Whatever you may think about the merits of “Obamacare,” if you are interested in prostate cancer you may want to read an article published over the weekend in The New York Times … about a smart guy with no health insurance and a diagnosis of metastatic disease in his 50s.
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I am sympathetic with Scott, but fail to see this as a valid argument in favor of ObamaCare. There are thousands of fully insured guys every year who don’t go to the doctor until they see blood in the urine (same thing goes for thousands of guys who take a pass on the fully covered colonoscopy until they see significant blood in the stool one day). I ignored an ever-shrinking urine stream for years until one day I ended up being admitted to the ER in tremendous pain with about 1,300 ml of urine stuck in my bladder, which was close to rupturing. Imagining that the passage of a law is going to solve everyone’s health problems is magical thinking.
This is an important article, and I never engage in magical thinking. The passage of a law will most likely never fully solve this problem, but it will make it easier and more acceptable for men to address it quickly. One example. Remember that I live in Sweden and have no private insurer. Almost all medical costs are covered by a fund that very many Swedes and legal Swedish residents pay into without objecting. I happen to prefer this to any of the five other medical systems I have used in as many countries.
Last week I was invited to take part in a physical. The Uppsala County medical authority (Landstinget av Uppsala Län) decided to give some sort of artery check to all County residents over 70. It’s free and voluntary. At first I thought it would be a waste of time, but 3 days ago I decided to take it. It’s free availability was an incentive, and so was the the thought that, if I don’t take it, I might have a cardiovascular problem that I would not know about until it was too late. That is, I would be behaving as foolishly as did Mr. Androes.
I have prostate cancer. I don’t have insurance. Not having insurance makes me look for alternative remedies. Scott’s problem is he expected someone else to bail him out. He needs to do some research on his own. His doctors are the ones killing him, not his lack of insurance. I have to go with Romney on this one.
FS
Whether you believe it is Scott’s problem or not, it is still your problem. Until we as a society are ready to tell all the Scott’s to go fish then you or your employer will pay. You will probably pay more in the end than preventive medicine.
Do not want a bureaucratic agency deciding about you health care? Try racking up some serious bills and try a for-profit insurance company. That is after your physicians spent more time talking to the insurance company than tehy spent with you.
I used to work for a defense contractor. I heard supervisor’s laughing about how to get around discrimination laws. Want to get around age? Throw in a few young guys.
I watched union guys with 20 and 30 years of service get moved into salaried positions. They thought it was their big break. We would tell them they would be gone in 2 or 3 years tops. How did we know? Someone in their family was seriously sick. If you think corporations fighting to stay competitive do not make long term chess plays to get rid of medical costs you have not been sick or you are not watching.
The hospital I use has been “computerized” for years. I still have a lab order written in a physician’s office, it is printed out, I walk 300 ft, sit down and have the paper order input, I then walk thirty feet with the new paper copy and pass it to a receptionist, she inputs it and passes to the lab person 6 feet away who inputs it. Wow! Now it is paperless the rest of the way!
The different offices on the same system may or may not be able to see the lab results. They all should. That is coming shortly and has been for at least 3 years.
A 2-hour operation will get you 6 months of bills from everybody but the janitor. Do not tell me the real problem is Obamacare. The first is cost and 30 somethingth is care. Not my America. We are broken and have not faced up to the truth.
Obamacare? It is dysfunctional Congress care. A plan built by committee of people who do not trust or like each other. All with an eye on their donor list.
My choice: Six medical plans from around the world and a monkey and a dart board to choose.
Scott Androes died this morning. His story has many variables that make further analysis impossible. He needed health care but felt he couldn’t afford it or get it, which may have hastened his death. It’s all words now.
In my opinion, we live in a country that cries for a better medical system. It is filled with perverse incentives for doing the wrong thing on the patient side and on the provider side. The AHCA, with all it’s warts, can be improved. Dumping the AHCA to satisfy GOP principles is absurd.
This is an obvious propaganda piece from the NYT in time for the election. Obamacare is a disaster. If you follow prostate cancer news, virtually every country that has a single payer system limits the treatment men get based on cost. In Sweden men with prostate cancer live an average of 6 years shorter than in the US.
Richard Palmer,
I agree with you. As a practical matter the future road to join the rest of the industrialized world’s health care system is through the AHCA. The early political choice to not attempt a single payer system was the only possible path to any progress at all. The GOP was there compromise by compromise as the AHCA took shape. Hypocritical to now say, “Not my plan”.
I knew Scott in college, and while I am upset that he didn’t do more to take care of himself, it is painful to read people attacking him in the guise of the debate on health care. It was terrible to learn he was dying by reading it in the newspaper…Those who blame him did not know him and might react quite differently if it were their loved one dying, and not a stranger.
Hang on there BajaJack. Your obvious propaganda gives me no way of deciding if you are correct. The matter is simple. Are you talking about men who die from prostate cancer, men who die from anything whatever although they have been treated for prostate cancer (and by what techniques, and with what divisions into risk categories, ages, and time between definitive treatment and death), or some general average age of death of men in Sweden that includes information about prostate cancer in the data set? Also, I hear but am not sure that the USA has no central data base for prostate cancer. Sweden does; it is located about 5 minutes from my home, by foot. So if the information is not online I can probably find it pretty quickly, whilst (since there’s no US database) you cannot find anything decent for the entire USA. I really don’t know the statistics, but I do know that your statement is obvious absorbed disinformation, the sort of simplified if not erroneous stuff that dominates American political “discourse” these days, with few exceptions. That is, one-liners, slogans, and brief texts like yours. So do excuse my going into some detail, but I’m an academic and no politician. They dispense such crudities and all too often get away with it.
To all of Scott’s friends and family. We do apologize for speaking in the abstract about a very personal experience. It takes a brave selfless man to speak out in his final days in such a candid honest manner.
Thank you for your kind words. I’m a friend of Scott’s and have been speaking out about his bravery on various forums. He wasn’t a shill. He was a very high integrity person. He would have enjoyed debating the ideological differences expressed in this and other forums.
Some people are so quick to blame the victim. I’m another friend of Scott’s, and knew him since he was 21. I’m also against this political pigpile on him in the guise of debate. He admittedly made a mistake when he was out of work and didn’t get health care. Like Mr. Maki said, Scott wasn’t a shill at all. I knew Scott well, and he was a thoughtful man who didn’t reduce people to statistics. Scott — a real human being — passed away Monday morning, but if he were alive he’d love nothing more than debating your antiquated view that health care should be run for profit and health should be a commodity.
Perhaps it is worth me noting exactly why I posted this link to Scott Androes’ sad tale in the NYT. There were three basic reasons:
(1) It is a very personal story of how unfortunate if well-intended decisions by very smart people can turn into individual disasters. We are all wise to remember just how little we really know. Casinos make healthy profits because individuals make poor decisions.
(2) It epitomizes all of the current problems with the American health care system, which can, indeed, be the best in the world … if you or your employer can afford it, and sometimes even when you can’t.
(3) There is something for every man to learn in this tale, as George Berger very astutely pointed out … if one is open to learning.
“The victim” in all this has not been just Scott Androes. The victim is every person whose life is terminated early (or otherwise undermined) because as a society we still haven’t learned how to offer and provide good health care (as opposed to high quality treatment for people with terminal disease) when that care is most needed. There are many reasons for this failure, but few of them are actually justifiable in America today.