Getting sick is only for the rich or the well-insured

See my post "Modern Medicine and Let Them Eat Cake Politicians" about the cost for the medical personnel for my open-heart surgery. It was  $20,280.50 of which I had an out-ot-pocket expense of $50.50.

This week I received the statement for the hospital stay and some of the rehabilitation.  It was $131,088.04.  Insurance paid all but $600 of it.

Without this insurance, somebody earning $9/hour would have to work over 14,565 hours or 1,821 days or 364 weeks or seven years.  On the other hand, Marissa Mayers earned $900,000 per week as she sold off Yahoo!  She could have paid the costs of five open-heart surgeries each week and still have had $150,000/week left over.

I’ll let you judge how a medical bill like this would affect your own finances.  My guess is that without insurance, many of you would have to take out an extended mortgage on your house or sell it out-right.

Heart disease only affects one family.  Consider what would happen if someone who had a communicable fatal disease didn’t get treated because the family could not afford the necessary care.  It has happened down through the centuries and still happens around the world.

The Magree Inexpensive Heart Stress Test

For the last two years, my doctor has not liked the sound of my heart and has had me visit a cardiologist for an EKG. There is a bit of hardening of an artery, but otherwise the result is negative. The cost - over $2,000!!! Sure, insurance pays for it, but who pays the insurance premiums (or the taxes).

I've had a leaky valve for over thirty years and have had no ill effects from it. I've stressed my abdomen a few times with repetitive activity, had nausea, sweating, and heavy breathing, but the tests for heart problems were negative.

Given the range of physical activity I do, I have come up with a simple, inexpensive heart stress test that can be done by a doctor's assistant in about twenty minutes.

Take the patient's pulse and blood pressure. Have the patient do push-ups. The push-ups can be the traditional, from the knees, or against the wall. Take the patient's pulse and blood pressure. Wait five or ten minutes and take the patient's pulse and blood pressure.

For the dividend create some formula consisting of the pulse and blood pressure measurements and the expected norms for these.

For the divisor use the number of pushups multiplied by a percentage relative to the effort of the pushup style. The percentage for standard pushups would be 100%; smaller percentages for the other two.

The resulting quotient should give an indication of heart health, the smaller the number, the better the heart health. My wife suggested multiplying the result by age or an age range.

An even more accurate test might include respiratory rate and maybe oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange.

I'll leave the details to those who know much more about physiology than I do.

OK, Mel, how many push-ups can you do? Well, I don't want to brag with an exact number, but let me say that I can do about the same number as my 19-year-old grandson can do.

Oh, and another wild-eyed hypotheses: barring accident one should be able to live for as many more years as one can do push-ups.