Greatest Health Care in the World
I’m parked in my dentist’s waiting room listening to the receptionist ask a Pakistani family if they have dental insurance. The odds of that must be about the same as winning Powerball this week. Across from me there’s an Hispanic twenty-something in for a root canal. The waiting area looks like a mini-Ellis Island by the time I’m summoned to the chair in back for a cleaning, both fiscal and dental. I heard it said once that if you wanted to determine if a person was poor or not, look in their mouth. Teeth will be rotten, teeth will be missing. The poor yank them rather than get a root canal or a crown.
A friend of mine, recently deceased, had half his pulled. Too much to fix em, he told me. By the end he looked like a caricature of a hillbilly. I’ve got another buddy whose abscessed teeth lay him low every month, but he won’t go to the dentist. Costs too much.
For some reason dental care isn’t lumped under health care. Not that most poor people have either. At least in this, the greatest nation with the greatest health care on earth. I guess if we just keep telling ourselves this bit of brag, we’ll eventually believe it even when statistics show us way down the list for everything from infant mortality to insurance coverage.
When I worked graveyard at the hospital forty miles away, the uninsured came to the ER where we treated them when they couldn’t pay for a regular doctor. We all not only pay for that service, we pay a lot more than if we treated them through a clinic or a doctor’s office. But you can’t go to an ER, usually anyway, for a toothache or an abscess or a root canal.
The Pakistani family walked out, probably to another dentist office, probably getting the same answer, a brushoff. Greatest health care in the world. Choose your own doctor. Just be sure to bring cash.
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