Today, like every day in the United Kingdom, I am thankful to live in a country where standard medical care is free, always.
Yes, there are wait lists – rationing – and excellence is variable depending on your postcode. But the basics are all in place; nobody wants for an asthma inhaler, or refrains from seeking emergency care. Everyone can in fact receive treatment for all manner of chronic conditions, including a liberal sprinkling of drugs I personally would consider experimental or pointless.
The system is incentivized, but in a civilized fashion: as a survivor of a particular kind of cancer I’m not allowed to pay for drugs because they really really really really want me to take the stuff that keeps me alive and moderately well. The murky central organizing committee apparently reckons ‘free’ is a good price to pay for compliance.
Now that I have the permanent right to live in the UK I am safe, but I’ve been watching the move toward reform in the states with great interest. Not because I want to go home (though I sort of do) or because I am fundamentally uninsurable in a pure capitalist model (though I am) but mainly because my friends and family are impacted by current policies. I’m worried about my parents right now, and about what my kids might do in the future. You know, that whole ‘family as a fundamental building block of society’ rhetoric.
Of course I was sufficiently indoctrinated in the bullshit bootstrap ethos to feel that I ought to work hard for my money and benefits; but my instinct was that no amount of work could protect me.
The first Americans in my family only arrived there about eighty years before I left, and I can assure you my ancestors were primarily economic immigrants. They didn’t leave their homelands seeking adventure, or to flee war. They wanted food and land and opportunities for their children to be something better than working class.
I’m the result, one of the first in the stateside family to permanently move more than six miles from the pioneer homestead, go to college, succeed by the standards of the community I was born in. And I did exactly what they wanted without losing sight of what they sacrificed – though the family is not especially impressed by any of my escapades.
My great-grandma lived to one hundred; she knew and disliked me, and met my daughter. But she probably never imagined her decades of dodging deportation would directly influence me to choose a new life in Europe. Not exactly a popular destination if you consult the huddled masses and etc.
I’m sort of with her on the bewilderment, but for a different reason: health insurance. Complicated? Oh, yes.
Right now I am sitting around thinking about questions I am not equipped to answer, and the reason is simple. I don’t recognize myself in this scenario. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, everything that has happened, even the fact that I am standing in a kitchen in Cambridge England cooking pumpkin pie, I am still a poor kid from a peninsula west of Seattle.
I lack a sense of entitlement to the extent that I do not even feel comfortable typing up my problems, let alone talking about the intricate and interesting bits about moving to a new country.
Basically I feel like an impostor. Though all the evidence indicates this is my real life. Some of you have even met me!
Happy Thanksgiving.
