This commentary is by Walter Carpenter of Montpelier, who works in Vermont’s tourism enterprise and is a author and a well being care activist. In 2006, he practically died by the hands of the well being care system and has been an activist since that point, combating for well being care as a public good. He is on the advisory committee of the Green Mountain Care Board. 

Lately there have been quite a few commentaries concerning the illness of our well being care system. Bill Schubart, Julie Wasserman, Mark Hage, Dr. Paul Manganiello and, most lately, Lee Russ, have all written eloquently and knowledgeably at VTDigger.org about our pricey and lethal well being care dysfunction and provided concepts on learn how to doubtlessly treatment it — that’s, in fact, if we have now the ethical, social, and particularly the political braveness to do it. 

So far, we have now not had that braveness. This is clear within the continued struggling beneath our well being care system (it’s beneficiant to name our well being care mayhem a system, however I’ll stick to that phrase for now for the sake of brevity and readability) that causes a lot useless agony. 

Absent from most well being care discourse is the affected person’s view. It is straightforward to get misplaced within the swamps of health-care-nerd land, wallowing round in phrases like “all-payer model,” “value-based care,” and 1000’s of others that make individuals’s eyes glaze over. 

This all conceals what this dysfunctional well being care means for bizarre individuals. As an activist for single-payer well being take care of the final dozen or so years, I’ve been carpet bombed with an unknown tonnage of acronyms, charts, graphs, percents, and greater than sufficient information to succeed in to the moon and again.

None of this has a single import on the expertise of being contained in the system for which we pay a lot and get so little in return. A system that’s alleged to take care of us once we want it too usually looks like it’s victimizing us for its personal benefit. Take a second, for instance, to learn what medical debt means to the lives of many Vermonters on the web site Medical Debt in Vermont.

In my lengthy years of well being care activism, I’ve heard our administration, our Legislature, and the “experts” all seek advice from sufferers as “consumers.” This turns me pale with suppressed fury. Someone yellow with jaundice and turning ashen grey due to it, as I used to be 16 years in the past, just isn’t a “consumer” selecting to purchase a $10,000 iPhone.

We have turned our well being care right into a enterprise relationship the place well being care is only a product the buyer is shopping for from a system promoting it for the best worth that it could get for it. 

Lee Russ mentioned it greatest in his Digger commentary, “How many inactions does it take to make a disaster?“: “Health care amounts to a huge economic pie. The public supplies the ingredients: money in the form of insurance premiums, co-pays, deductibles, taxes and the cost of services not covered by insurance. The health care industry feasts on the pie.” 

This was true even earlier than the doubtful creation of OneCare. When my liver was shutting down and poisoning me 16 years in the past — a situation that would have been fastened in quarter-hour, however dragged on for months due to our insurance coverage system — I used to be requested for my insurance coverage card as usually as I used to be requested how I used to be feeling. I used to be forgotten in physician’s places of work, hospital ready rooms, and surgical procedure prep rooms as if I used to be not there in any respect. I shortly discovered that, within the jaws of this machine, if I didn’t struggle for myself I won’t survive it.

This was often not the fault of the ground workers, who themselves are handled as uncooked materials for use for revenue, whereas the numerous layers of administration and plethora of administration are thought-about belongings. I all the time admire how underpaid and overworked flooring workers handle to deal with scores of sufferers like me being rammed via the system like we have been on a surgical procedure geared to producing ever extra accounts receivable. One completely exhausted nurse fell asleep on my arm as she was sticking the needle of an intravenous tube into me. 

These workers persons are the human face representing what our well being care ought to and could be if it have been a public good as a substitute of an business feeding off customers and human “resources.” It is the physician who took a number of hours from a badly wanted day without work to come back into the workplace, coordinate the retrieval of scan outcomes, and personally name me to announce with aid that I didn’t have bone most cancers, a chance raised by preliminary exams. 

My most up-to-date well being care expertise nonetheless handled me as a “consumer.” A request for my Medicare and Medicare complement playing cards for “billing purposes” was the primary query I obtained on the check-in desk of a Vermont hospital on a current go to for a take a look at. 

It was nearly like a resort wanting a bank card to safe the reservation. This is extremely dehumanizing. It reduces well being care nearly to a skit by a well-known comic within the final century, Jack Benny, who was requested by a robber throughout a mock holdup, “Your cash or your life.”