An emergency tour through the French health care system
Lives: Le Treatment
by Sara Paretsky
New York Times Magazine - August 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16lives-t.html
Last summer, sitting in a quiet garden outside Paris that belonged to my
friend Frederic, I indulged in my favorite fantasy - living elsewhere, where
I would become a different kind of person. Less fretful, better organized,
more creative. I could see myself in a garden like this.
Frederic's young son was teaching his baby brother to play catch, along with
the words "la balle." He helpfully turned to me and made me repeat after him
several times. I study French, but I'm not fluent, so I added a 7-year-old
French coach to my garden and more-perfect-life fantasy.
The only problem, I explained to Frederic, was that I didn't think I could
cope with French bureaucracy. "No one can," he said. "Just remember that
they exist to make your life miserable, and you'll be fine."
A few days later, my husband and I traveled to the Loire Valley. Having
served with the Royal Navy at Normandy, he enjoys seeing France in
peacetime. Every year or so, we try to look at a different part of the
country.
My husband kept falling asleep on the trip but insisted he was fine. Shortly
after reaching our hotel, in a little town south of Tours, he complained of
severe chest pains. I was panicky, but the concierge called a taxi and
helped explain to the driver that we needed a hospital emergency room.
The small country hospital was much like an American one: anxious people
lined up in a waiting room, a television blaring, vending machines along one
wall. My husband speaks no French, so I explained as best I could to the
gatekeepers at the front desk what the problem was, the douleur dans sa
poitrine, sa fatigue and so on. We were U.S. citizens, not British, and we
didn't have an E.U. passport, so we didn't have reciprocity for insurance
coverage.
After a few minutes, someone came for my husband. Even though he didn't
speak French, they wouldn't let me go with him. I sat down to wait, trying
to breathe deeply. Among the waiting crowd was a woman about my own age,
clearly as worried as I was about her own family member. She was already in
the waiting room when I arrived, and after perhaps half an hour, she went up
to the front desk and asked, in a hesitant soft voice, for news.
The man behind the counter demanded to know if she'd heard him call her
name. "Non," she whispered. "Then you have no reason to come forward," he
said.
Of course, he spoke in French, but even I could follow it. I remembered
Frederic's mantra - bureaucrats exist to make our lives miserable - and I
watched the clock slowly sweep off another 30 minutes.
At that point, I couldn't take it anymore. I walked up to the desk and asked
for news of mon mari. The gatekeeper turned to his colleague: had Madame
been to the counter already? No? This was the premiere fois? Very well. He
called into the back, and in a few minutes, a technician came to fetch me.
I was escorted to my husband's cubicle, which he was sharing with a
Frenchman who collapsed while getting off the Paris-Tours train. A doctor
arrived. Her English was worse than my French, so with my little Collins
dictionary I translated my husband's symptoms. They took him and also his
cellmate away for X-rays and left me and the cellmate's partner to sit on
their beds.
The partner, a chic young woman, blond, extremely thin, was carrying a fat
book called "L'Anorexie." Judging by her own size, I wondered if it was a
guide, but she explained that she was training to help people with eating
disorders. Bulimia and anorexia were severe problems in France, she told me:
women, and increasingly men, are prey to a cultural mystique that proclaims
they must be both fashionistas and foodinistas. Bulimia in particular is
widespread, she said, and people smoke heavily to suppress their appetites.
Meanwhile, my husband's heart and lungs were examined inside and out. He and
his cellmate were both suffering from pneumonia, not heart attacks. They
were given antibiotics.
At 2 a.m., when we were discharged, I offered my MasterCard to the surly
gatekeeper. He said they would send us a bill. The doctor apologized for
having to bill us, but we were not citizens, after all.
Six months later, the bill arrived. For X-rays, an EKG, 10 hours in the
emergency room, a doctor, a cardiologist, technicians, nurses, drugs and
even the surly gatekeeper, we were required to pay $220. I might put up with
a lot of ugly bureaucrats for that.
[Sara Paretsky will publish her 13th V. I. Warshawski detective novel,
"Hardball," in September.]
A version of this article appeared in print on Aug. 16, 2009, on page MM50
of the New York edition.
***
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090819_the_politics_of_the_jackboot/
The Politics of the Jackboot
By E.J. Dionne
Washington Post: August 20, 2009
Try a thought experiment: What would conservatives have said if a group of
loud, scruffy leftists had brought guns to the public events of Ronald
Reagan or George W. Bush?
How would our friends on the right have reacted to someone at a Reagan or a
Bush speech carrying a sign that read: "It's time to water the tree of
liberty"? That would be a reference to Thomas Jefferson's declaration that
the tree "must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and
tyrants."
Pardon me, but I don't think conservatives would have spoken out in defense
of the right of every American Marxist to bear arms or to shed the blood of
tyrants.
In fact, the Bush folks didn't like any dissent at all. Recall the 2004
incident in which a distraught mother whose son was killed in Iraq was
arrested for protesting at a rally in New Jersey for first lady Laura Bush.
The detained woman wasn't even armed. Maybe if she had been carrying, the
gun lobby would have defended her.
The Obama White House purports to be open to the idea of guns outside the
president's appearances. "There are laws that govern firearms that are done
state or locally," Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said Tuesday.
"Those laws don't change when the president comes to your state or
locality."
Gibbs made you think of the old line about the liberal who is so open-minded
he can't even take his own side in an argument.
What needs to be addressed is not the legal question but the message that
the gun-toters are sending.
This is not about the politics of populism. It's about the politics of the
jackboot. It's not about an opposition that has every right to free
expression. It's about an angry minority engaging in intimidation backed by
the threat of violence.
There is a philosophical issue here that gets buried under the fear that so
many politicians and media-types have of seeming to be out of touch with the
so-called American heartland.
The simple fact is that an armed citizenry is not the basis for our
freedoms. Our freedoms rest on a moral consensus, enshrined in law, that in
a democratic republic we work out our differences through reasoned, and
sometimes raucous, argument. Free elections and open debate are not rooted
in violence or the threat of violence. They are precisely the alternative to
violence, and guns have no place in them.
On the contrary, violence and the threat of violence have always been used
by those who wanted to bypass democratic procedures and the rule of law.
Lynching was the act of those who refused to let the legal system do its
work. Guns were used on election days in the Deep South during and after
Reconstruction to intimidate black voters and take control of state
governments.
Yes, I have raised the racial issue, and it is profoundly troubling that
firearms should begin to appear with some frequency at a president's public
events only now, when the president is black. Race is not the only thing at
stake here, and I have no knowledge of the personal motivations of those
carrying the weapons. But our country has a tortured history on these
questions, and we need to be honest about it. Those with the guns should
know what memories they are stirring.
And will someone please tell the armed demonstrators how foolish and lawless
they make our country look in the eyes of so much of the world? Are we not
the country that urges other nations to see the merits of the ballot over
the bullet?
All this is taking place as the country debates the president's health care
proposal. There is much that is disturbing in that discussion. Shouting down
speakers is never a good thing, and many lies are being told about the
contents of the health care bills. The lies should be confronted, but
freedom involves a lot of commotion and an open contest of ideas, even when
some of the parties say things that aren't true and act in less than civil
ways.
Yet if we can't draw the line at the threat of violence, democracy begins to
disintegrate. Power, not reason, becomes the stuff of political life. Will
some group of responsible conservatives, preferably life members of the NRA,
have the decency to urge their followers to leave their guns at home when
they go out to protest the president? Is that too much to ask?
E.J. Dionne's e-mail address is ejdionne@washpost.com.
© 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
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