Health Care Misconceptions, Cancer, Kids and the VA

Four years ago, my son was diagnosed with T-Cell leukemia. All of this occurred before Obama was elected and somehow sold the American public on the idea that the American health system was broken and needed to completely overhauled. Sure, anytime one has a huge system, one os going to experience problems. People will be discriminated against, insurance companies will try to limit coverage and with anything as extended as four years of cancer treatments, there will be billing problems. But this is a far cry from a system broken beyond repair.

As my circle of international friends found out about it, I got a bunch of comments. I expected these comments to tout how much better my son would be treated in each friends country. I have friends in Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, the Czech Republic, Germany and France and some in China and Korea. So I got phone calls and a few emails. Here is the gist of the responses. The actual statement is from a President of a health care company in Denmark that make an artificial heart. She was previously an RN and has worked in the medical field for over thirty years. Here's the statement: "You should get down on your knees and thank God every day your son is an American citizen and you live in America. The care he will get is so much better than any place else in the world that a real comparison cannot be made."

I was shocked to a d egree because a friend who lived in France consistently touted how well the French system was dealing with his parents who were in their eighties at the time. He was comparing the "free" system there with the "paid" system here and it sure seemed that his father, at least, was getting care he would never have gotten here. I found out later that his father was quite wealthy and had purchased private policies. Yes the French state did pick up some costs for in-home nursing but his major medical procedure was paid for with cash in part and a supplemental policy he had purchased for himself and his wife. The person the state brought in was not a nurse but was a woman from a local village who did things like house keeping and cooking while his father was recovering. Yes, my friend misrepresented the whole of the French health care system and his motives are still unclear. Maybe it's like that condition where people who lose money gambling tell stories about how much them make from gambling. I really have no idea.

My son was making monthly visits to his oncologist by this time. When one it treated for cancer, remission starts immediately if one is responding to the course. Treatment is given and the cancer subsides and new cancers do no develop. If this condition does not happen, the course is changed to something more drastic. For leukemia, the courses have numbers. These numbers are not associated with years but are the number of the trial. My son was undergoing the course called 1976 B (It's called the Standard course.) and he was responding. Had he not been responding, the course would have changed and he may have had to move to a center that dealt with patients who do not respond to the standard course. Each case is reviewed by a panel which may be international. For childhood leukemia there is something called the COG (Children's Oncology Group) and it is a bunch of oncologists who meet online or over phone and discuss each case. When that happens, each patient can get the latest successes from a number of different sources. The COG is international in scope. (Subsequently, I met an oncologist from Italy who was a member of the COG and he also commented that success rates in America are higher than those in the rest of the world for a number of reasons.)

On one of the visits, the oncologist was moving offices. Materials kept in the back office, like case files, were now kept within sight of the waiting room. There were two different folders: one was blue and one was red. The blue folders took up about three feet by six feet of shelf space. There were approximately three times as many red folders than blue so I asked what the different colors meant. The office director told me that the blue folders were patients with insurance and the red folders were people being treated who did not have insurance and could not afford to pay for treatment. I asked if the government was paying for them and she said,"In part. We get some money from the government but nothing close to how much it really costs. We just absorb the costs."

I asked how they got reimbursed and she said they didn't in general but there were some private foundations they could appeal to which the did. So here we have people getting treated by a cancer center even though they couldn't pay. Regardless of what anyone thinks about health insurance, this doesn't seem like a broken system to me. Here was a doctor treating patients even though they couldn't pay and interestingly, he wasn't upping every other patients bills to compensate for what he was losing with the patients who couldn't pay.

It's hard for me to accept the facts we were given in regards to doctors and insurance companies, by the administration to "sell" health care reform. The facts didn't match what I was being told in the real world in this circumstance. It was the only I could really examine and the facts turned out different that the misconceptions being used to justify a huge government incursion into the healthcare system. We already have government involvement with senior citizens, Medicare and similar state run health care systems. We also have the Veteran's Administration.

Now, I do have some experience with the VA. I am a veteran with six years military service and am honorably discharged. I met a guy who was a beach buster in WWII. He served in the Pacific Campaign and was involved in five beach landings earning two Silver Stars. He entered the VA hospital and I went to visit him. I couldn't find a nurse or doctor or anyone on the ward where he was bedded. The care was appalling due to lack of resources. I went to visit my friend by he asked me to help the other guys who were in some pretty dire straights. I'm not going to detail what I did but suffice it to say I spent a day there and got some basic (non-medical) things accomplished. Now that is a system that is broken in many ways. After I finished what I was doing, I walked around and found a remarkable disparity in treatment: Some wards had adequate personnel and others did not. It didn't seem to matter what was being treated or age and just appeared to center around resource allocation.

It's government run healthcare and it's broken and needs and overhaul. I couldn't help but come away with the impression that the private system was adjusting to problems and was working but the government system was not adjusting to problems and was broken. Maybe someone else has experience in contradiction to mine and would be willing to state his experience. As far as I can tell, we were lied to to achieve a goal and that goal is the eventual socialization of healthcare following European models. By the way, the EU is falling apart and the social democracies are rapidly falling into disarray. The wonderful French system touted by my friend is failing on a massive level and the costs are rising way beyond the French private system to support it.

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