The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [94]
The man handed me the pasty in a paper bag and I went with it out to the car. It did seem to be a genuine Cornish pasty except that it was about the size of a rugby ball. It came on a styrofoam platter with a plastic fork and some sachets of ketchup. Eagerly I tucked into it. Apart from anything else I was starving.
It was awful. There wasn’t anything wrong with it exactly – it was a genuine pasty, accurate in every detail – it was just that after more than a month of eating American junk food it tasted indescribably bland and insipid, like warmed cardboard. ‘Where’s the grease?’ I thought. ‘Where’s the melted cheese patty and pan-fried chicken gravy? Where, above all, is the chocolate fudge frosting?’ This was just meat and potatoes, just natural unenhanced flavour. ‘No wonder it’s never caught on over here,’ I grumbled and pushed it back into the bag.
I started the car and drove on into Wisconsin, looking for a motel and a restaurant where I could get some real food – something that would squirt when I bit into it and run down my chin. That, of course, is the way food should be.
Chapter nineteen
‘AT NORTHERN WISCONSIN General Hospital, we’ll help you to achieve your birthing goals,’ said a voice on the radio. Oh, God, I thought. This was yet another new development since I had left America – the advent of hospital advertising. Everywhere you go you now encounter hospital ads. Who are they for? A guy gets hit by a bus, does he say, ‘Quick, take me to Michigan General. They’ve got a magnetic resonance imager there.’ I don’t understand it. But then I don’t understand anything to do with American health care.
Just before I left on this trip, I learned that a friend was in Mercy Hospital in Des Moines. So I looked up the number in the phone book and under Mercy Hospital there were ninety-four telephone numbers listed. The phone numbers started with Admitting and proceeded alphabetically through Biofeedback, Cancer Hotline, Impotency Program, Infant Apnea Hotline, Osteoporosis Program, Public Relations, Sleep Referral Services, something called Share Care Ltd, Smoke Stoppers and on and on. Health care in America is now a monolithic industry and it is completely out of control.
The person I was visiting, an old family friend, had just learned that she had ovarian cancer. As a complication arising from this, she also had pneumonia. As you might imagine, she looked a little under the weather. While I was with her, a social worker came in and gently explained to her some of the costings involved in her treatment. My friend could, for instance, have Medicine A, which would cost $5 a dose, but which she would have to take four times a day, or she could have Medicine B, which would cost $18 a dose, but which she would have to take only once a day. That was the social worker’s job, to act as a liaison between the doctor, the patient and the insurance company, and to try to see to it that the patient wasn’t hit with a lot of bills that the insurance company wouldn’t pay. My friend would, of course, be billed for this service. It seemed so crazy, so unreal, to be watching an old friend sucking air from an oxygen mask, all but dead, and giving weak yes-or-no nods to questions concerning the continuance of her own life based on her ability to pay.
Contrary to popular belief abroad, it is possible, indeed quite easy, to get free treatment in America by going to a county hospital. They aren’t very cheery places, in fact they are generally pretty grim, but they are no worse than any NHS hospital. There has to be free treatment because there are 40 million people in America without hospital insurance. God help you, however, if you try to sneak into a county hospital for a little free health care if you’ve got money in the bank. I worked for a year at the county hospital in Des Moines