Suffering from once-easily-treated colorectal cancer, terminal patient Todd Rivers expressed gratitude for his opportunity to spend his forty-six years on Earth in a a capitalist society without the interference of socialized medicine.
Rivers, who began experiencing alternating diarrhea and constipation in his late thirties, said he was glad to have lived in a country where wasteful preventative care measures like colonoscopies were only covered by insurance plans that were more expensive than he could afford.
“I have friends in Canada with socialized medicine, and they hate it up there,” said Rivers, whose $5,000 deductible caused him to only seek medical attention when he completely lost all bowel control and the cancer had already progressed to Stage III. “Since everybody gets their free hospital visit whenever they want, you always have to wait. My Aunt Kathy in Toronto had to wait three months to get her ‘free’ hip replacement. Ridiculous!”
Rivers’ doctor, who gave the man two months to live this past December, agreed that, while people like Rivers sometimes pay a price, healthcare in a free market is “by far the most efficient thing out there, probably.”
“In this system, people only come to me when they really need help,” said Dr. Collins. “Sure, they sometimes wait too long to get something checked out, and end up clogging up the ER, but overall, there’s less time wasted on hypochondriacs who only might have a symptom of a more serious illness.”
Rivers also extolled the virtues of the new experimental drugs and procedures that could only happen in a free-market economy. The drugs he discussed were also far too expensive for his value class insurance to cover, as he found out when he received a denial letter from HAP.“
Without free-market competition, how will we motivate doctors to come up with all these exciting new treatments?” said Rivers from his future deathbed in his Dayton, OH, home. “Even though pharmaceutical companies make billions of dollars in profits by jacking up the prices of those life-saving medications, it all benefits the patient in the end.”
Rivers will be survived by his equally underinsured eight-year-old daughter, whose innocent heart murmur counts as a preexisting condition under most insurance plans.
