I'm talking to my daughter the other day and she tells me a story about one of her friends, a young woman we've known since she was in high school. The story illustrates why national health insurance needs to be more than a campaign topic -- it must be a reality.
The friend, let's call her Denise, has moved around a lot, but she and my daughter kept in touch. Denise's dad's work assignments took him to different cities around the country. After college she landed a job. Well, an almost job. An internship.
Internships aren't just for summer anymore. Apparently, they are a neat way for some companies to avoid offering benefits to young employees. They get them cheap and have them do big league work at bush league pay while withholding benefits such as health insurance eligibility. Eventually, interns are offered a job or terminated six months or so down the line from their hiring dates.
So, after college, Denise is offered an internship and this intelligent, young woman begins her professional career.
One day, early on, she gets a small bump on her forehead. The bump grows. A doctor looks at it, guesses it's a cyst and wants to do more tests. But the tests cost a lot of money. Denise, a lowly intern, has no health insurance, a small salary and significant college debt. The cyst, unaware of Denise's situation, continues to grow.
Being a resourceful young woman, she does some research and decides she will simply drain the cyst herself until she gets health insurance. She goes out and gets a hypodermic needle kit available to diabetics and becomes her own one-woman clinic. Periodically she inserts the needle into her brow above one of her eyes and drains the cyst. The bump goes away for a while and when it returns, she sticks herself and drains it again. And again. And again.
She finally finds a job after her internship. She gets a salary bump and health benefits. Off she goes to the doctor who does the long-delayed tests and finds the cyst is not a cyst at all. It's a tumor. The good news is it's not malignant. The bad news, it has grown into the muscle layer on her forehead.
Ahh, but there's more good news. It hadn't quite grown deep enough that any of the fluid Denise had been drawing from her head was brain fluid.
Hip hip hooray.
So the doctors, who can now bill an insurance company, do what they should have done months earlier, and remove the tumor. The operation leaves not a hole, but a small depression, a little ding in Denise's young head. Plastic surgeons can fill the ding with the medical equivalent of spackle. End of problem, right?
Not yet. The muscles over the eye nearest the cyst are damaged and the eyebrow no longer moves in sync with its mate. When she laughs, smiles or otherwise facially expresses herself, she looks not quite like Popeye, but odd. The solution? Freeze the eyebrow that works with Botox. Should be the end of it, right?
Nope. The Botox isn't permanent and the dermatological filler they use to spackle the ding also goes off over time too, and gets absorbed by the body. What part or parts of the body, we don't exactly know.
So for the rest of her life, Denise gets to have the ding in her head periodically filled (maybe it will heal itself eventually) and her eyebrow frozen into position by Botox. But it's OK, right? After all, maybe one day she might decide to become a professional poker player and it will give her a great poker face.
As for the ongoing plastic surgery, that will continue for as long as she lives, or until she lives long enough not to care about facial dings or twitches. And the bills, which could have been totally unnecessary, will be paid over and over again and over again.
She's got coverage now.
