Give Them Everything They Want

The late comedian Bill Hicks once said "We all pay for life with death, so everything inbetween should be free". Americans are often good at obeying instructional pedagogy handed down from institutional power. Instructions on how to live are supported by corporate sloganeering and so-called folksy aphorisms tell us that Americans are becoming weak and whiny. We're an unproductive lot, lazy and obese, given to easily to sin. We should be penalized for buying all that shit they sold us when we couldn't afford it. No mercy for those who couldn't spot a government-sponsored sham deal on a mortgage. We need to live in the "real" world.

But the world most of us live in is as real as it gets, despite our delusions, confusions, and passive addictions. And there's nothing more real than the fact that each and every one of us is on a sinking ship, bound for death.

I meet people at my job who have been through this rotten life, who've faced the worst of humanity's demons, witnessed the dreary absence of God. I don't meet them in person, though. I read them on a page where it's easy to break down their disorders into functional systemic data. Despite this distantiation, it's hard not to feel the pain oozing out of their medical records. It's difficult not to note that it's this same distantiation that put them in ther position to begin with.

One guy has had 15 years of traumatic brain problems after getting hit in the head with a baseball bat. Another woman dislocated her nose after her husband punched her in the face. Another man, poor guy, was unable to maintain an erection for years due to his misshapen penis. The inciting incident for his disfigurement was only described in the documentation as "penile deformity for several years= vaccuum cleaner accident X girlfriend".

People heap mountains of misery onto one another because for some reason they can't just communicate their frustrations. But is this any better than the insurance company that denied all of these people services in their time of need because it did not fit the terms of a pre-negotiated contract. When you sign an insurance contract, you're consenting to future abuse. In fact, more than that, you're paying for the privelege of that abusive relationship. The thought is that the alternative, having no coverage at all, is far worse than facing these vultures when you're most vulnerable.

Does this argument sound familiar, the lesser of two evils? It's the same one used to keep us voting, and to keep us voting for a system that would gladly allow this to continue. It's no surprise then that the democratic party's health care argument is that everybody should have the honor of being a member in the dysfunctional clan of large insurance groups. The Republican plan, by contrast is to suck it up, get a job within the infastructure, or die. If you can find no place in the world we create, the rest of us slaves are better off without you. Both groups want us to get the virus. Only which strand is up for debate. There's no third way. No remove for sublimation unless we shut down these vile companies and start from scratch.

Then there was the woman whose thumb got caught up in a dog chain while trying to stop her pet from fighting another dog. The thumb was cut so severely that it sliced through the bone and was essentially hanging off the side of her hand. After amputating the thumb in the hospital, doctors discovered that the woman had a rare condition called hypercoagulation where the blood clots too much. They way they treat this is- I shit you not- by leech therapy. She would sit in bed all day getting sucked by leeches and when the leeches were...full or dead or...whatever, the doctors would bring in new ones. After a couple days, the insurance company got tired of paying for the leeches and put a stop to it. Leeches don't like competition, I guess.

When I get pediatric cases, you can trace the whole life. You can see when the kid was born and when they first started noticing something was wrong. You see that he was developmentally slow and had all sorts of health problems associated with this delay. Then they started calling it severe mental retardation and as the years peddled on; 3 years old, 4 years old, 5 years old. The kid gets to be six years old and he still can't walk. He still can't speak. He can't even crawl. You think about the difficulty this kid has just trying to be human, the struggle to push through every day, and the struggle his parents face with someone who requires so much extra help. When the doctor requests something, perhaps a useless treatment, perhaps a waste of money, perhaps something that just plain won't kill the kid, you want to scream to the monsters who deny him coverage GIVE THEM EVERYTHING THEY WANT. THEY'VE BEEN THROUGH SO MUCH. JUST GIVE THEM ANYTHING THEY WANT. We all pay for death with life, so shouldn't everything else be free?