Thinking about Health Insurance, as one does when one is SICK

Howdy. I'm still sick.

Those expensive antibiotics? I'm halfway through the seven day script, and I dunno, they haven't kicked in the way I thought they were going to.

I should clarify something about their cost. If I'd walked into the drugstore and bought the seven pills without any insurance, they would have cost me $233.99 - or $33.43 each. I do have insurance, but since this was the first non-generic prescription I'd filled this year, I hadn't yet met my deductible. So, I had to pay $100 deductible PLUS the $30 co-pay that I'll have to pay on any future scripts, for an outlay of $130 for the seven pills.

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One of the things that the scare-mongers use in lobbying against nationalized single payer health care is that it would limit choice, that you won't be able to see the doctor that you want to see. Well, in point of fact, that's already happened. Managed care, with networks of doctors, has pretty much limited one's doctor choice to a doctor who is in your network - unless one has the resources to pay out of pocket for care.

And there's a problem with that.

A couple of years ago, I had some growthy thing on my forehead. I went to the in-network dermatologist THREE times, it came back THREE times. I gave up and went to the fancy Fifth Avenue no-insurance-at-all doctor and he fixed it - it's never come back and the scar is invisible. And you know? That kind of pisses me off, because - in that case anyway - the fancy expensive doctor actually WAS better than the insurance paid hack.

A friend, a new real-life friend who happens to have a blog, who I met last month at the birthday party of a very old friend (who also happens to have a blog), recently had a health issue that wouldn't go away. She called it "the itis", and it hung around for five months. She finally found another doctor, out-of-network this time, and guess what? Cured! Again, the out-of-network turned out to be a better doctor.

My sister-in-law asked me for a recommendation for a doctor because she's got terrible bunions. As it happens, I know who the foot doctor is - three different people that I know have had him operate on their feet - he's the best, period, end of story. She called up - yes, ma'am, a consult will be $450 and we don't take any insurance.

I don't know what the moral of these stories is. But they're just indicative of another way that the system is broken. I hope it gets fixed.

Murder, Syphilis, Piggostat

So, after lying around listlessly since Saturday afternoon, I decided to go to the doctor, where I learned all sorts of interesting things.

I have no idea whether my doctor is actually any good, but he makes me laugh - and there's something to be said for that. And he chats. A few years ago, it came up in conversation that his wife was a reproductive endocrinologist and had worked at RMA in New Jersey. This was shortly after the murder scandal where an RMA nurse had her husband cut up and tossed in the Chesapeake so she could run away with her lover, an RMA doctor. So, you know me, on the way out I asked him if his wife knew them. He looked at me wide-eyed, closed the door, and proceeded to tell me that his wife had joined the practice after the doctor left with his tail between his legs, so no, she didn't know them, BUT, that she was thoroughly skeeved out to learn that the doctor had been having it on with the nurse on what was now her desk.

Today, he felt the lymph nodes in my neck and then in my elbows. Elbows! I've never had anyone feel my elbows before. He said that enlarged lymph nodes in the elbows could be a sign of untreated syphilis and launched into a possibly apocryphal story he'd learned in med school about a doctor who always shook his daughter's boyfriends hands with his left hand on the boy's right elbow.

Then he listened to my lungs, decreed them "junky" and sent me downstairs for an x-ray.

Have you ever noticed those 19th-century-looking restraining devices that they use to immobilize little kids who need x-rays? There's always one parked in the hall at our doctor's office, and I wonder at them every time. Well, this time, I was in luck - there was a photocopied sign taped to the wall in the x-ray room - it's a PIGGOSTAT. Can you believe that? What a wonderful word.

I told my doctor about the Piggostat when I went back upstairs for the verdict. He was non-plussed, and didn't quite understand why I was so tickled about the Piggostat. Oh and the verdict? PNEUMONIA. Can you believe that? I can't, though I feel less guilty for being out of work for the third day in a row, and maybe tomorrow too.

I'm on antibiotics for a week (which "cost" $234 for seven pills), and I have to go back in a month for another x-ray. On my way out, my doctor told me that he'd tell them to use the Piggostat on me for the repeat x-ray. I told him that the thing was only for kids under 3 1/2; he said "you read that sign?"

Hey. I always read the signs. If I hadn't read the sign, I wouldn't have learned anything about the Piggostat.

2009 Just Posts

The Just Posts is a monthly roundtable of posts that "lift up our planet and all that inhabit it" begun by the inimitable Jen and Mad , and later handed over to Holly and Alejna. The latter two took it upon themselves to re-read all of the 2009 Just Posts, culled it down to a bunch of semi-finalists with the help of volunteer readers, and then put together a list of finalists in twelve different categories.

I'm thrilled to have been chosen as a finalist in the "SOCIAL JUSTICE as advocacy/service : Posts related to INFORMATION AND ADVOCACY" category, and of course, I hope you'll go vote for me. But even better would be for you to go over to either Holly's post or Alejna's and read through some or all of the great posts. They are moving, and shocking, and funny, and informative.

The News From My Bed

What's in my bed right now:

• Two books that I'm reading (Naming Day in Eden and Absolute Beginners).
• The New Yorker that came today.
• A box of Kleenex.
• The arts section of the Times, in case I want to do the crossword puzzle.
• A pen.
• My cell phone and the house phone.
• A rather large stuffed dolphin (or porpoise - I supposed I should know the difference?).
• A new game for the Wii, called Endless Ocean (which came with the dolphin/porpoise).
• A microwavable heat wrap, now cold.
• Me.

What's on the floor right now:

• Three books I read to the girl last night.
• Two books I finished yesterday (One D.O.A., One on the Way and Juliet, Naked)
• My bathrobe.
• The rest of the Times.
• A drift of used Kleenex (because I'm too lazy to go find a wastebasket).
• Gödel, Escher, Bach.

What's downstairs right now:

• The Robitussin.
• The jello.
• The aspirin.
• The Sudafed.
• The hot lemonade.

Yeah. I'm sick.

[Post title adapted from that catchy little Bishop Allen tune.]

Undercover Photography

I'm generally not a lawbreaker - I don't swim in the reservoirs, I signal when changing lanes - and I don't generally hang out with bankers, but I got invited to a party on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and you better believe I went, because in all my born days, I'd never been there.

The invitation said "photo opportunity", so I packed my camera, picked up my walker and headed downtown. We had a ball, me and my snarky friend. Open bar, passed hors d'œuvres, and the chance to wonder at the vast yet intimate space - a collision of old (marble stairs, coffered ceilings) and new (screen after screen after screen). We talked to a woman with great glasses, an art dealer, a lady of a certain age - all of them said the same thing: "I've never been here before".

On the way in, there were several big NO PHOTOS signs. It turned out that the "photo op" was actually a chance to have someone else take your picture up on the balcony where the bell gets rung. We did, everyone did, and got a souvenir to take home, but I really wanted some pictures of the floor. I wanted the odd little details, like the Purell dispensers and the 1940s vinyl fold-down chairs and the newspaper clipping collage and the empty soda bottle suspended gaily in the middle of one of the pods. It's so clearly a workplace, not a museum, and despite all the high-tech, there's a distinctly human quality about it.

So I played spy-girl and took vague photos from the hip while holding my scotch in the other hand, but they're all terrible because I was trying too hard to be discreet. Oh well. I wasn't supposed to be taking pictures anyway.

The Sexist Olympics

I know, I know. The Olympics are over. But there was a really interesting article in the New Yorker this week, about skiing - and moguls and freestyle and and cross country and aerials and ski jumping. I've gone skiing a dozen times, as an adult, and I hung up my poles when I broke my thumb one day. And the only ski jumping I've done is on the Wii, and honestly, how many people do you know that have ever ski jumped, like for real?

Anyway, I wasn't reading it because of my deep love and understanding of skiing, but because it was one of those echt New Yorker articles - the kind that you read with fascination despite not really caring about the subject, like when John McPhee writes about plate tectonics or shad fishing. I was carrying along merrily, until I sat bolt upright on the train and dog-eared the page: ski jumping is the ONLY male-only sport in the winter Olympics. That in and of itself is bad enough, but there's a theory advanced by a German professor that the reason is that ski jumping is ideally suited to the small and lean - a theory supported by a New York Times article about anorexia in ski jumpers. In other words, women ought to be winning - and by banning women from it, it protects the "virile self-image" of the men who do jump.

Sputter, sputter, sputter.

That Awkward Conversation

My parenting style is fairly laissez faire. I don’t own many how-to books, although Ferber and Weissbluth live under my bed, talismatically, as magical thinking tells me that bedtime will be shot to hell if I get rid of either one.

But the other day, I had one of those bath-time conversations with the kid that I really wasn’t prepared for: “Mommy, I can feel my vagina!”. It went on from there, and though I’ll spare you the details, it wasn’t her vagina she was talking about. At that moment, I felt a need for reinforcement, and I was damned glad that I had a glass of wine in the bathroom with me.

As one does these days, I put out a plea for help on Twitter/Facebook. I got a mess of good responses, and so armed, I headed off to the library.

The book I came home with was perfect. It’s straight-forward, and not at all cloying, with a bird and a bee acting as a sort of Greek chorus. It works for boys and for girls, it’s got all stripes of families, it offers IVF and c-section and bottle-feeding as alternatives to the old-fashioned less technological processes, and it points out the similarities between the sexes, as well as their differences.

It’s called It’s NOT the Stork! and I’d recommend it if you’re looking to impart some dispassionate information to a six year old on what it’s all about.

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Because I’m all about sharing, here’s the complete list from the Twitterati and Friends – in case you too are looking for resources. No guarantees - I've only read the first one.

• It’s Not the Stork!
• It's So Amazing (for older kids, from the same author/illustrator as It's NOT the Stork!)
• Charlie Brown's Super Book of Questions and Answers About All Kinds of Animals
• The Care and Keeping of You (for girls)
• What's the Big Secret?
• Where did I come from?
• See Inside Your Body
• Boys, Girls and Body Science
• A Child is Born

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Oh, and in case the FTC is reading over your shoulder? No one paid me to chatter about any of these books, and no one gave them to me either. In fact, you could say that I bought It's NOT the Stork indirectly via my library taxes, thank you very much.