Friday, July 20, 2007

I saw Sicko and I feel sick

My mom told me to see Sicko -- it was kind of an assignment. She said, "All you girls should go see it." (She meant me and my three sisters.)

This was coming from a woman with whom I'd had an over-the-phone argument back in early 2002 about the existence of WMDs in Iraq; she strongly believed we should trust the President, I strongly believed there was no basis for trust. It seems her own confidence in the Pres and his plans has eroded a bit since then. Or maybe she is just tired of dealing with health insurance companies who don't want to walk their talk about "ensuring the best quality of care" and "providing choice" and "giving power back to the patient" and all that. God knows she and my dad have gone through enough of that on my account alone.

I guess you could call the rest of this post a "rant," and I guess if you don't like Michael Moore, that's what you're already calling his movie about our health care system. I don't like to be ranted at, either. But I'm not one to ignore an issue just because thinking about it makes me uncomfortable. Thinking about American health care definitely makes me uncomfortable -- I deal with the crap end of people's health problems all the time in the pharmacy where I still work weekends, and it stinks. The job has made me deeply resent sick people on some occasions -- it gets old, serving as a stand-in for careless doctors and the convoluted Medicare Part D program, being blamed because I'm wearing a white smock and a name tag.

I've whined about this to a lot of you before -- "I don't like being a bitch, I don't like that I've started hating poor people since I became a pharm tech, but at work I am often cold and blunt, and at work I have days when I hate the poor." Hell hath no fury like someone who can't afford his Vidocin for the shoulder he wrenched at the construction site and whose Workman's Comp is held up in cyberspace. When you get this guy after a single mother whose Medicaid won't cover the anti-nausea suppositories for her screaming two-year-old, and after the 80-year-old man whose Medicare Part D plan has spontaneously decided to no longer cover the blood pressure medicine he has taken for 20 years, your head is hurting a bit from all the desperate bitterness that has nowhere to spew but at you.

So there's that. But...

I also know how it sucks to not have health insurance. I went without for six months after I graduated college -- I held three consecutive full-time jobs during this time, but stayed at no one of them long enough to start getting health benefits (each job required a minimuim of 8 weeks full-time work before they'd start worrying about how my getting hit by a car would affect their bottom line).

I suppose I have myself to blame. After all, I quit all three jobs of my own accord. At the first (a cafe), I had a loud public argument with a co-worker after she deliberately humiliated me in front of a packed dining room on Sunday morning. At the second (a Humane Society), I couldn't handle the day-to-day gross carelessness and favoritism of my supervisors towards the shelter's sick animals -- intra-shelter cronyism at the expense of animal welfare was also a downer. At the third, I walked out on the loathsome pharmacist at a failing CVS pharmacy because my blood pressure couldn't take it anymore (by the way, the pharmacy's failure was being covertly abetted by the chain's district manager because it had apparently passed the point of no return, and some analyst had told the higher-ups that it would, perversely, be more cost-effective to let us run ourselves into the ground sooner rather than later -- the whole ordeal deserves its own blog post).

ANYway...I could have done what millions of Americans do, could have sucked it up and stuck it out to get my insurance the way everyone else does. My stupid self-respect got in the way. At the time I was paying over $300 a month for my prescription medications, and I was depending quite a bit on my parents for financial help when I needed it (which was pretty much all the time), and I was already working the 35-40 hours per week for no more than $7.75/hr at any of the jobs -- I had proven I could scrape by -- what was another couple of weeks? I could put my grievances on hold for a little while longer.

Except I couldn't. I chose to go back to the drawing board, start over at a new employer, clear my accrued "hours to health insurance" each time. I guess I loved myself more than I worried about falling down the stairs and breaking my leg and having my first thought be "Shit! I can't afford to break my leg!" followed by "AAAAAGGGGHH THE PAIN!"

Of course this begs the question -- should respect for oneself and concern for one's own health be mutually exclusive? Of course they shouldn't. But can they be? You bet. This is America.

Now I have student health insurance. Actually the insurance is one of the reasons I decided to go back to school. The idea is to make the most of my tens of thous of $$ in student loans and eventually get myself a job that will cover my health care costs. Since the EIU insurance isn't that fabulous, I applied on-line for a basic-coverage plan from a major health insurance company to be sure I'd be okay if something bad happened.

I was rejected because I have high blood pressure. In a funny aside, I developed the high blood pressure at those three abovementioned jobs while I waited for my insurance to kick in (which, of course, never happened before I quit).

...Sigh. Speaking of high blood pressure, I'm wearing myself out here. My purpose in writing all this, I guess, is to try convincing the unconvinced to shell out the $7.50 or whatever to see Moore's "rant." Really the film is just a bunch of little rants from everyday people -- though you could only call them "little" if that's already how you feel about everyday people, and I don't think most of you do -- all cobbled together in Moore's own narrative fashion that somehow I didn't really notice this time around because this is a story that pretty much tells itself.

So do yourself a favor and don't rule "Sicko" out. Or at least really think about why you don't want to see it. You'll learn something either way.