The Sun News (Myrtle Beach, S.C.), Issac Bailey column

July 19--Not too long before I got sick, I watched with journalistic eyes as a mother stood in the intensive care unit of Conway Medical Center wondering when or if to remove the tubes helping keep her dying daughter alive.

As I spoke to her, my mind wandered to the end-of-life studies I had been reading and remembered that about half of Medicare dollars are spent in such situations, even when medical care can no longer make a difference in a person's survival.

When I got sick and was in a Cambridge, Mass., hospital bed, "bending the cost curve" never crossed my mind.

Getting sick has its privileges. It has given me a glimpse into the other side of the health care debate I had been reporting for years, teaching me things I couldn't learn even while gently rubbing the hand of a young woman who would die in Conway's ICU days later.

I had also been listening to people claim that free market forces was the key to improving the system and bringing down costs, comparing health care to picking fruit at Whole Foods, the more choices the better.

Empower the consumer, they insisted.

This is why I know that outlook is flawed and limited:

I spent nine days in the hospital fighting off fevers, headaches and chills caused by a meningitis that resulted from the treatment I received after being diagnosed with the auto-immune disease CIDP.

There were moments it hurt to lie down, to sit in a chair, to stand up, to remain still or move.

One doctor said discharge from my nose could be brain fluid. Another said my heart was no longer pumping normally. One whispered into the ear of another to remind him to tell me all the possibilities, cancer, bacteria in the blood, abnormal signs on my liver, degenerative diseases such as ALS.

"Don't forget leukemia," a doctor quietly told her colleague, though loud enough for my wife to hear.

They couldn't tell me why the fever kept coming back, stronger each time.

They kept sticking needles in my arms to take more blood.

They kept wheeling me up and down halls for more tests.

There was an MRI of my neck and back and feet, and eventually head.

There were ultrasounds of my inner thighs and lower legs and abdomen, and right heel. There were two spinal taps, one painfully unsuccessful.

I crawled into large machines I'd only seen on episodes of "House."

I was given a pill to control a blood infection -- so strong it made me see flashing blue lights that weren't there -- only to find out later there was no infection.

There was the uncomfortable talk with my wife about the life insurance policy and why I didn't want to linger on life support, if it came to that, but that any decision she made would be the right one.

There was a lot going on in those nine days.

Here is what wasn't going on: I was not shopping around for the best MRI prices because I was in no position to do such a thing. I was in no condition to question the use of the ultrasound machine. I didn't think to ask if two infectious disease doctors, a neurologist, a cardiologist, and a gaggle of other medical professionals was overkill or how it would cost me, Aetna or Mt. Auburn Hospital.

I couldn't. I was sick and literally hallucinating blinking, blue lights.

That's not even taking into account the difficulty I had trying to compare prices of different kinds of CIDP treatments before I felt too bad, even though I was in a state with near-universal health coverage and transparency laws that demand doctors give patients information about prices upon request. Often, they can't provide accurate prices in advance because the price negotiated between a large insurance company and a hospital is proprietary, and because treatment often doesn't unfold in a predictable straight line. There are hits and misses, no matter how well-trained the professional.

While in that hospital room, I knew enough to know that the more medical professionals involved, the less efficient the process -- but the more likely the mystery would be solved.

When you are in the midst of a medical emergency or quickly deteriorating chronic condition, when medical decisions and procedures are most costly and urgent, all you want are answers -- and now -- no matter what it takes to get them. Empowering a person about the real costs of health care has little chance of making a difference in that environment.

It's not like choosing between a C- or D-cup breast augmentation, or the red apples that cost a little more at the Target across the street than those at the Wal-Mart a mile down the road.

Medical professionals are human, too. They want to put an end to the suffering in front of them.

They, too, wonder if they've done everything humanely possible to save that life even in the absence of a flawlessly executed textbook treatment plan.

If the health care system hadn't found an effective, efficient cost structure before me and my chills and headaches and 103-degree fever showed up in the emergency room, it wasn't going to while medical professionals were frantically trying to pinpoint the cause of my misery.

Individual choice is a bedrock of ours and should be cherished. But some problems are bigger than the individual and call for comprehensive, collective action.

The Affordable Care Act, while not perfect, is the country's first true attempt to deal with this conundrum by using free market principles where they might have the best impact and collective action to deal with the ways those principles are rendered useless by impossible-to-predict, complex human behavior. It's already been credited with reducing the rate of hospital readmissions, brightening the country's fiscal outlook just a little.

Tens of millions of Americans didn't individually choose to be born with pre-existing conditions or to suddenly fall ill after a lifetime of good health, and neither should they be individually on the hook for the carnage -- emotional, physical, spiritual, financial -- such things cause.

Where the private market is best at alleviating their burden, it should be embraced. But a belief in the private market should never trump our concern for those in need.

Contact Issac Bailey at [email protected] or @TSN_IssacBailey.

___

(c)2014 The Sun News (Myrtle Beach, S.C.)

Visit The Sun News (Myrtle Beach, S.C.) at www.thesunnews.com

Distributed by MCT Information Services