2023-07-18 19:35:38
by Luigi Ripamonti
“When you know you’re sick, you start saving for a transplant” reads in The kiss of the insect (Code editions). The sentence comes from a person with Chagas disease, caused by a parasite widespread in the Americas (but recent studies estimate it is under-diagnosed in some European countries). Who can afford to pay for a transplant, in this case of a heart? But the paradox, explains the author, is that whoever pronounced them meant a pacemaker and not a transplant: costing around 15,000 euros, in any case inaccessible to the person concerned.
The term “poverty” remains abstract until one thinks that it can really affect us too. This is the case of medical and surgical care essential to survive that one day, perhaps not far away, we too will not be able to afford if there is not a breakthrough in the financing of the National Health Service and in the way in which priorities will be established in the allocation of funds for public health.
From the same book: «One morning, while reading an online article in the “New York Times”, I learned of the existence of what I have defined as the “epi-elite”, i.e. families in the United States who can afford to pay between 40,000 and $80,000 a year to have a network of doctors on call.”
The universal healthcare system is a privilege whose importance we never realize enough. We will be told that this key is continually insisted on and that we need to deal with reality, i.e. with the state’s economic resources, falling birth rates, an aging population, ever-increasing costs of care, public debt, etc. Right, true.
But it is equally true that we are all willing to get “inflamed” by other problems and themes and in the meantime we are letting ourselves be “warmed up” (we quote Alberto Scanni once again in the pages of Corriere Salute) like Noam Chomsky’s frog, which once realizing the the fact that they were cooking it was already boiled and she no longer had the strength to jump out of the pot. Let’s all try to deal with this problem, or we risk having to give up a transplant, a pacemaker, a doctor who answers.
July 18, 2023 (change July 18, 2023 | 7:34 pm)
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