One of my oldest friends was stricken a few months ago as he walked along an Austin sidewalk on a brisk Saturday afternoon. He suddenly felt as though he was walking uphill into a stiff wind. The feeling got worse through the weekend.
Willie thought he knew what was happening to him, and when he went to see his east Texas doctor Monday morning he found himself being bustled to the hospital for an angiogram. Sure enough, his blood pipes had prodigious blockage. By Tuesday morning he was under the knife, his breastplate cracked and jacked apart, veins from his leg stripped away and reinserted near his heart where they could do more important work. We laymen call it a quadruple bypass.
He's OK now, eating better, exercising, back on the job. Willie's a rural mail carrier, something he's done long enough to see retirement within his grasp. Thank God postal workers have good health coverage. They have some of the best benefits don't they? Thirty days of vacation every 12 months, sick leave and vacation leave that accrues if you don't use it all every year, and health insurance that is unsurpassed.
But you know what Willie has told me since his surgery? That for a few years he had been praying for a minor heart attack. Just enough to trigger his health insurance provider's willingness to pay for the angiogram, the test that would reveal the blockage that was just about to kill him.
He probably didn't quite have the heart attack, but he came very close. Close enough that the USPS insurance arbiters were willing to pay for the test that would save his life. His prayers were answered. Willie is Methodist, in case you wanted to know.
Now, this is funny. A guy praying for a "little" heart attack - not enough to kill him, just enough to alarm his doctor enough to order the test. It's right out of a Jack Benny skit, high humor. Slapstick.
How do we get to that point? I won't pretend to explain how we can perform medical miracles that almost nobody can afford to pay for. It doesn't really matter.
What matters is what we do now.
Me, I like as little government as possible. I like when we count on our government to provide only that which we just can't provide for ourselves. Like building roads. We can't manage that on an individual basis Or, national defense. No, my deer rifle and my Glock won't help me when China lobs a nuclear-tipped missile here from Tamaulipas. You can argue that education, retirement plans and mail delivery should be privatized. How about the criminal justice system, or sewage treatment and electric service? Should that be left up to the individual?
But health care is no less crucial, and it is a commodity that has advanced far beyond the ability of most of us to pay for. I make decent money, but I will never write a check for my own angiogram. I shouldn't have to, any more than I should have to personally swipe a credit card to pave the hundred feet of roadway outside my subdivision.
I'm amazed that we've figured out how to make strips of earth passable by millions of cars for years and years, not to mention the wonders we can perform within the ailing human body. But they both cost way too much.
Of course, we have to eventually pay for road paving, national defense, and health care. But let's pay for them as a group, rather than expecting individuals to figure it out. And please, don't invoke the mantra of evil socialized medicine. It's a political term, nothing more. Nobody rages about socialized road building or socialized national defense.
I really don't want to have to pray for a heart attack.
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