Last week I was brushing my teeth and found a peanut size abscess above my molar on the right side. I know how dangerous an abscess can be, especially for someone my age so I got immediately to my Dentist who took x-rays and there was an abscess where my father had one and which had broken into his sinus and caused him misery during my high school years. An abscess also killed the composer Alban Berg. So my dentist sent me to a specialist for a root canal. He told me she would give me a good deal because I have no dental plan. Can't buy one on my social security. Now I had a root canal a couple of years ago and then the whole process was $1500 for the tooth and the cap and everything. This root canal today was different and cost as much as my going to and attending a week long master class with the greatest voice teacher in the world at Greve, Italy last summer. Well, no more of that foolishness. No going to Oklahoma for family funerals either.
The difference is that I am now seventy and on social security. As I got to the dentist this morning she was wonderful and killed the nerve and gave me her special deal. $1700. Not bad for me with $600 in the bank and my credit card maxed out. I just laughed, then she told me that I needed to get the cap pronto because the tooth was fragile and could split at any time just from chewing. I called my dentist and asked the cost for his service and the cap. $1500. Humm! That's the private market. What the market can bear. The Supreme Court is going to turn us back into this market because the market knows best. But my root canal and cap has doubled in the last two years. What was $1500 is now $3200 for one root canal and cap. That same Supreme Court gave us the Iraq War and hundreds of thousands of people dead. Maybe my $3200 is not as bad as being dead. Some would disagree. They just don't see the point anymore. I was told today by a relative that a short time before I had my other root canal she could buy an implant to replace a lost tooth for not much more than that $3200. I would look great with no tooth and teaching all of these people looking like a thief or a homeless person. In a world where image is crucial, that would be a bummer. Add that sad tale to this one. A new healthcare center opened across the street from me. I needed a healthcare service close by for Strep tests. The VA is too far away and the transportation too expensive. l need strep medical tests for me and my students. The tests four years ago with another Doctor, now closed, was $35 for the test. This new doctor said that my Medicaid would take care of it for a co pay of $35. "Great" and I will send my students since strep is always a problem for singers. Except two weeks later I get a bill for $190 through the mail for the test. He claimed Medicaid wouldn't pay and so I had to make up the difference. Actually, I paid the co pay and he accepted it so I don't have to pay but he tried. That's the market. Most people would just pay up and blame the government. I checked. No students of mine are going there and neither will I. I used to watch the vultures around my Mom and Dad as they came with every kind of scam imaginable to get the old folk's money. From Jimmy and Tammy Faye Bakker to that fat preacher with his own "Liberty" university in Virginia where they "liberated" old folks from their money and then there was Oral, the old faker cry baby, that I had experience with in college and the Flint Ridge land people who took ten grand from my parents for 3 acres that then had rent every year as a community fee on nothing and there were taxes as well. Meanwhile for brief moment I thought we could cut through all of this and get a decent healthcare plan. Solve the expensive drug problem and release us from having to spend all of our time just managing our own health and accomplishing nothing except survival. That's a really good use of Elders who have a lifetime of experience that could contribute to the community. For a brief moment I thought I could do my work, get by on Social Security, help the young great voices born into homes with no resources for the development of that talent for the good of the nation and the future of our art. For a brief moment I thought we were going to have a health care plan. Not a perfect one. We still had to kiss the butts of the insurance companies and pay for their Mercedes but we would have a health care plan and my wife would have decent coverage instead of paying a hell of lot for junk and I could get my teeth taken care of for a reasonable amount. Meanwhile we have "Christians" on the Supreme Court doing away with that again. The brigade of Opus Dei sitting on their little punishment thigh chains to make sure they feel nothing compassionate for anyone. But what's the excuse for the others? Those Attorney Generals from states filled with people who just love to gamble and make other people pay if they get sick. No pulling together as a nation, a people to help the bulk of the poorly born but talented population develop their lives. Now we know the wealthy are the owners of the classical arts. You should have told that to Bela Rozsa or his daughter Roxanna Lorton before they built that big beautiful music school at TU. Graduates to nothing. No jobs. No work. Just take another degree, but this is about healthcare not education. Don't want to get distracted by my passion. Doesn't it make anyone feel guilty that the serfs of China and Russia have benefitted from group social help? Yes socialism. While the average people here are no smarter, no more sophisticated, nor more enterprising than they were when I was growing up in 1950. That they haven't and won't come as far from their beginnings as did their parents and their children will be even more angry and impotent than they are but with their guns hunting black hoodies to fill the holes in their own understanding, self-worth and lost talent. Many of those people have great talents, great voices, music in their souls but it will be lost. They will never know the pleasure of Beethoven that my grandson felt the other day at his last lesson as he explored the Moonlight Sonata's obsession with tone, rhythm and sublime beauty. Something that made Beethoven's life significant even as he lost his hearing. They will never know that because this system removes their ability to do the work and puts them in the chains of drudgery, the worship of money and grinding poverty so that a few can have everything. I think we should organize a peeing brigade. Go to Washington and pee on the steps of the Supreme Court for all of these Papists who want to support the wealthy and large corporations and condemn women to the whims of nature and genetics. Yes we would go to jail but a thousand men peeing on the steps of the court would make Guinness and would be in the history books for all time. Of course we have that old saying from home that I should probably consider. Never get into a peeing contest with a skunk. You'll lose everytime. And it's too late to immigrate. That's what I think as I meditate on the quality of this nation and it's lost souls. What good is heaven if you never lived here in the first place? REH
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