I was so angry… nurses were fluttering around, my blood pressure; pulse and mental state were being monitored.  The doctor’s assistant turned multiple pages for me to sign, 20 plus, 10 requiring my initials.  I was so incensed, my signature ground down to a straight line, the madder and madder I became (got).

    Then He walks in...his highness the doctor,  “MILLER….” I pronounce, “I DON’T TRUST YOU.”  “The state of medical practice is totally out of control and you know it.”  His staff froze, but I was fierce, I knew my voice would echo at their dinner tables, in their pallid lunch rooms.  “How can you justify… and you can’t… this over the top medical nonsense for my procedure?  I’m not getting a hip replacement!  I know you’re in bed with the lawyers.”  I had to be quick, my attack critical and consummate, their faces still frozen. “Who is your administrator? I’m going to write a letter to the New York Times. This is the most outrageous overkill of medicine I’ve ever seen practiced.”
   
    That was it.  The famous Beverly Hills doctor quickly endeavored to palliate me with some soft shop talk. I’d said enough.  I didn’t want him to take off my nose; all I was there for was a minute skin cancer surgery on my upper lip the size of a tiny peppercorn.

    I am much more proletarian than you might imagine when it comes to my looks.  The only thing I use on my face is soap and water.  I don’t get facials and I file my own nails, I don’t Botox my face.  My mother taught me not to frown when I was very young and she forbad me from ever getting a sun tan.  I had weathered most of the downside of aging.  However - and this time it was a big however - I didn’t want what had happened to me before.   Maybe it had been due to the sun’s reflected rays that I had had 33 stitches in my nose from the cursed basal cell carcinoma and I didn’t want to be stitched by any M.D. less than a plastic surgeon, the fellows who do the miniscule stitches.

    Lying on a heat warmed bed in the sterile hospital side of this, my $2500 office visit, I saw the other side of the outrageous practices of health care in the country. I thought of the people who can’t even get an x-ray, can’t afford their full supply of medicine, the part of America denied reasonable care or any care at all.

    What was I doing on my Marie Antoinette warm puffy hospital bed when others languished under the dubious and corrupted system we have.  “Others steal from you if you let them,” I heard Jay Leno say on the Bill Maher show.  “We get the health care we deserve.”  For god sakes America, pass the president’s new health care bill, and then make it better as you go along.  We have this chance to make a change.  Too much wealth, (like fat) in the lives of too few is putrefying, ugly.  I can tell you, it doesn’t feel good. 

    Take back your power, people.  Release the pettiness. Envy will keep you from getting the better deal. Think about America. Think about the whole.  Think about what is good for all of us.