The American Medical Care Myth

Winter was coming on in the Bay Area and I had to get out of the cold so using frequent flier miles I had accumulated, I flew to San Jose Costa Rica again. I stayed in San Jose this time to get some medical work done. I looked up a woman I had lived with before and stayed with her out in Zapote near the university. I paid her three hundred dollars a month for room and board. I had a nice clean modern one bedroom with a private bath and she was a great cook and a good conversationalist. I enjoyed staying with her. She was constantly trying to talk me into staying with her permanently but I could never settle down like that I kept telling her. I was just too much of a wanderer to settle down in one place.

I had some bleeding ulcers on my face that I wanted a dermatologist to check out. I made appointments with the doctors in Costa Rica before I left California so I settled in quickly with my friend and headed off to the hospital the next day for my appointments. I had been trying to get treatment in the United States but the medical care in the States is very very very slow if you are poor. I had been trying to get an appointment with a dermatologist in California for over a year without success so I resorted to Costa Rica's high quality and speedy medical care system.

I took a bus to the hospital early in the morning and saw the dermatologist. He wanted to do an immediate biopsy and have a plastic surgeon close up the wounds for me. We booked it for the next day. When I returned I was taken to a procedure room with a couple of doctors and some nursing staff. The dermatologist cut out the ulcerating area and the plastic surgeon closed up the golfball sized holes for me. My face was very swollen from having work done in two areas and then one area of my arm also. I took a taxi back to the house I was at and rested up for a week to let it heal. The area on my face healed very nicely with only a small scar. The melanoma was gone for now. I went back for a followup dermatology visit a couple of weeks later and the doctor did a christmas tree on me. I asked him what he meant and he laughed. That was his code to his nurse that he was going to be doing a lot of removals on a patient. I quickly found out why it was called decorating a christmas tree as bright red balls started to appear all over my arms, shoulders, back and legs as the doctor started to freeze off various skin conditions around my body. I did look like a christmas tree covered in red balls when he was finished treating about 40 or 50 areas on me. It didn't hurt so much as just made me look pretty stupid for a week while they all healed.

The bill for all the work was fair. I would have had to pay around ten to fifteen thousand dollars for this work in the States but in Costa Rica it cost me $275 for the entire package including dermatology, plastic surgery and lab work. The United States thinks they have the best medical care in the world. You can ask almost anybody in the country and they will immediately say the U.S. is number one. In reality the U.S. is rated down around 37th or 38th in the world for quality of medical care, just below Mexico usually. If you are rich or have the top of the line health insurance then you might do alright in the States but a person like me with no insurance and unable to even purchase insurance if I wanted to because of my preexisting conditions, the United States is the last place I want to be when I need medical care and this was a classic example of why. Costa Rica treated me quickly, fully and cheaply all at the same time. I was still waiting for my appointment in the States. About a year later I did finally get an appointment in the States at a dermatologist and they looked at the work the doctors did and told me they did a good job. The American doctors would not do the follow up work that the Costa Rican Doctors had told me I should get. The American doctors just wanted to wait until I had more visible tumors before they would do anything at all. They told me to just come back in two years for another visit. The myth of the Great American medical superiority over the rest of the world is just that, a myth perpetrated by the American Medical Association and the American government. Maybe one day Americans will wake up and see the truth their lackluster medical care but I doubt that they will in my lifetime.