Health Care As It Should Be

When I went to vote in the PA primary yesterday, I was wearing my Harvard t-shirt. I have one or more t-shirt for every institution that I’ve been associated with, and this one came up in the rotation. Anyway, the nice lady behind the desk asked if I’d been there, and I said yes, and she said her granddaughter had just been admitted to the dental school. So I congratulated her and said that I had fond memories of the dental school.

 

I didn’t go into the reason why I had such memories. There was the serious business of being # 44 to vote that day—it was around 2 p.m., so pathetic turnout is the name of the game. But the memories of the dental school are interwoven with memories of the health services offered to students and faculty at Harvard, at least back in the last millennium: I don’t know what they’re like nowadays.

 

Three experiences there.

 

One day I was sitting at my desk intent on taking notes to prepare to write a paper, and I carelessly inserted the back end of a Bic pen into my ear. Being a lucky kind of guy, I immediately felt the little rubber cap that seals the end come out and nestle itself lovingly into my ear canal. I went to the health services. The receptionist did not mock me. The nurse who carefully removed the cap did not mock me. I walked out chagrined but un-mocked.

 

A while later a physical exam suggested I had a heart murmur. The health services sent me to a specialist facility where the good doctors and technicians spent some two or three hours trying one test and then another and another trying to figure out what was going on with the ol’ ticker. It turned out that nothing was going on, and happily I trotted back home.

 

And then came the dental experience. I went to have my teeth checked and cleaned. The dentist looked at the results of both procedures and said, “Your teeth are fine, but your gums have got to go.” What a joker! And so the health services provided me with a periodontist who considered my mouth and decided that the dentist had been right. He, the periodontist, was affiliated with the dental school, and it happened that he had a student who was about to finish her training—a nice Iranian woman, as it turned out. The student would do the surgery, which took place over the course of a month or so, one segment of the mouth at a time while the periodontist supervised. I was the student’s final project. Everything worked out fine.

 

So from blush-causing idiocy to oral surgery, the health services were there to help.

 

And you know how much I paid for all of that? Nothing. Zero. Zilch.

 

That’s the way health services should function across the country, for everyone.