Ambulance ride brings home health debate

I think it was during the ambulance ride down Bangerter Highway when I first started thinking about the cost.

This wasn't like taking my car in for a repair. No one showed me an estimate or asked if I could afford an EKG before they administered it. They didn't even ask me if I wanted aspirin before they shoved three of them in my mouth and told me to chew.

I can't wait to see what this costs, especially since it was all a mistake.

Well, sort of a mistake. I had volunteered to help with the open house at the new Oquirrh Mountain Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One of my jobs was to lift boxes of water bottles into the hospitality tent. As I did so, I felt a crack in my left knee and a sharp pain.

Maybe I'm an extra squeamish sort. For whatever reason, as I continued to try to help and as the pain refused to subside, I went into shock. I felt my head filling with fog, and I quickly sat down on a chair, putting my head between my knees. It was the last thing I remembered before waking up to discover several people looking at me grim-faced and certain I was having a heart attack.

Nothing brings home the debate over health-care reform quite like a close encounter of the third kind with a paramedic. As I was wheeled into the ambulance, still groggy-headed but insistent that my chest didn't hurt, I was breathing fine and I hadn't had a heart attack, I thought about a lunch I had earlier in the week with James Jarvis, a doctor and medical activist.

He had told me about how much Americans already pay in taxes for health care — about $1.5 trillion for programs ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to veterans benefits — and how relatively lousy he thinks U.S. health care is. Per capita, he said, we pay more in taxes for health care than any other nation, including the ones with socialized medicine.

But, and this is the "but" I focused on during the ride, he said we have the best acute care in the world.

I don't pretend to have the all the answers in the health-care debate. Dr. Jarvis believes in a centralized system, but on a state, not a federal, level. He has ideas for making the system transparent, controlling costs and making sure treatments are based on the scientific evidence of what works best.

He doesn't believe Washington or Salt Lake City will find the right answers, thanks to all the highly paid lobbyists looking out for the interests of people other than patients.