Free Stuff Is Expensive

I was lying on a plastic-covered table at the free medical clinic the other day, stoically enduring an uncomfortable examination that would be too much information to elaborate on here, thinking about how useless money is as a measure of value.

In Canada, in theory, basic medical services are free. In practice, we pay for our health care indirectly via tax dollars, after the government has taken their cut to pay for the extra layer of paperwork required to administer the programs. For those of us whose tax dollars wouldn’t buy a Starbuck’s pumpkin latte, this still looks like a pretty good deal on the surface.

But let’s take a peek beneath the surface.

I don’t have a primary care physician, because there aren’t enough of them to go around where I live, so when I get sick, I can either go to the emergency room at the hospital, or make an appointment at the free medical clinic. In this case, my problem although painful, didn’t seem life-threatening, so I started calling the free medical clinic at 8:30AM on Friday morning. I got a busy signal on my first twenty tries, but I kept re-dialing every two minutes because the clinic only makes appointments for the current business day and the first hour of the next business day. On most days, all available appointment slots are filled by 9:30AM. I finally connected with the receptionist at 9:15AM, sat on hold for ten minutes and got the last appointment at 8:40AM the following Monday, by which time my symptoms had entirely disappeared.

I felt bad about this. Somewhere in this town, people who were even sicker that I was connected with the receptionist later than I did on Friday, and at the very moment I was being inconclusively examined on Monday morning, those who survived the weekend were once again playing the clinic re-dial lottery, some of them probably still in pain. A person with really bad luck might have played for days before getting an appointment.

After determining there was nothing obviously wrong with me, the doctor sent me downstairs to the lab for a generic CBC panel and another test I won’t offend your delicate sensibilities by naming. I have to call the clinic again next month to find out if my symptoms were the precursors of a life-threatening disease or just another flair up of my chronic hypochondria.

So how free is this system?

When I lived in the States, I paid exorbitant health insurance premiums. Like most hypochondriacs, I’m a pretty healthy person overall, so I was grossly overcharged when I did avail myself of medical services, some of which I had to pay for myself anyway. Specialists and diagnostic technicians tripped over each other in their scramble to ding my insurance company for every procedure that could be even remotely justified by my symptoms. I never endured the anxiety of being unable to obtain medical assistance when I was in pain, and test results came back in hours, or at most a couple of days.

I’m getting older. Things don’t work as well as they once did and given my hypochondria, unless I win a real lottery, I’ll be losing the clinic phone lottery more frequently. In retrospect, those exorbitant insurance premiums were an incredible bargain.