Don't Know Why

by Norah Jones from Come Away With Me

Hello again everyone. Hope everyone had a swell August. As mentioned in last month's entry, I along with the whole gang went to Tahoe for some R & R. There was no bike riding this year for a change of pace. Kudos to Phill for organizing and booking a kick ass guest house, where apparently both John Elway's and Joe Montana's families once stayed. Besides hiking and lake enjoying, there was plenty of eating. I did manage to work in a run also. I guess the other big thing this month has been half-marathon training. I have been doing long runs to prepare for the San Jose Rock n'roll coming up in October. I am up to 8.7 miles and I am shooting for 10-11 miles this weekend. Along with the marathon training, I have been consciously trying to improve my diet by eating for fruits and vegetables and attempting to avoid processed carbohydrates, which is definitely tough. Another thing I realized as part of my marathon training is that a good soak in a jacuzzi does wonders for sore legs. It may all be in my head but I definitely felt less sore after sitting in the hot tub for the past two nights.

In other news developments, I am tying this blog entry on my new Spotlight desk from Crate and Barrel (predictably). My previous desk (which was Jinah's old desk that she picked up on the side of the street as a student at Berkeley) finally died when I tried to move it in preparation for my Super Bowl party. Alas, I waited a while to replace it because I wasn't 100% sure I was going to stay in my apartment for another year. I have a bit of traveling in store for me. Next weekend, I am going to Seattle for Erika and Viktor's wedding. Almost immediately after, I am hoping on a plane for Japan. Yup, yours truly is going to Japan for assist on a study for work. So I am super psyched about it. If anybody has any recommendations on stuff to I should do or see, please let me know. Plus I am taking requests for items to bring back. Currently on this list is the special lady for stuff from Muji and DJC, who, no surprise, wants Hello Kitty stuff. Best of all, I am flying business class on Japan Airlines. I am wagering how many pounds I will gain just on the plane.

But enough about my life, the real purpose is for me to talk about the current health reform that is being debated. Actually, not really being debated more like lunatic raving and flat out lying being done by those interests (mainly Republican and insurance company cronies and proxies). With all babble and froth about make believe death panels, Nazi/Socialist policies, and the NHS would have killed Stephen Hawking but apparently didn't, what I can't believe is why all these people against health reform think our system is in anyway acceptable. Even those screamers at those town halls recall medical horror stories but when it comes to maybe offering a public option to compete against all those insurance companies that are causing all the horror stories, the gullible fools freak out and yes, quite literally lose their minds. So why does this disturb me so much? While I am thankful that I haven't had a medical horror story happen to me, I do know what it is like to live on the edge of catastrophe, being just one accident away from medical ruin. So yeah its story time. Might want to grab a drink or bite to eat before continuing.

Way back in 2002 when I graduated undergrad from Santa Clara, the dot.com bust was in full bloom. I actually had a job offer doing insurance risk analysis that would have provided me full health insurance but I turned it down (and took a really substantial pay cut) and accepted a contract quality assurance job at Cisco Systems. My reasoning was that I wanted to get technology experience and hopefully when the economy improved Cisco would hire me on full-time. Being that I was a contractor, Cisco paid my contracting agency which then paid me and "offered" me health insurance. I say "offered" because while they did offer health insurance, the premium was so high I was better off just buying it out of my own pocket. Now that doesn't seem so bad on the surface but at the time, I was making (and I am not making this up because it's rather embarrassing) a little less then $34,000 a year. Yes, that is not a mistake. I was college graduate who graduated cum laude with a technical degree and I was making $31,000 for the first two and a half years out of college while living in Silicon Valley, one of the most expensive places to live in the entire country. After taxes, I was pocketing a little more than $26,000. Break that down per month, and after paying rent, expenses, bills and yes student loans payments, I didn't exactly have a nest egg. But I had to have health insurance so I paid around a hundred bucks a month to get the crappiest health insurance possible from Kaiser. Plus I had to pay dental out of my own pocket also. And mind you, this insurance only covered me just for emergency care only. Anything else was pretty much out of my pocket. While I wasn't paranoid about getting sick or hurt, it always did stick in my back of my mind. When I drove to work, I would sometimes think what would happen if I got into a serious accident that would require rehab or anything beyond just basic care.

My precarious insurance situation was especially evident when I needed to replace my glasses about six months after graduation. During my undergrad years at Santa Clara, my glasses just wore down and yes would break every so often. Since I had no eye insurance, I would try to fix them myself. I remember a screw popped out of my glasses so I found the smallest screw I could find and screwed it in to replace. When my prescription sunglasses broke, I used a bent paper clip to hold them together. Flash forward to after graduation and working full-time I still didn't have eye insurance. So when my jury rigged glasses finally fell apart, I had to comically tape them together with masking tape and I reluctantly went to Lens Crafters. I decided to get contact lenses but still wanted replacement glasses and with no insurance that would have been a whopping extra $300. Remember when you're only making 2 grand a month, that is a lot of money. So I bought the contacts (the generic kind - the brand name was too expensive) and then saved up for a few months and finally bought a replacement pair of glasses.

After 2.5 years at Cisco, I got offered and took a substantially better paying (about a 40% pay increase) contract analyst job at Network Appliance and even better they offered partial medical benefits including eye coverage. And this turned out to be very lucky for me since a few months after starting at NetApp, I fracture the middle finger of my right hand while paying basketball with Vishnu, CWP$, and Mike all of whom to this very day that they had anything to do. Yeah according to them I broke my finger by kicking it while chasing a loose ball that all of them were chasing at the same time. Anyway, I didn't think much of it other than it hurt like hell for a day. But after it swelled up and my cube mate, Kim, said "That's broken dude" I decided to go to the hospital to get it checked out. Since I didn't think it was an emergency, I called the hospital to see if there was anyway to get it checked out without going to the emergency room. Apparently there isn't so I drove to Los Gatos hospital and walked into the emergency room with probably the least emergency injury in the history of mankind. For the record there was not a long wait to see someone but this was probably because it was a hospital in freaking Los Gatos. I got checked out by the attending physician while I sat on one of those examination beds. I didn't even lay down. I remember distinctly I was asked if I had health insurance at least 3 times and each time I said yes and handed over my Blue Cross card. After sitting an hour, I had an x-ray and then sat another hour while the physician called in another doctor to look at the x-ray. After 2.5 hours of sitting, I was told that yes, I had fractured my finger and I was given a splint for my finger plus a roll of tape to hold it in place. I was told to take Advil if I felt too much pain. Plus I was given the name and number of a specialist to see as a follow-up. Dutifully I made an appointment with the specialist. AT the appointment, he looked at the x-ray and said "Yup, its fractured." He altered my splint, which essentially involved cutting it in half, so that my finger could bend. He said it would heal in six weeks, that I shouldn't play basketball until then, and gave me another roll of tape. All and all I was there for maybe 40 minutes and that includes sitting in the waiting room and filling out forms. After six weeks, my finger healed fine.

So what it is wrong with this? It seems the good ole capitalistic US health system worked like it should and I came out fine. Well I didn't think much of it until I got the bill and see what was charged. According to our apparently great heath care system, it cost over $2000 bucks for all that. Let me break that down. The hospital charged $1000 bucks for me to sit on the examination table for that 2.5 hours, get my splint and a roll of tape. I didn't even have an aspirin for crying out loud. Oh yeah I did get my blood pressure taken when I was admitted. Its not like I asked for it. That didn't even cover the x-ray which was charged at $25. Another $900 for that 40 minute specialist visit where he essentially looked at my x-ray, cut and bent my splint in half, and another roll of tape. But wait, remember the ER physician called in a consult to look at my X-ray. Turns out that cost another $170. So $2000 bucks for a fractured middle finger. Thankfully my health insurance covered nearly all of it and I paid a little less than $170 bucks out of my pocket. I should have been outraged but after seeing all the charges, I was glad that Blue Cross and my employer were covering it.

After going through this experience, I realized what how terrible our system must be for those 43 million people who don't have insurance or those millions of others who were like me straight out of school with really crappy health insurance that didn't cover anything. Now I suspect that the hospital and specialist were really raking up the costs on me because I had decent health coverage and my injury was so cheap and easy to treat. Why not because no doubt they have to make up the cost for the other cases where the insurance companies deny payments for life saving treatments and medications for those patients who really are sick. Looking back at this episode make me realize what trouble I would have been if I had gotten really sick or injured when I had my crappy health insurance. Which is why I am so thankful for having a very good package of benefits from Google. Now every time I go to the doctor, dentist, or optometrist, knowing that I won't have to give up a month's salary to do so. Remember my finger apparently costs $2000 to fix and that was my monthly salary in 2002.

Like I said I am thankful for what I have now, but I am disturbed by the millions of other Americans who are living just like I was several years ago. They either have no insurance or very crappy insurance that won't do much help when it is really needed. They are just one accident or one diagnosis away from being financially wiped out and sent to the poor house (or in many cases to no house at all and onto the streets). That is not acceptable for supposedly the world's richest and most medically advanced democracy. I cannot fathom the reason why anyone would stand the way in order to makes things better.

Anyway, thanks for reading through my limited yet in my opinion, eye-opening experience with our health care system. I'll try to blog when I am in Japan later this month. Until then, good night, peace, and good health.