The Guardian
Obamacare gets my vote: Romney and Ryan's alternative nearly killed me
I'm critical of Obama's presidency, but my medical emergency convinced me that for Obamacare alone we must re-elect him
Under the influence of the painkiller Dilaudid, and dog-tired after
another day of fighting for my life with my private health insurance
company, I glimpsed
Mitt Romney and his running-mate,
Paul Ryan, entering my Los Angeles hospital room dressed in surgical gowns with scalpels in their hands ready to fatally operate on me.
It
was a drug-induced hallucination, of course. But the mirage made me sit
bolt upright in bed and, fully awake, start to rethink my previous,
bitterly dissenting view of
Barack Obama.
For
the past year, I've been in a death spiral without knowing it. The
occasional fainting spell, sprawls on the street and a dramatic weight
loss were shrugged off as merely a cost of doing a writer's business.
Denial is a most powerful analgesic. Even when paramedics first rushed
me to the hospital, I angrily argued with the doctors.
But when a
lightning-bolt sciatica pain, triggered by a car accident, brought me
down like a bull under the matador's sword, more or less paralyzing the
left side of my body, the health gods decided it was time to shut down
my hubris. Like something out of the TV's "House" or "General Hospital",
suddenly there were midnight ambulances, emergency room traumas, drip
feeds, oxygen tubes up my nose, renal failure, suspected meningitis,
pneumonia and a minor heart attack.
Thankfully, working as a team
at my local Cedars-Sinai hospital, whole platoons of neurosurgeons,
cardiologists, nurses, infectious disease experts, radiologists,
physical therapists, pulmonologists and hospitalists (whatever they are)
dragged me back from the edge. Emergency surgery in a special spinal
unit was successful, and today I'm back on my feet – I'm a product of
American medicine at its best.
Ah, if only the doctors were free to do their jobs!
My private insurance company, a subsidiary of Wellpoint Inc – America's
largest "managed healthcare",
for-profit company – interfered at almost every stage of my treatment.
They were aggressive and shameless. At my most vulnerable, with tubes
sticking out of me, they phoned my hospital room – kicking my anxiety
level sky-high – to let me know that Wellpoint's profit-seeking radar
had targeted me. The anonymous voice warned, with a kind of smiling
threat, that they were on my case: meaning, some bureaucrat – was he or
she even medically competent, or just an IT geek – in a far-off, distant
corporate office believed that my treatment was violating a mysterious
insurance algorithm.
Read it at The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/13/obamacare-gets-my-vote-clancy-sigal
