Chapter 10

When I called the doctor's office, the receptionist delivered his interpretation of the x-rays. It felt a bit like my mother reading a message to me over the phone from the mortgage company off a sticky-note she had posted on the kitchen refrigerator.

The doctor, the receptionist explained, said to tell you that you need to keep the splint on the arm for four more weeks and that he wants to see you again in four weeks. The fracture has not moved, so that's good. He said you can also get a splint where your thumb is not held like that so that your thumb can move. Oh, you can get one of those splints for the wrist, yes. I don't know, oh they have them in any pharmacy; we have one downstairs. It's an over-the-counter; you don't need a prescription for it. Yes, sure, you can make an appointment now. Yes, the fracture has not healed. These things take like six to eight weeks sometimes.

I detected that the receptionist had lapsed into some Armchair Medicine at the end there. What did she know about how long the fracture on my arm would take to heal? Perhaps she had seen this sort of thing happen often, to the point of routine, and the patients on the other end of the telephone line merely nodded, uh-huh, OK, in a kind of distracted, unthinking acceptance.

The day had been like a coin tossing in the air since morning. Suddenly the coin landed with Disappointment face up. Earlier, when the coin was still flipping in the air, the doctor had walked into the exam room and informed me that he could not do the x-rays in his office because my insurance company would not pay for them; I had to go to a separate "facility." I had to prompt him to offer to send me to a radiology clinic on another floor of the building, as I wanted to avoid re-scheduling this visit for lack of x-rays. He agreed to view the x-ray report, which would be available within an hour, and I could simply call the receptionist to learn about his findings.

I grumbled that this country needed to get its act together and provide real health care. Unfortunately, the doctor replied with a pleasant smile, the direction we seem to be going in is towards more "facilities" and "fewer choices." It was a simple, telegraphed message, which would be lost on the distracted and the unthinking. I got it: the doctor was opposed to nationalized health care.

"How does it feel?" He took off the splint and moved my wrist.

"OK, I guess." I complained of soreness, probably from the splint itself.

"That's fine," he said.

In less than five minutes I had my x-ray prescription and saw the last that day of the doctor with his pleasant smile, his tanned, middle-aged complexion and his blond, curly hair. I walked out while the flipping coin made an arc over my head.

Every day in this, the wealthiest nation on earth, millions of patients attend five-minute "That's fine" exams with disinterested, smiling doctors who send them flipping through the air to all manner of busy, clattering "facilities" at the promptings of enormous health insurance companies. Every day the insurance companies flip the lives of patients, like so many coins, until they land on the ground, dollar-value face up.