I’m not a sickly person. I don’t get seasonal illnesses. I’m
not overweight, I don’t do drugs recreationally, I don’t smoke pot or
cigarettes, I’m not a drinker, I workout regularly and I eat clean. I’m not
perfect by any means – I love baked Cheetos as much as anyone else does – but
once I began to take myself seriously as a performer, I worked hard to develop
and maintain this lifestyle.
Eventually, I realized that staying healthy, lean and strong would have to
be a full time job. Ultimately, I would have to fight for the body and the
quality of life that I wanted, and that fight would never really end. Every
day, I fight for my life with all the salt and sugar I don’t eat, with every
mile I run, with every
2 minute
sparring round I crawl through, with every shot of wheatgrass.
I believe that those preventative measures add up.
Someone said to me recently – I think it was Charles Burnham
– that the ailments that visit you in your 30s and 40s come back to stay with
you in your old age. I haven’t had any visitors – and I’m not keeping the porch light on for houseguests,
either. This little story is a strong example of what it means to stay vigilant
and fight for your good health.
Because I’m fairly in tune with my body, I’m acutely aware
when something is wrong. While on tour in Dresden, Germany, I was quite
suddenly in so much pain with what I thought was an earache that I asked to see
a doctor. It felt as though a needle
was pushing its way directly into my ear canal, causing a shooting pain that
ran down my neck. My voice remained unaffected – but how long would that
last? I didn’t want to wait to
find out.
I had never had emergency medical care by a general
practitioner in Europe. What would this experience be like in comparison to
what I usually get in America when I’m uninsured?
Eva (our Austrian tour manager) got a few phone numbers from
the hotel and made an appointment to see a doctor on a Friday after 8am, when
their offices opened. When I saw
her at breakfast, she said I was in line to be seen as soon as possible. Thanks to a childhood that included way
too much art house cinema, this remark filled my head with images of starving
desperate filthy eastern Europeans in endlessly long breadlines, shrouded by
snow and grey skies wrapped gently within an overall sheen of desolation and despair. Our leisurely sun
drenched10 minute walk to the doctor’s office was quite the contrast. We even marveled at the beautiful
architecture as we went along.
There was a line, as it turns out – but it wasn’t what I
expected. It felt as though we were waiting to check out a book from the
library. We stood in a clean, well-lit vestibule with a few others for awhile
and then suddenly we were at a desk explaining ourselves to a sweet faced girl
in white who took my information and led us to a waiting room. In no time at
all – something like 15 minutes, maybe? -- I was sitting in the doctor’s
office. He was a little on the young side, a boyish looking 40-something
perhaps, smiling and open and friendly, and was dressed in jeans and a dark,
striped, button down shirt. I sat in a chair next to his desk, which was
expansive and well-organized, and he leaned back in this huge ergonomically
correct chair and listened to me attentively as I pointed at my neck and
gesticulated. Needless to say, his English was perfect. The whole thing felt
like a job interview. Or a really terrific blind date. We should have been
having coffee and pastry as we chatted. Sitting there, looking at him in his
black crocs, I couldn’t help but wonder: Where were his many, many degrees from
expensive inaccessible universities? Shouldn’t they have been hanging on the
wall behind him, constantly reinforcing his authority and expertise? Where was
his equipment? Wasn’t he supposed to be wearing a stethoscope or something? How
about some id tags? And where was his white jacket?
When I asked him this last question, he laughed. “Yes,
that’s right,” he said casually. “I wore a white jacket in Canada…” Equipment? He nodded toward the
bookshelf behind me, where a stethoscope sat on a shelf, glistening in the
phosphorescent light like an overfed garden snake. As I regaled him with stories of American doctors and
hospitals and how this might work if I were stateside, he examined my neck and
throat and listened with interest. He seemed bemused.
Then came the diagnosis. My ear was fine. My voice was fine.
The tube that runs from my ear to my throat --
the Eustachian tube -- was infected. How did this happen?
“Have you had a cold?”
he asked.
“No,” I replied. I honestly couldn’t remember the last time
I’d had a cold. I even made sure that I got my annual flu shot before I left
home.
“Was your nose clogged, was your head congested at
all?” he asked.
That’s when it hit me. I had been crying constantly for
days. This is all
Jef’s fault.
The doctor wrote a prescription for nose drops and a cream
that is to be inhaled with steam. And with that, our visit was over as abrubtly
as it began. If I was in that room longer than 10 minutes, I’ll eat my favorite
pumps.
Here’s the upshot: I presented myself as a foreigner, I gave
them NO insurance information – just my passport. That little visit cost me 30
Euros. The medication was only 15 Euros. That’s something like $60. Even if the
rate of currency was 2 of our dollars for every one of theirs, I would still
have paid less than $100. We were in and out of there in less than an hour. I
was more than astonished. I was impressed.
I remember sitting in the van as we zipped down the highway,
more than just a little freaked out as I considered the American no insurance
alternative: sitting in the triage section of an emergency room’s waiting area
for hours on end, eventually sifting through
a stack of paperwork only to wait and wait and wait until a
doctor sees you, hurls you through some expensive equipment if you’re lucky or
tosses some Tylenol at you if you aren’t.
That bill would be for hundreds upon hundreds of dollars. If you have
coverage, you’ll spend months haggling with the insurance company over it. If
you don’t have insurance, you’ll give a false name, address and social security
number, and then you will disappear. Or you will give them your correct
information and pay hundreds of dollars for what would have cost you less than
$50 in a place that used to be behind the
Iron Curtain.
I have insurance but that doesn’t mean that my days of
munching on fresh fruit and praying that I don’t get hit by a bus are over.
Plenty of Americans have all the insurance they could possibly want. And they
get a major illness and get bilked out of their life savings. Why, it’s almost
as though corporations are constantly scheming on how to get as much of
everyone’s money as they possibly can.
We’ll be a country of the very rich and the very poor in no time at all.
The haves and the have nots. And of course, the haves will say that what you
have or don’t have will be entirely your own fault. You just didn’t work hard
enough.
Whoever came up with the idea of America being a place where
everyone pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps should be taken out back
and horsewhipped for all eternity. The idea of such a notion –
if I work hard,
I can have whatever I want! – is appealing, but it’s just flat out not true.
First of all, this great nation has worked very hard to disenfranchise a great
number of its citizens since its very inception – and in many ways, it
continues to do so, unabated. Jim Crow?
Segregation? Voting rights for everyone – not just white men who own
property? Slavery – a topic that NO ONE wants to openly acknowledge or discuss.
Give me a break. Secondly, no man is an island. No one does anything in and of
themselves. Land grants? The G.I. Bill? Free (yes, free!) college tuition? Give me yet
another break. And last but not least, there’s
institutionalized racism. You
know. It’s that thing that tilts absolutely everything in this country to your
white advantage.
But I digress.
Americans seem blissfully unaware of how well other first
world nations live. If they knew what they could be getting for their hard
earned tax dollars, they would riot in the streets. As one ex-pat said to me
after a gig in Dresden:: “Why should I go back to the USA? There’s no poverty
here. They have universal health care. They pay for your education. They have
gun control.” He paused, shrugged
and continued. “While America is squabbling, everyone else is living in the 21st
century.” He’s right.
That’s a 21st century way to live.
Because I'm convinced that
Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko should be required viewing
for anyone in this country that doesn’t want universal health care and anyone else that's curious about what's really happening in the health care industry, I've included it below in its entirety.
And no, I’m not a socialist.
