The Fish Who Don’t Make It

Posted on March 2, 2006 in Hospitals and Prisons Insurance

I’m very lucky when it comes to health insurance. My wife works for a company with a generous plan (knock on wood), so we don’t worry about our monthly health expenses quite as much as others do. In this day of disease as capital commodity, we’re doing all right though the illness remains a problem.

The mental health field is a river up which salmon make their run from the sea to the source. We fish don’t know why we’re in the stream; we know only that we must swim as our jaws elongate and our sides ruddy.

Not so long ago, someone decided “for our good” to put up a gigantic dam. As they did so, they promised us a fish ladder up which anyone could climb. Corporate interests and state misers who believed that it was a good idea to maintain a surplus* decided to renege on that promise. As the salmon foundered in the forebay, a few notable donors to conservative causes created an airlift. If you had the money or someone was willing to pay for you, they would carry you into the reservoir; from there, you would resume your journey.

Opportunists line the banks of our elysian stream: Scientologists, some Pentecostals, New Age healers, and others run pipelines that suck unwary fish from the forebay and from the lake. These deliver their catch to canneries, telling each of us that we really are individuals despite the uniform labelling and shape.

The system works nice for fish such as myself who have spouses or other portal points to decent coverage. But elderly fish, young fish, and homeless fish must splash about in the shallow waters, flopping for air. The damkeepers slowly, very slowly cut the flow of the river, eliminating by artificial Darwinism (as they sing praises to God to believers among the fish), the fish who the keepers chose not to make it.

*Now think about that. You pay your taxes for services. The State sits on them and gives you nothing. Is that efficient?