Our Health Care Dilemma - Part 1 - The Gory Glory Days

This is the first of a 3-part series on our current health care in America.  The views expressed in this column are my own exclusive ones, and I make no apology for them.  However, I challenge you that, if you can find any evidence to dispute what I am about to present, I would love to have you either send me a message with the facts, or post your comments at the website whenilk.blogspot.com.  I promise to publish your comments as a follow up column (anonymously, of course) if you don't want to put them on the blog.

I recall in my youth in the 1940s and 1950s that when I was sick or injured our family doctor would come to our house, or my parents would take me to the doctor's office and he would treat me that same day.  The ER - emergency room at the hospital - was used only for emergencies, those times when injury or illness was serious enough that there was no option but to treat at the hospital.

The bill for treatment, whether in the home or at the doctor's office, was always, to my knowledge, reasonable.  It was often paid by my parents, but I'm sure we had some kind of health insurance, as well, and higher cost care was paid by an insurer.  And, with all the treatment that a family of seven needed, I never heard my parents complain about the high cost of health care.

At times when no quick treatment was available, we made do with what we had in the vicinity, or in the medicine cabinet.  For those of you too young to have seen it, a medicine cabinet was that wall mounted or built-in, 3-inch deep, 3-tiered box in most bathrooms, usually with a hinged mirror door, that contained every home remedy known to humankind. There seemed to be a pill or liquid in there for every known malady, plus a few things YOU WERE NEVER TO TOUCH!  They must have been toxic.

Our house was a magnet for the neighborhood kids to play, maybe because we had a side yard with a sunken badminton court cum ice hockey rink in it.  Of course, that was an arena for accidents, as was the side street alongside it where we played baseball, football and other games on the concrete surface.  I can recall my mom fashioning a sling from a Life Magazine, an old tee shirt and a belt to splint a broken arm.  She was a whiz with homemade aids for all kinds of ailments, too.  Unless there was blood and guts, she could make a temporary fix for it, and often the blood didn't stop her either.

Little did we know that there was a major transformation taking place in health care back in those halcyon days.  It's no secret that sometime between 1965 and 1975, the house call and the unscheduled visit to the doctor became obsolete, replaced by the immediate care clinic and the hospital emergency room for those who couldn't wait. Meanwhile the cost for treatment also rose faster than the sun on a clear summer day.  You may ask, "Why?"  Was it the greedy insurance companies?  Was it the high cost of modern technology?  Was it the greed of the health care providers?  Was it due to inflation of wages and prices in general?

We're going to explore just what happened to our medical costs and treatments in the next part in the series, so stay tuned and keep this column handy to review next week.