In the midst of all this talk about health care reform, I am lucky to have ended up in the emergency room twice this year — once at a hospital in Albuquerque and another time in Barcelona, Spain. But I don’t have health insurance.
For those of you who fear that socialized health care would result in subpar medical service, you’ll be happy to know my experience in the Spanish hospital was awesome. I was bitten by a snub-nosed viper outside of Barcelona atop a mountain. The result put me in the hospital for almost five weeks — where at first I expected to have my leg amputated if I didn’t die first — they gave me a 70 percent chance of survival. I had six operations to irrigate the muscles, a long series of Xrays and a skin graft from Dr. Joan Font, who, according to the nurses, is the best plastic surgeon in Europe. Actresses even fly out for his services.
I was served three home-cooked, balanced meals daily. If I needed something, like painkillers, something to help me fall asleep, thrombosis cream or a walker, they were there for me right away.
When I had been living in the hospital for a few weeks, I uncharacteristically went through a hysterical tantrum. The kind nurse called for the psychiatrist two floors up, who came and calmed me down effectively with words, and then left. I’m just trying to say here that I needed many things, and it was a lot of work for them.
With Spain’s health care system, the hospital staff gets paid whether or not their patients can afford it. They seemed rested, calm, professional, attentive and genuinely concerned about my well-being and everyone else’s. When I left the hospital, I did not owe them any money. They did give me a list of four prescriptions to buy from the pharmacy. These were also incredibly cheap, amounting to no more than $60. Today my leg is healing faster than the doctors had estimated.
Now for the contrast. A few months before my trip to Spain, I wound up in an Albuquerque emergency room with something amounting to a burning hole in my stomach. The pain was astronomical and I could do nothing but scream. The first nurse I met with, who checked my vitals, was rude and snappy to the point of making me cry. When I finally got a room, instead of giving me something for the pain or even bothering to check on how I was doing, another nurse snapped at me to be quiet, and she closed the door completely so nobody could hear me and left me there for an hour. After an X-ray, a bag of morphine drip and some rest, I was released.
I was there for about thirteen hours and they charged me close to $6,000. That means that if I had been bitten by the viper here in the states, my bill would have been more than $350,000 for uncaring care. In Spain, I instead paid $0 and had a true healing experience.
I want socialized medicine.
