I Now Firmly Oppose Socialized Medicine

This morning, the kids and I went to the health department so they could get flu shots. H1N1, to be precise. Libby and I got ours back in December, and Gabe got the first batch of his (kids under 3, I think, need two doses, a month apart). Button couldn't get a dose at the same time because, at six months, she was just old enough to get the regular flu shot, and she couldn't get both at the same time. So Gabe was getting his second dose and she was getting her first (which means a repeat trip next month, hurray!).

When we went last month, they had a special clinic set up and we were able to move through there within a half hour of getting there.

This time, however, it was different, and my experience led me to oppose socialized medicine, and I am doing it based largely on two assumptions.

And you know what they say about assuming--it makes an ass out of you. At least that's how I remember the saying that I seem to hear ad nauseum these days.

Anyway, the assumptions that I make about what socialized medicine is like are based entirely on two points of reference: what the talking heads tell me I should think about socialized medicine, and what happened, as I recall it, in the movie "Jesus of Montreal."

I'll start with the second one (which I should have made the first one, in retrospect, but it's too late now). For those who have not seen the move "Jesus of Montreal," it goes something like this: an actor plays Jesus, has problems that reflect the Bible's story of Jesus, then dies at the end while sitting in a waiting room in a Canadian hospital--a SOCIALIZED hospital. That may or may not be how the movie actually goes, but it is how I remember it. I also remember being pretty bored while I watched the movie way back in college (at a time when I was pretty tolerant of boring movies because they expanded my horizons, something I've since come to recognize as balderdash), and because I remember being bored, I wasn't going to go out of my way to look the movie up on the internet to make sure my facts were straight. As far as my brain is concerned, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE KILLED JESUS. That alone is a pretty strong case against it.

But, then, I've also got the influence of the sources that the media have deemed fit for me to hear from to consider. Everyone they show on my TV is against socialized medicine for various reasons. For instance, there are long waits. Also . . . hmm. I

'm not actually sure why else I should hate socialized medicine now that I think about it. Competition, maybe? Capitalism, perhaps? Quality of care, could be? I don't think I understand how, exactly, it will really hurt anyone but, possibly, doctors because they might make a little less money and insurance companies because they would be obsolete--oh, and drug companies because they couldn't price gouge here to make up for "shortfalls" they suffer in places with socialized medicine where they refuse to pay top dollar if they can still get something else that does basically the same thing for cheaper. I guess I missed those part of the arguments against it. That's understandable, really, as there wasn't much time spent on WHY I should hate it, it's mostly just been a bunch of shouting that I SHOULD hate it. And because I like to believe people who shout at me, I will in this case also.

But I DO know that patients have to wait ungodly amounts of time to receive care. I've seen it in the motion pictures and I've had it shouted at me. That's more than enough proof for me (I did, after all, come to believe that dinosaurs could be cloned on tropical islands after only seeing one movie--Jurrasic Park--and having nobody shout at me for proof, so I'm not that much of a stickler for multiple sources, really).

Which brings me back to my experience today. We waited in the waiting room at the health department, surrounded by about two dozen different people, many of whom probably suffered from exactly the kinds of illnesses that I was supposedly trying to protect my children from, for almost an hour and a half. When we finally did get our turn, the procedure took all of two minutes and we were quickly out the door. Only four people went before us with the lady giving the flu shots, and it took them only about five minutes each to get through.

According to my basic maths, four people at five minutes each should equal twenty minutes of wait time. But, somehow, it equalled nearly ninety minutes of wait time. In short, it was a display of EXTRAORDINARY inefficiency--and this was in a capitalized medical facility! Imagine if I'd been in Canada or England. I might have had to wait two or three days in that waiting room! And believe me, 90 minutes was WAAAAAAAYYYYY too long to have to sit in a waiting room with a fussy seven month old and a quite possibly hyperactive two year old.

Gabe was, literally (and I mean that, I don't use this word lightly, as many do), bouncing off the wall (specifically off the row of wooden letters they have mounted to one wall, he was bouncing and spinning along them while he shouted whatever random letter or number came to mind in no particular order). I was able to contain him with the bribe of a "treat" after we got out of there for about twenty minutes, but then I think it started to dawn on him that this treat, at the rate we were going, might never to come--and, really, how good could a treat be compared to the misery of sitting still for an hour and a half?

And, of course, I hadn't brought him any snacks or juice and I hadn't packed her any formula because I hadn't been expecting it to turn into a day trip, so I didn't even have that.

By the front desk, they have a sign hung up that says, "If you've been waiting for more than twenty minutes, please check back with us" or something to that effect. So, after we'd been waiting for a half hour, I began to get up to do just that but stopped as the flu shot lady came out and called in the first of the four people to get in ahead of us--an old guy who had been dozing in a corner when we first came in. So I didn't go complain at the front desk. There were, after all, people who had been waiting there even longer than me. They didn't have kids with them, of course, so their waits, in relative time, only lasted about 1/4 the time mine did, but they wouldn't accept an argument like that, and I wouldn't have either before I had kids. Anyone with kids who've had to sit in a waiting room for an extended period will doubtlessly back me up on this. There is no time that moves by more slowly than the time you have to spend keeping your kids out of other people's hair while simultaneously trying to be pleasant to them so the entire room doesn't immediately label you a "bad parent" or "monster" or "candidate for electroshock."

But, then again, I have to be thankful that I'm part of a "pay to play" system of medicine. Had it been socialized, I probably would have needed to sedate my kids, bind and gag them, and zip them up in sleeping bags to keep them under control over the multi-day wait I would have had. So, for that I'm thankful, because we don't even have any sleeping bags for them, and we can't afford such luxuries, not when we're still paying off Libby's back surgery from two years ago.