You're probably aware of the Nevada candidate running against McCain, who says we should return to the barter system when negotiating with doctors.
Great idea - a couple of car washes for that office visit to get the anti-biotic prescription.
The system kinda breaks down, however, when you need to pay for the $5000,000 cancer treatment. Two words come to mind: indentured servant.
Depending on who your healthcare provider is, theft is also another option.
ReplyDeleteYou know all that time you spend waiting in the exam room while they hunt down your doc and your charts? That's plenty of time to go tripping through the drawers and shelves to come up with band-aids, alcohol packets and other small first-aid items that will come in handy later on. It's pennies and not dollars, but in a time of economic war (on the working class and the poor), you do what you have to do. As long as I'm taking it from some Big Hospital Chain I figure I can afford the karma.
(Non-profit free clinics are OUT, of course. Don't EVER steal from them. They're on our side.)
As for the Bigger Medical Bills? Well, two things:
1. We'll all die someday. We spend a lot of time and money trying to deny this, to no avail. Maybe cancer is one of nature's ways of thinning out the population on an overcrowded planet. If it happens to me I doubt I'll try to fight it, especially if the treatment stands as good a chance of killing me as the disease.
2. Anything less, but still kinda big? I go to the hospital ER and accept minimal treatment to patch me up and send me back out again. Then, if they won't work with me on an income-contingent payment plan, I skip the bill. I refuse to let anyone penalize me for holding down a low-paying, hourly-wage job. I didn't iinvent the system where some peoples' jobs pay far more than others, and I'm not going to be a sucker for their system.
Remember that you can't be sent to prison for being broke and in debt. The working poor don't have to worry about karma, and they can work on getting what they need to survive without any guilt.