The Savage Arithmetic of the Pre-Existing Condition

[DFW]

54. I'm one of the 81,000,000

"According to the American Heart Association, more than 81,000,000 people in America suffer from one or more forms of cardiovascular disease."

I'm one of them. I just do not break down cholesterol. Period. I almost died in late April, 2004 when a very alert German cardiologist sent me in panic to a cardiac clinic and got 2 stents put in two clogged arteries. The specialist who put in the stents spoke German the whole time except when showing me the before/after images, when he said "just in time." I have relatively low blood pressure (115/75), so I had no chest pain, no idea I was in mortal danger. A couple of years after that, my outfit wanted to change health insurance plans. The insurance company looked at my record and demanded $35,000 a year to insure me. We said we were looking to get an insurance quote, not hire an assistant.

America's system is so whacked out. Last year, before a minor procedure, I was told to go off my blood thinners for ten days prior. I did so. Sue enough, about an hour after the procedure was done, I had my very own, very first heart attack. One of my stents had clogged right back up, due to not taking the blood thinners for ten days. For 3 days in the hospital in Dallas, I got the first bill: $35000, but discounted to $26,500 (WTF?) and our old insurance covered 90% of that.

Now, I've been in German hospitals before, and when I had my stents put in here, I was in the hospital for about the same amount of time as I was in Dallas, and with far more intensive care. The bill was less than $10,000, and our insurance screamed bloody murder for my emergency not having occurred at a clinic (or, apparently, on a continent) approved by them. Yet covering 90% of a $26,500 bill in Dallas was no sweat. Now, as far as I know, Germans don't drop dead with any significantly greater frequency than Americans do. No do the French, the Scandinavians, the Dutch, the Belgians, or any other denizens of neighboring countries. My wife just spent three hairy days in a hospital getting her tumor-laden thyroid taken out. We had to wait 3 days to find out if it was cancerous or not (it wasn't), and she needed the three days to recuperate from the invasive procedure anyway. The cost to us? About €1.50 a day at the hospital parking lot so I didn't have to walk a kilometer to her hospital to visit her.

So, William Pitt: how am I feeling today? Better, but no thanks to a system whose motto truly is "Stay healthy or die quickly."