I’ve been sick. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine. I didn’t get this tan in a hospital. But I did spend 5 days there, back in June. I went over to Milan to see a guy about some oil and I got a fever on the plane. Air Conditioning. I was freezing. Halfway over there I was rooting through my bag looking for things to wear. By the time we landed, there was nothing left to put on.
At first they thought it was Swine flu, which in my case makes perfect sense. The hotel doctor called an ambulance and they met me in the emergency ward wearing Hazmat suits. Just so you know, Milan has one of the best exotic disease hospitals in the world. Those Italians go everywhere, and they bring back some pretty strange shit. And the doctors love it. They got the best. A bunch of kids you could die for suited up and met me every day in my hermetically sealed room while they tested me for every known anomaly. Swine flu it was not.
Turns out that my urologist in NY fucked me up with some antibiotics he prescribed over the phone after a biopsy I didn’t need in the first place. It put me in the hospital for a week. Luckily, I wasn’t here. The one thing that gave me pause was my insurance. If I get sick, I’m obliged to do so right here in the USA. If I put one foot outside, I’m on my own.
So, I get the bill for five days of the most through treatment I’m ever going to get, from the ambulance to the isolation ward, with every possible blood test, scan, and specialist review, and do you know what the whole thing cost me? - including the drugs, the lab work, the gang of doctors who are my new best friends? Fifteen hundred Euros, which is less than my co-payment, or the same money I would have spent taking those kids out to dinner, which I intend to do the next time I’m in Milan. Plus, the room was huge, the nurses were beautiful, and the food was Italian.
I thought long and hard about how it was possible. I saw that they wasted no money. The nurse didn’t wheel a big electronic unit into my room when she wanted my vitals. She used a thermometer under my arm, which she kept in my night table and was mine to take home. She used a manual blood pressure cuff. The IV had a little wheel instead of a computer. So there was no useless goofy shit. But I still couldn’t figure it out, until it hit me. No profit. Nobody is making any money. And once you subtract profit, once you stop looking for ways to make money from sickness, you get down to the price of health.
Take my Flomax. I just got a box of thirty on Capri, along with the same of Ambien. Here, my co-pay is $50 for Flomax and $25 for Ambien (which I only take on the plane). In Capri the Flomax cost 7 Euro straight up over the counter and believe me, Capri isn’t cheap. The Ambien was 5. But they weren’t called Flomax and Ambien. They don’t advertise drugs on TV over there, so the names aren’t as good.
