that they have for kids. I was playing defense in the low post, and didn’t realize that I’d actually positioned myself directly below the rim. I jumped, smacked my head into the rim, and the little loops of metal that hold the net in place cut my scalp. It didn’t hurt too badly, but I was bleeding like crazy. Someone drove me to the emergency room in Augusta, ME and I was holding a towel on top of my head to try to minimize bleeding. We got to the ER, and fortunately someone was available to see my almost immediately, but first I had to fill out some insurance forms. So I was standing there at a counter, bleeding from my head, struggling to fill out the forms without the ability to use my left hand to stabilize the sheet of paper. I used the left elbow instead, then kind of contorted my head and neck somewhat so as to be able to hold the towel in place. Naturally, with my head tilted there was blood dripping onto the counter and the forms wound up being filled out with a less-than-ideal degree of eligibility. But, damnit, this is America where we have our priorities in place. First you fill out forms, second you get treated.

Conversely, one time I was in the UK and sort of randomly cut my leg. It wasn’t especially bad, but it’s the kind of thing you want to clean properly and put a band-aid on. But I was far from my hotel and didn’t have any of the relevant equipment on me. I hopped around a bit, hoping to find a pharmacy, but I actually saw an NHS clinic first. So I limped in there, a nurse saw the problem and quickly and politely dealt with it with no fee or forms or anything. The only problem was a minor miscommunication around the fact that I had no idea what an “elastoplast” is.

Back to the US, where about three years ago I stepped on something in bare feet and cut myself. It didn’t seem like a problem at the time, but it got infected which created a painful “I can’t walk on my left foot” kind of situation. Naturally, I called my doctor to see if he could help me out with that. And because this is America where we don’t have waiting times to see doctors, was told that he could see me in two days. Fortunately, the very next day somebody canceled his appointment and I got a call and was able to cab it over to the doctors office and get the situation treated relatively swiftly. And since I’d been to this doctor before, the forms and such had already been filled out. It was practically an NHS level of service, except since this is the United States of America an extremely minor problem was dealt with by an expensive MD rather than a cheap nurse.

Now as I said yesterday we have hundreds of millions of people in the developed world and thus tens of billions of anecdotes about health care. Under the circumstances, a dueling battle of anecdotes is not going to reach any definitive conclusions. But people think about the world in terms of stories, so these kind of things matter.