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Best medical care is left to fate
(by Dave Lange - August 19, 2009)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
Best medical care is left to fate
When my father, Charles Lange, retired in the early 1980s, he was fortunate to have excellent health insurance -- thanks to the United Auto Workers but not to the political forces that have been working to undermine labor unions since that time.
A decorated World War II veteran, he endured a life of pain in his lower legs after suffering severe frostbite during his advance on Nazi Germany. Although the consequences of that frigid march through Europe didn't stop him from returning to the battlefield or from nearly four decades of factory work after that, the pain became agonizing following his retirement.
He could have gone to the Veterans Administration, one of the world's few true systems of "socialized medicine," for treatment. After all, Americans do believe veterans deserve the best medical care that the government can buy, don't they? But, as I said, my dad had excellent private insurance, so he turned instead to one of the best hospitals that the private sector can buy.
Despite valiant efforts by the best surgeons at that excellent hospital, they were unable to save his leg and eventually had to amputate it above the knee. But when my father was told they would have to take his second leg as well, he confided in me that he wouldn't be able to go on living that way. So, despite his excellent insurance provider's resistance, we took him to an even more excellent hospital, one that is recognized as among the best in the entire world. And its even better surgeons heroically succeeded in saving his remaining leg.
Our entire family was most thankful for that. But we couldn't help wondering whether Dad might have kept both legs if we had taken him to the more excellent hospital in the first place. And some of us thought about the millions of Americans who don't have excellent insurance and who can't afford the best hospitals that the private sector can buy.
In the months that followed, my father's recovery was complicated by a series of prosthetic fittings that refused to cooperate with his stub of a leg. For some reason, the best medical care that the private sector can buy could not relieve the discomfort aggravated by an unnatural grinding of manmade material against flesh and bone. Nevertheless, he was determined to accompany my mother on their long-planned return to Europe.
Perhaps it was fate that led my dad back to Germany -- the country where "socialized medicine" was born in 1870, the land where he was born and spent his early childhood, the place he later invaded as an American soldier -- at a time when the ill-fitting American prosthesis simply became unbearable. Perhaps it was good fortune that the German single-payer health-care system heard a plea for help from an aging citizen of the country with the best hospitals and doctors that the private sector can buy. For it was a German doctor that provided my father with a perfect-fitting artificial leg that not only salvaged his vacation but enabled him to walk without pain for the remainder of his days.
There was no wait, and there was no cost to the patient.
Americans, who inhabit the only industrialized nation in the world without a single-payer health system, are free to honestly debate the merits of change. But it would be a shame if half-truths, misinformation and scare tactics deprive many of their countrymen of the best medical care that the government can buy, as well as the best medical care that the private sector can buy.
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