A VERY PERSONAL REASON

If you are a reg­u­lar reader of this col­umn you might re­mem­ber sev­eral ar­ti­cles I’ve writ­ten in sup­port of the pub­lic health sys­tem over the past few years.

This month I have an in­ter­est that is par­tic­u­larly close to home be­cause I am just two days away from hav­ing a kid­ney trans­plant in Bel­lvitge Hos­pi­tal in l’Hos­pi­talet de Llo­bre­gat, just out­side Barcelona. The organ donor is my wife Paula so I now have an­other rea­son to be grate­ful to her, apart from putting up with me for the last 25 years.

We only have to look at the United States of Amer­ica to wit­ness the hideous tragedies that un­fold when there is no uni­ver­sal pub­lic health scheme to pro­tect those who can­not af­ford to pay for pri­vate med­ical in­sur­ance.

Ac­cord­ing to the United Net­work for Organ Shar­ing, “the first-year billed charges for a kid­ney trans­plant are more than US$262,000.” On top of this, the drugs that are needed after the op­er­a­tion, in­clud­ing anti-re­jec­tion drugs and other med­ica­tions are es­ti­mated to be about US$3,000 a month.

In my case, prob­a­bly like many oth­ers who are lucky enough to live where we do, the fi­nan­cial bur­den on my fam­ily and I will be lim­ited to some loss of in­come be­cause I won’t be able to work for a few weeks or a month or so.

If I was liv­ing in the USA, I could well face the prospect of being heav­ily in debt for the rest of my life, or even com­pletely dev­as­tated. This, purely be­cause I have had the mis­for­tune to in­herit a ge­netic fault.

As one Amer­i­can re­ported re­cently, “after we went through all of our sav­ings, all of our re­tire­ment, and all of the eq­uity in our house, we filed for bank­ruptcy.” Sadly, these kinds of sit­u­a­tions are as com­mon as hot dogs and apple pie in the USA.

New schemes have helped some peo­ple to a lim­ited ex­tent, under the Af­ford­able Care Act and the so-called ‘Obama Care’ state and fed­eral fund­ing, but the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion is de­ter­mined to end these pro­grammes.

Re­pub­li­can party mem­bers of con­gress have their eyes equally fixed on en­sur­ing that the pri­vate health in­dus­try com­pletely dom­i­nates pa­tient treat­ment and that in­creases its abil­ity to make a healthy profit from un­healthy peo­ple. At the mo­ment, there are still 27 mil­lion Amer­i­cans with­out the in­sur­ance that is nec­es­sary for them to en­sure they get looked after prop­erly.

It’s easy to take what we have for granted in this coun­try. Per­son­ally, I have no prob­lem pay­ing my share of taxes, pro­vided it goes to vital ser­vices, like health, ed­u­ca­tion or other human in­fra­struc­ture.

The mark of civilised so­ci­ety is that it looks after its lower in­come earn­ers or those who make next to noth­ing. Hav­ing a health prob­lem should never be a pass­port to fi­nan­cial mis­ery.

These are the kind of thoughts I have as I think about what I am fac­ing in the com­ing weeks. I am ex­tremely thank­ful to my donor but also thank­ful to all those or­di­nary peo­ple who both fund and fight for the con­tin­u­a­tion of a qual­ity pub­lic health sys­tem. Long may it con­tinue to help peo­ple like me who need it.