To your health

Fredericksburg, Virginia

The huge popularity of your TV show Doc Martin here in the US has nothing to do with the balmy Cornish setting. What really turns us on are the scenes in the Doc’s surgery, where no one ever pays a bill.

Contrast that with the bedlam of an American doctor’s office. A panicky patient hunched over the front desk waving his insurance card at the frazzled nurse as she waits on hold for a claims adjuster in a distant state to rule on how many haemorrhoids are covered. When the adjuster finally comes on the line she can’t hear him because the panicky patient lobs a barrage of questions and instructions at her. ‘Tell him it’s not a co-pay because I just had one operation, not two. The first time he didn’t get it all and had to go back in, so that counts as one!’ The other patients in the waiting room can hear all this. While they are reluctantly visualising it, the debate shifts to whether the problem qualifies as a ‘pre-existing condition’. Is there a haemorrhoid that doesn’t? Nothing can pre-exist like a haemorrhoid, so you’d better not have one in the good old USA, because your private health insurance might not pay for it.

We are currently in the grip of multiple hysterias but the greatest of these is health care. The Supreme Court is now considering whether the President’s ‘Obamacare’ system is constitutional. But the truth is that We the People, those freedom-loving, liberty-worshipping, government-hating, go-it-alone, do-it-yourself denizens of what our politicians call ‘the greatest country on the face of the earth’, really want a National Health Service just like the Brits have, but we are afraid to say so because it would destroy our cherished self-image as the cowboy who rides off into the distance alone, like Shane, like Randolph Scott, like all of those grimly self-sufficient sociopaths we call heroes.