I used to run a blog titled Lump on a Blog. It was a political blog for many years. Some of you possibly read it now and then. Last year I changed the theme of the blog – it now is a site for sufferers of heart disease.

Starting three years ago, I began to have chest pains that seemed more like heartburn at the time. To make a long story short, three years and multiple coronary interventions later, I now find myself with 25 drug-eluting stents in three major heart arteries. If you want the gory details, read My Story.

To give the reader an idea of just how many stents this is, I once posted on the Cleveland Clinic ask the expert forum about my declining maximum heart rate. I am now 42 years old and my maximum rate topped out at 160 beats per minute and not the expected 178 bpm. Within the question, I made a reference to my number of stents.

The Cleveland Clinic is the golden standard of heart disease care and treatment in the United States, so imagine my surprise when the expert replied to my query that my worries about my maximum heart rate were unfounded, but that he hoped the 25 stents I referenced were not all in my coronary arteries. Since then, two other cardiologists have told me that I probably hold the record for someone my age. However, I am alive – at a cost of over a quarter of a million dollars.

Of course, I have good insurance through my company and my personal cost was less than $2000. If unemployed, there are programs that assist in paying these bills and hospitals often work with patients in lowering the amount due. My wife’s mother used one of these programs to pay the entire cost of care after the death of the my wife’s father due to cardiomyopathy caused by a virus. They found out about the program after receiveing a letter from Bill Clinton (or his staff). Don’t let anyone fool you – these assistance plans exist, you just have to ask about them. Amazingly, it was the letter from Bill Clinton that alerted my wife and her mother to the existence of the Hill-Burton Free and Reduced Cost Health Care program. All the medical costs were covered.

Other programs exist, such as charitable organizations, that cover more than just drastic emergency events; it took my wife’s father more than three years of care before the disease took him from us. It makes one wonder just how many truly uninsured exist in this country that would be forced to pay for care. Where are the studies? Are most of the uninsured illegal immigrants? These are questions I have yet to find an answer for.

Another option, bankruptcy, although not desirable, is pursued most often in this country due to health costs. Given the above facts, one would think my support for the public option in healtcare a slam dunk; not so.

I come from Canada, so don’t get me started on socialized medicine. Plenty of examples exist and if you can use Google, prepare to be inundated with horror stories. The same is true for Great Britain and many other countries, some that have both public and private health care, and some only the public option. Assume for a moment that government public health care does not shut down our private health care system. I have yet to see how it would not diminish it. In competing with a public plan, private health care would be required to ration care in a manner similar to the public option. Let’s take a case close to home for me in a small little country called New Zealand, which has both a public and private health care plan.

Fromt the New Zealand Herald, On the waiting list roller-coaster:

Murray Benton has had to wait more than two years for life-saving heart surgery promised by Auckland City Hospital.

That’s more than 18 months longer than he should have had to wait under the Government’s strict policy of offering surgery only to those who can be treated within six months.

It has been a time of worry and lost opportunities for Mr Benton, who has had to give up many physical activities, and even watching rugby on television, to minimise his exercise- and stress-induced attacks of angina pain.

As well as helping him avoid a repeat heart attack, he hopes the surgery will enable him to do things like help with house alterations for one of his daughters and to return to riding his surf-ski.

A 64-year-old buildings and maintenance manager from Albany, Mr Benton has been booked for surgery at least three times, only to be shunted down the waiting list at the last minute because of other, more urgent cases and the hospital’s aim that the operation be done by a surgeon involved in his first heart surgery in 1983.

Yesterday, the hospital told Mr Benton it had booked him for surgery next Thursday, but could not guarantee it would be done then. The phone call came after the Herald inquired about his case and Mr Benton’s wife Sue suspects this spurred the hospital into action – but a hospital spokeswoman said the booking had already been made.

National Party health spokesman Tony Ryall said Mr Benton was a victim of the Government’s “hoax promise” of surgery within six months.

“Despite the billions of extra dollars going into health, people like him are waiting extraordinary lengths of time to get vitally needed surgery.”

Mr Benton had a heart attack without warning in 1983. He was given a triple bypass operation. In December 2004, after suffering chest pain, he was admitted to North Shore Hospital for eight days. He says he was put on the surgery waiting list then, but Auckland City Hospital maintains it was in December 2005.

Mr Benton accepts the need to treat acutely sick patients ahead of him, but believes the hospital must have insufficient resources if it cannot cope with its elective-surgery patients.

“It’s a fairly major operation. You build yourself up to it and when it doesn’t happen, it’s like being on a roller-coaster.”

The general manager of the hospital’s cardiac service, Kay Hyman, said the aim of having a particular surgeon treat Mr Benton had restricted the opportunities to schedule Mr Benton’s surgery.

She said there had been a significant reduction in the number of patients waiting for heart surgery in the past two years.

JOIN THE QUEUE

February 28, 2006: Auckland District Health Board had 341 patients waiting for heart surgery; 88 of them had waited for more than six months.

February 29, 2008: 225 people waiting; 31 for more than six months.

Is this truly what American’s want?

Don’t feel sorry for me, I am doing quite well these days – my maximum heart rate is now 185 bpm and I have passed my last three stress tests. I don’t know what the future holds, but I have learned many lessons. As I stated in My Story:

Ah, youth – wasted on the young, missed by the old. I am not sure the etymology of the phrase: “You are only immortal, for a limited time”, but I first heard these words in a song titled Dreamline, from my favorite band, Rush. The meaning to me now is more obvious than ever. In my younger days, my entire life stretched in front of me much like the vanishing point in a perspective drawing, or that point on the horizon where the sky meets the earth. I knew that one day I would reach that point, but existentially it still felt like there would just be some other distant vanishing point magically appearing, and so on, ad infinitum.

I take personally responsibility for my own condition. Starting in my early twenties, I knew my triglycerides were over 2000 (less than 150 is recommended). I smoked, did not exercise, took my medications intermittently; the very definition of a coach potato. I don’t believe you should pay for my mistakes and I don’t need a nanny state to take care of me if the result is mediocrity for all. The government controlled public option attempts to level the playing field in an attempt to provide for everyone. Like all other attempts at nationalization, you sacrifice excellence and treat it as a cheap commodity. There are other ways to reform health care that does not kill private insurers. The public plan in not an option – it is a death wish for millions of people. Ironically, if the public option is enacted, it is the rich, so quickly demonized by the left as evil for daring to possess money, who will be capable of affording quality health care. For the rest of us, think crap shoot.

In Obama’s America we all lose.

In more news and opinion:

Michelle Malkin has some great news on cap-and-trade: The farce of cap-and-tax revealed. Looks like we are heading in the right direction. First, the realization that cap-and-trade is a non-starter and will only cost the U.S. if we go it alone. Next, the realization that anthropocentric global warming has been a hoax all along.

Also from Michelle: Tax-maniacs backing off health benefits?

Ed Morrissey: Hoyer: No one would vote for ObamaCare if they read the bill

More from Captain Ed: Confidence in Obama, economy still dropping. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

From Glenn Reynold’s at Instpundit: IN THE MAIL: A big PR package with a copy of Atlas Shrugged. The press release is headlined: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years.

I agree with this: Sister Toldjah declares today “bad news for Obama day”. The awakening has begun.

Megan McCardle teaches Kevin Drum about healtcare:

If only Kevin had a subscription to The Atlantic–very reasonably priced at 19.95 a year–he would have found a hint in Virginia Postrel’s article about Herceptin and early stage breast cancer, which we ran in March. That article is about New Zealand, but the controversy over Herceptin was not limited to the Southern Hemisphere; Britain had a famous case involving the expensive cancer drug, in which a woman successfully used a combination of legal and media pressure to force the NIH to provide her with the drug for her early-stage breast cancer (she has since died). Early stage HER2 positive breast cancer is hardly a 0.001% event–25% of breast cancers have the HER2 trait, and those tend to be the more aggressive kinds of cancer. The drug had already been offered for early stage cancers in the US for years, even though no one had definitive proof that it worked.

This may be why–contrary to what Mr. Drum has apparently read–cancer survival rates in Europe lag those in the US. (Although this is complicated: we catch cancer earlier, because we’re screening-test-mad, and some cancers just hang out for decades without killing you). At the highest macro level, life expectancy, Europe generally outperforms us. But it’s not clear how much of that is health care, and how much things like our murder rate, and our famously sedentary lifestyles. When you drill down into many diseases, we outperform them. And many argue that we outperform them on hard-to-measure “lifestyle” issues: how fast your torn ACL gets repaired, how quickly (or whether) you get a hip replacement, etc. Such quality of life issues are nearly impossible to measure, though this hasn’t stopped many people from trying. But I don’t really trust the figures they generate.

I always wondered how the U.S. ranked 37th in the world. The indication that it could be our sendentary and stress filled lifestyles makes a great deal of sense. Do I dare hope those who measure such metrics will decide to take this data into account? Of course not – inconvenient truths are ignored by liberals to advance their agenda. Think global warming.

Truth is the first causality of liberalism.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 9:50 am and is filed under General Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.