My wife and I are in a discussion about how health care has shifted from people-based to profit-based since the middle of the last century. Is it true? If it is, how did it happen?
I wish I knew the details of an event in the mid-1950s which began when I developed a stomach ache one afternoon. By dawn the next day, it had become severe. I was about 12 years old.
My mother called our doctor, Dr. Carroll Murtha. In half an hour, he was at our house. He listened to my belly, and then he took out a knife. Damn, I thought. He dragged the point of the knife across my belly a couple of times, asking me what I felt.
When he was finished, he told my mother to take me to the hospital, where later that morning my appendix was removed. They put it in a jar of formaldehyde, and I took it home. In the last 10 years, I have asked three times (two hip implants, a prostatectomy) to take my old parts home in a jar and was refused.
That's not all that has changed. In 1955, we had our own doctor, and he made house calls. My mother worked at a bank, and yet I have no memory of my appendectomy creating any serious ripples in her ability to pay the bills. She might have a different memory, but it left the firmament with her in the spring of 1989.
I should have asked her. You younger readers, if you have questions about the way things were in your childhood, don't wait to ask your elders.
How much did an appendectomy cost in 1955, and how did lower middle-class families pay for it? What principle of health care inspired doctors to get out of bed and make a house call on their way to work?
Karen claims she has a document showing that her family was charged $150 for the birth of her sister, in about that same time frame.
What happened? Feedback, please.
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