Patricia L. Ballard

Being creative has been hard for me this week. Maybe it’s being at back home after a trip to Florida last week. Maybe it’s feeling overwhelmed by everything that I want to get accomplished and the intrusion of the trivia of daily life. Whatever it is has led to a feeling of limbo that nothing seems to shake.

Finally yesterday, it hit me. I’m waiting for the presidential election here in the US. It can’t come fast enough. The changes in daily life for most Americans have been massive over the last eight years. Many people will blame it on 9/11, and that has been part of it. No doubt that it sped up and magnified our downward spiral, but the changes had started before 9/11. To me, it seems that the changes in my life and those of my friends are indicative of the deeper problems of our country.

Let’s start with medical care. After almost twenty years of a good job, my husband was forced to quit after his hospital was bought by an HMO that was famous for the way it cut the quality of care in order to make money. I was ill at the time with sinus polyps. Under by law, we could continue with our current medical insurance for eighteen month after he left his job. I was locked in a pattern of chronic infection. My body was resistant to the antibiotics that were approved by the formulary. The doctors would put me on steroids and antibiotics. I’d get better for a few weeks. Then I’d be weaned off the steroids and get ill again. All of this was complicated by asthma that presented itself with a chronic cough. At its worst, I could only get a little sleep at night by sitting upright with pillows across my lap and slumping forward over the pillows. Only this position stopped the cough. At no time did my doctors even suggest x-rays of my sinuses or even bother to look up my nose with a scope. As baby boomers, we were told that we were uninsurable by any other private insurance.

My husband was jobless, and we had just bought our dream home in Santa Fe a year before. There were no jobs for him in Northern New Mexico. He tried for a year to work locums. They’re sort of have stethoscope will travel. All the travel was exhausting. This led us back to Chapel Hill, North Carolina where we had lived thirty years ago. He went back to work at the University of North Carolina where he had done his anesthesia training.He immediately got me seen by a specialist who probably saved my life. After over four hours of sinus surgery, I got up and walked out of the hospital the same day. We went out to dinner two days later and decided to move to Chapel Hill three months later. We hated to leave our home and friends in New Mexico, but we needed the job and the medical insurance. Our old insurance refused to pay for my surgery as they claimed that I could have gotten the same care in Albuquerque. Short of hiring lawyers and suing the HMO, there was no way we could get our money back. It did not matter that there was none of the equipment used on me during surgery in the whole state of New Mexico.

We’re relatively lucky as my husband will always have a job. We’ll always have medical insurance, but overall the quality of care is dropping in this country. It’s unimaginable how many people are dieing with no affordable care. My brother, an epidemiologist who specializes in public health, says that more people die every year in the US from a lack of medical care than died in 9/11. Yet our leaders are callous to this statistic. I have counseled my friends who have thought of retiring or changing jobs to make sure that the medical insurance and benefits are locked in before making any changes.

Recently, I went to get a refill for a medication that I have taken for almost ten years. It has been discontinued by the manufacturer. It’s not a necessity for life, but it did take care of my problem. The replacement medication does not work as well and gives me mood swings. The manufacturer of the first medication evidently decided that it couldn’t make enough money on the medication when it went off patent and stopped production. Unfortunately, I can’t find a generic version.

The quality of life here has degraded in other ways, too. I don’t see friends if we have to drive too far to meet, as gas has gotten to be too expensive. If you can find gas. It took weeks for the pipeline to the Southeastern part of the US to be repaired after it was destroyed by a hurricane this fall. Many people are having to choose between driving and feeding their families because of the expense of gasoline. Before driving to Florida, a necessity for my husband’s work, he got on the AAA web site and researched the availability of gas on our route and it’s cost. The roads have less traffic. Fewer people can afford to travel.

Two friends of mine have had to close small businesses that they had run for over twenty years. People are often buying only necessities. When I run errands, the stores are much less busy and crowded than they were even a year ago. The organic and whole foods stores are particularly empty. People are opting for less expensive foods.

These are just a few examples of the changes that have happened in the US since 2000. It’s looking as if Barak Obama will win the current election. If he does, I don’t see how he can do more than make a small start on correcting the mess in four years, but at least it would be a start.

This has all been written from my perspective and out of personal experience. I did not take on larger issues because I do not have the time gather the statistics to back up my beliefs. Plus, almost any statistic can be twisted to back up any argument, but I felt the need to let Redbubblers from outside the US know a little of what it’s like to live here at the moment.