What Do 50 Million American's Lack, That Every Britt Has?

For a little while, I was worried that my trip was going to be forced to an unexpected and undesired stop, and that I would have to fly home. This is because I had to be rushed to the emergency room in Oxford, England and was scared that the bill would send my budget into the red. Here is the story:

It was one of those sequences of events that the mind freezes and remembers more like a still life style painting, than the passage of a few quarter seconds in time. It was Halloween and I was carving a pumpkin. The sharp knife sliced through the meat of the pumpkin, and into the flesh of my hand, cutting the skin and tissue between my left thumb and index finger. My hand jerked away and smashed the glass of red juice I was drinking against the white wall. Everything in the room seemed to freeze - the white walls with their ambiguous red stains, the shattered glass all over the room, and the dripping puddles of dark red blood – it all just seemed to stand still until my mind registered (aided by the pain) what had just happened. Once the situation was more or less under control, and I was in a cab on my way to the ER, a new and scary question registered – how much is this trip to the ER going to cost me?

My experience at the Oxford Radcliffe ER was similar to all the ones I had witnessed back in the US. I registered and was seen immediately by a nurse. Then I waited for a bit, and was seen by a doctor. I was given six stitches in my hand, and then sent home with bandages and instructions.

Right before leaving the ER, I had to deal with the moment I had been dreading ever since the cab ride over. I had already been stitched up and debriefed, but there was still one very painful thing left to do – pay. I took a deep breath and asked where I should go to pay for the operation, nervously thinking about the hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of dollars that would be charged to my credit card, and potentially force me to cancel the rest of the stops of my trip. The nurse kind of smirked at me and said, “You’re not in America, you don’t owe us anything. Our hospitals and doctors are free. You can be on your way now, happy Halloween!”

There are only two other times in my recent life when I have had to go to the ER, and both experiences were in the United States. One was in Boston, with a friend who was going into anaphylactic shock. He didn’t have his health care card with him, and ended up having to pay the $325 dollars for an epinephrine shot out of pocket, with the hopes that his health care would reimburse him later on. The other was with a friend in Florida who needed to get emergency contraception, but was afraid to tell her mother that she was sexually active, and chose not to use her health insurance. Though the doctors, citing religious and ethical reasons, didn’t even give her the emergency contraception, they did give her a bill for $275.

What the hell is going on here? How can two countries, with comparable economies, arts, standards of living, and cultures, have such different stances on medical treatment? In the UK I was given professional attention by nurses and doctors for free. I don’t even pay taxes in the European Union, let alone the United Kingdom. In the US my friends, who are both taxpayers and citizens, were charged hundreds of dollars for their trips to the ER. If they were in the UK, or most of Europe for that matter, they wouldn’t have had to pay a thing.

What it boils down to is that The United States of America and The United Kingdom view health differently, and their views inform their government’s actions. In the US, we view health as a luxury for the rich and fortunate. Hence, the upper class in the US has easy and quick access to the best doctors in the world. Simultaneously though because of the great expense of private medicine, 50 million US citizens live without health care, and 18,000 die annually because they can’t afford health care. This is in contrast to the UK (and nearly all of the rest of the developed world) where health care is public, and no one dies from inability to access it, and people are still treated by skilled doctors.

This is an issue that we should all be thinking about as we finalize our decisions about who we will be voting for this Tuesday. You will have to decide for yourself, but as far as I’m concerned it’s time that we in the US join the rest of the developed world and make health and health care a basic human right and not a privilege to be enjoyed only by the wealthy.