Speaking of Too Much Exposure…

There I was, standing half naked in a large room with a dozen or so technicians scurrying about. It took me months to get here. I wondered if this somehow capped my initiation into French society.

It all started when I arrived in France* in August 1998 to spend a year as a nanny. To qualify for a long-stay visa, I had to get a chest x-ray to check for tuberculosis.  I received a letter informing me of my appointment date: 3/2/1999. I read that as March 2, 1999 (about 6 months after my arrival – good thing for France I was tuberculosis-free).

When I walked into the clinic on March 2, the woman at the desk took my appointment letter and looked at me with a genuinely French combination of scorn, distaste, and annoyance. “C’est trop tard,” she said, pushing my appointment letter back to me. That’s when I learned – the hard way – that Europeans use the dd/mm/yyyy format, and I was a month late for my February 3 appointment.

But this was the French bureaucracy, so a new appointment only required filling out another appointment request form and waiting several weeks for a new letter to arrive announcing my assigned appointment date and time.

Hopital Joseph Ducuing, Toulouse, France

This time I was to report to the downtown hospital. The one with an x-ray machine in the middle of the large room. The one where they put you in a private room to disrobe, but then expect you to walk shirtless down a corridor to get to the x-ray machine in the middle of the large room. With the dozen technicians swirling around.

I did my best to turn my arms into a shirt. Was this standard protocol, I wondered, or just punishment for being a stupid American who can’t read dates?

At any rate, the x-ray was done, and in perfect bureaucratic style, I received my long-stay visa on the day I left France several months later.

Such was my brush with socialized medicine. Certainly, others have fared worse.

Look, ma! No tuberculosis!

Obamacare celebrates its second birthday on Friday (though most of it has yet to take effect). However noble its intentions, I have to wonder how long it will be before we have to wait weeks or months just to find out when we can see the doctor, much less get treatment. And how long will it be before we’re just another number waiting in line, instead of a patient with unique needs? With the government’s dismal track record of cost-cutting, how long before the costs spiral out of control, like they did with Romneycare?

No doubt our current system is broken. But there are better solutions than government mandates and programs.

Next week the U.S. Supreme court will decide whether the President’s healthcare system is constitutional. Here’s hoping the justices will let us keep the shirts on our backs.

 *I am so sad to hear about the terrorist shootings in my beautiful French “hometown” of Toulouse. My prayers go out to those affected.