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No
Room on the Balance Sheet for Truth or Humanity
by
Barbara Sumner Burstyn
September
22, 2003
As
a columnist, there's a constant tension between aiding the story by revealing
the personal and sticking with ideas and facts to neatly shroud it.
But
sometimes that barrier is breached - the experience so extreme that there is
little option but to exploit personal experience.
This
is one of those times. A few weeks ago I visited a family member in hospital in
Los Angeles. If you believed all his stories, his life was worthy of a John le
Carre novel. He'd been a gentleman, a spy, a businessman with contacts in
underworlds too secret to talk about.
What
was indisputable was his Continental charm and his role as a loving father and
generous benefactor when times were good.
Now
he was living in LA at the pleasure of a wealthy, insincere widow of similar
late age; his retirement fund, we joked privately among ourselves. Until he
became ill.
One
week laid low by the flu was enough for his girlfriend. She trucked him off to
a hospital in LA, a free county facility serving the poor in a society that
likes its disenfranchised as invisible as possible. The only place to take an
ageing boyfriend, past his use-by date, an illegal alien with no health
insurance.
They
admitted him for tests and a few days later the verdict was in: hairy cell
leukemia, a highly treatable blood cancer with an 80 per cent cure rate.
So
far so good. By the time I got to LA, he'd been in hospital a few weeks and
they were champing at the bit to release him. He'd been treated aggressively,
they said, with a new form of continuous intravenous chemotherapy.
He's
cured, the two doctors and social worker declared almost as soon as I arrived
at the hospital. They looked me in the eye, two young women doctors with the
earnest appearance of doing good for the poor and reassured me his blood tests
were clear.
But
his girlfriend didn't want him back. After all, he wasn't walking or eating. He
was malingering, she said. It's his choice, said the social worker. He could do
both if he wanted to, said the doctors in unison.
I
sat with him and massaged his dry hands and watched as he struggled to swallow
a sip of water, his skin flaking, his eyes dull, his charm and vitality
drained.
Finally,
we agreed he needed to go home to Spain, where he'd lived for many years. Was
he well enough to travel the 15 hours to Madrid? The answer came from the head
physician at the hospital. Absolutely. Then came the surprise. The hospital
would pay his airfare.
I
was amazed. Time, I thought, to rewrite my narrow view of user-pays, my biased
sense that in a pure market economy not even sympathy trickled down.
The
arrangements were made swiftly. He arrived in Madrid groggy in his wheelchair,
almost unconscious with exhaustion, his hospital release papers grasped in one
hand. His daughter drove him another five hours to a nursing home to
recuperate.
After
three days he was back in Madrid, admitted to hospital and desperately ill.
Just 10 days after being discharged as cured and almost healthy from hospital
in Los Angeles, he was dead. The cause of his death: full-blown bone marrow cancer.
Now
the questions. Did they know? Those young doctors with their clipboards and
honest-eye answers. Did they willfully mistreat him with a cheap alternative to
buy enough time to remove him from their hospital and their balance sheet?
And
what about those second-degree bedsores, the one on his backside the size of a
CD? Did they not consider those an impediment to 15 hours in economy?
Or
the bedsores on the heels of his feet, forced into shoes he hadn't worn in
weeks?
And
his liver that had ceased to function a few days after he arrived? Had that
been a normal, healthy organ on the day they discharged him?
We
won't know until his medical records arrive - at 25c a sheet the bill will come
to more than US$200. But it may take months, the hospital admitted, before they
process the request.
And
the social worker, the woman who made all the arrangements and stood by nodding
seriously as the doctors reassured me he was cured? On the telephone from her
desk in the acute ward, she had little comment. "I didn't know he was that
sick," she said dully.
When
I asked her how she felt working within a system that was either incompetent or
downright dishonest, she said she didn't know how she felt.
Perhaps
there was another explanation for the death of a man declared well enough to
leave her hospital? She didn't know.
When
asked about the ethics of flying a dying man around the world, she sighed
loudly and said she didn't know.
Maybe,
I suggested, it was all a ruse to get a costly patient without insurance off
their hands. She remained silent on the phone.
And
did she think his treatment barbaric or inhuman? She really couldn't comment,
she said before hanging up.
So
no facts or figures this week. Just the sad tale of a man who died. An
anonymous, uninsured number on an admission sheet at a public hospital in LA.
In the end his family did not expect a miracle. Probably no treatment would
have saved his life.
But
there are other ways to die. Ways that afford dignity, that control pain and
suffering and afford the sufferer some degree of comfort.
Except
in a society where socialized medicine is an anathema.
In
that world there's no room on the bottom line of a balance sheet for truth or
dignity or humanity. There's no room for the practice of social work, let alone
medicine.
And
in the end, there's just that nagging question: were they incompetent or did
they lie?
Barbara Sumner
Burstyn is a freelance writer who commutes between Montreal, Quebec and
The Hawkes Bay in New Zealand. She writes a weekly column for the New Zealand
Herald (www.nzherald.co.nz), and has
contributed to a wide range of media. She can be reached at: barb@sumnerburstyn.com. Visit her
website to read more of her work: http://www.sumnerburstyn.com/.
* Working
to Live has Been Overtaken by Living to Work