Dodging the Health Care Bullet

...Or "How Long Do We Deserve to Live Without Unbearable Physical Difficulties and to Live at all, Without Having a Card to Show the Front Desk?"

Speaking of medical coverage and the problems of paying for it, my recent post titled "Toward Medicare for All" got me to thinking about what happens if one adopts my favorite way of getting rid of all uncomfortable situations (and people), which is to wave a magic wand at them and saying "Bye" or "Later" or some such, and watching it or them recede to nothingness in the distance, as has happened a surprising number of times.

Medical care involves first of all living with a reasonable lack of physical discomfort. (Age increasingly makes the word "total" an impossibility in that statement, and so "reasonable" must be used as the modifier instead, though often only barely.) And also it involves not saying "Bye-bye" to everything just yet, voluntarily or involuntarily. But if medical care in accordance with modern standards comes at a monetary price too high for one to afford, it seems logical -- though in the eyes of many not reasonable -- to forgo the expense of paying for it and therefore having it, in the same sense that having to forget all about owning a sports car, a yacht, or merely a new cellphone doesn't have to be the end of everything.

So, casually skipping past pain and handicap to the ultimate biggie -- since that is what everything eventually comes down to -- how long does a person deserve to live when living entirely disconnected from the medical services of his time?

Naturally that question has absolutely no answer, and even reviewing one's own medical history throws no light, as it depends too much on what the Fates have to say, and I've never heard of any university that offers courses in learning how to hear those intentions, much less influencing them.

In my case I can say that things could have gone tragically against me as early as about age 22, had I not been transported to a military hospital in California. But would I have contracted that regional enteritis in the first place, if I hadn't been in the Air Force at the time? In any case the military paid for the whole thing, including two months in the hospital. This was after my childhood period, that now weird-sounding era of the 30's and 40's when it was still customary for family doctors to come to your house and take care of things that didn't require trips to the hospital, for which your situation had to be really, really serious.

After that I was lucky enough to stay clear of going into the medical shop for repairs through nearly the next 50 years, marked by several extended periods when I carried no discernible medical insurance. Then came that fateful year of 2001 and turning 70, when it became advisable to ask people in hospitals for help, first in Atlanta and again a few years later here in Virginia. Both times it was for situations that weren't anywhere in the class of triple bypasses and such but still were best not left to my usual system of toughing things out.

But how does that relatively happy medical history compare with the millions of instances meanwhile when, like nearly everybody else, my time in this world could've been shortened considerably and in a flash, in the air, on the Pacific Ocean, and especially on automobile roads and train tracks?

I guess, aside from stuff like genes, the reason I am still here and able to split my firewood is that I've usually gone uncommonly far out of my way to avoid tempting the Fates. Whether or not that's true and therefore is the Ultimate Answer amounts, however, to a couple of other questions.