OUR
"HEALTH" IS MORE DEPENDENT ON "CARE"
THAN IT IS ON A "SYSTEM"
By: Bob Strodtbeck
The problem with America's health care
system is, well, the term, "health care system."
I hearken back to a simpler time when those words were not put together and we knew
where we had to go when we didn't feel so well. If we were in good "health" we
went to work or outside to play and went about our daily lives. If we weren't in good
"health", we would stay home and our mothers would take "care" of us.
This "care" would involve staying in bed, taking plenty of fluids, and, of
course, chicken soup. Generally we weren't in good "health" and needed
"care" because some malady had overtaken our respiratory "system" or
digestive "system" or some other "system" that was important to our
bodies performing its routine tasks. Simply put, we didn't need an insurance company or
federal bureaucrat to tell us we didn't feel so good.
Something happened between the time when a band-aid cured all my boo-boos and skin
abrasions covering my body was a sign that I was a healthy, active boy. Shortly after I
passed through my boyhood, I worked for a now defunct pharmaceutical company-it was
absorbed by a larger, more powerful pharmaceutical company. During that time in the early
1980's, I would pay a sales calls on the many family owned pharmacies that filled my
Nashville, Tennessee, territory to sell a new pill. I would tell the pharmacists, who also
owned the business, of all the miracles the wonderful little pellet would perform in the
bodies of people in bad states of health. Without exception, everyone of these stern
businessmen would ask, after my stunningly professional dissertation the same two words:
"How much?"
One day one of my clients went beyond the basic utterance and after I gave my pitch, he
went back into the shelves collecting six different bottles of other medications. He laid
them out on the counter in front of me. He told me each did the exactly the same thing as
did my miracle pill, but at a precise fraction of the cost. Then he asked, "Tell me
why I should rearrange my shelves for your pill."
I had not reached the point of professionalism at that point to give him a decent
answer. |
Not
long after that the words, "health", "care", and "system",
merge as a single phrase to identify a need for all our lives. It seemed that we no longer
needed mom and chicken soup, but something sophisticated, scientific, and comprehensive to
cure us of all our problems. Interestingly, since that time costs have skyrocketed.
Prescriptions, vaccinations, and going to experts to issue more of each is a sign that we
are so conscientiously caring for our health as to prevent all the evils that can attack
us in the new millennium.
Something that does not exist, however, in this new age in which our "health"
is in the "care" of a professionally manged "system" of corporate
executives and government employees is that there are no more of those little family owned
pharmacies with their inflexible owners grumbling, "How much," to every
innovation to save the innocent from the ravages of illnesses-real or perceived.
Might I suggest that these medical curmudgeons were a huge barrier to those executives
and bureaucrats who saw great wealth and power in the discomfort of us mere earthlings.
When those small business trolls would resist buying the newest invention intended to
rescue us from the frailties of the human condition because they had plenty of other
remedies at a lower prices, they were subjecting the masters of industry and government
beneficence to the crude basics of economic realities.
Those little shop keepers, with their soda jerks, lunch counters, and Timex watches,
were preventing corporate and government growth by placing laws and supply and demand on
each great creation to spare us from disease. Somehow those store owners knew what their
customers could afford when they needed a pill. Interestingly, their stores were generally
very close to their homes and the people who came into their shops tended to be their
neighbors.
On one occasion I saw one of those neighbors come into the store with a $10 bill and
told the pharmacist, "We're needing some food." The pharmacist told him,
"Go get what you need." He filled his basket with an assortment of bread, milk,
and canned goods worth at least, at that time, $15. The man gave the pharmacist the $10,
he rang the cash register and gave him $5 back. After the man left and I watched
quizzically the pharmacist, who routinely asked me, "How much," told me, "I
grew up with him, he's down on his luck, and he needs a friend." I also saw some of
these penny-pinching small operators dispense medications to their neighbors free of
charge even before they went to a doctor to have a diagnoses or prescription. It seems
that although they were parsimonious to a brash, young pill peddler, they didn't need the
permission of a "system" to tell them how to "care" for the people who
depended on them.
Maybe that is why the "health" of so much of what we see in this country is
declining to the point of being hopelessly inoperable.
"Published originally at EtherZone.com :
republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."
Bob Strodtbeck has been writing commentaries for a
news weekly circulated in a community 10 miles north of Orlando, since 1993. He currently
lives in Orlando. Bob is a regular columnist for
Ether Zone.
Bob Strodtbeck can be reached at: strodtbeckr@bellsouth.net
Published in the December 22, 2008 issue of Ether Zone.
Copyright © 1997 - 2008 Ether
Zone.
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