Alex Chilton didn't seek medical attention because he had no health insurance

[Withywindle]

http://www.avclub.com/articles/alex-chilton-didnt-seek-medical-attention-because,39979/

"Had Chilton been less concerned with the expense, and had he been able to visit the doctor during the first sign of sickness without it costing thousands of dollars, would he still be alive today? Obviously, that would just be speculation—and politically biased speculation at that, which we know everybody hates around here. But it is a sobering portrait of what it’s like for independent musicians, as well as everyone else out there who has to make do without health insurance; now, why don’t we want everyone to have that again? Something about socialism and Hitler?"


I know, he was just one of millions in this predicament. But I loved his music, dammit! We could have had more of it. His family and friends and fans could have had more time with him. :cry:


RAGE.

[panader0]

1. I haven't been to a doctor in at least 20 years. What I need is a dentist.

[localroger]

7. Go to Mexico

I wrote a widely linked article on how to do it for the now-derelict kuro5hin.org. The article is still there. I'll go ahead and put here what I usually ask people to email me for:

Dr. Oscar Torres of Pacific Dental
email: [e-mail]
web: http://www.sdro.com/pacdental

My "full mouth rehabilitation" (that's 28 caps, which were not copies of my original teeth but a sculpture designed to elevate and correct my seriously flawed bite) was USD$8,000. Add travel and hotel expenses it was still under $10K. To have it done, to a similar level of skill, in the US would have been more like $40K.

Oh, and Dr. T accepts American dental insurance, so if you have that it's even cheaper.

[Frank Cannon]

2. That just fucking sucks.

I have nothing more to say about that.

[nashville_brook]

3. a while back I started a thread about artists having to choose btwn their art and their lives...

this is what that's about. check out the comments section of the original post to get a sense of how much people don't understand about this.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=7701805

Paying for your art with your life
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/02/12/cary_tennis_health_insurance_open2010/index.html

BY CARY TENNIS
(Cary Tennis is on leave while he recovers from cancer surgery. He has been documenting this experience on his Open Salon blog, the most recent entry of which is reprinted here.}

While I was in the MRI machine today, I thought of my friend Tom Fowler, the artist who died because of lack of health insurance. The MRI machine was taking pictures of my lumbar region where a large sacral chordoma tumor was recently removed. Though the MRI machine is loud, I had taken some pills that cause drowsiness, so I was able to contemplate various things in a state of serenity. In this state of serenity, I contemplated how I was receiving the best medical care ever available at any time in history at any place on the planet. I contemplated the incredible genius of scientific research to which I owe my life.

Receiving the benefit of such great medical research made me feel like a rich man, though I am not a rich man. I am just an employed man. I am just an employed man in a company that has a health insurance plan.

(snip)

When we creative people find we cannot easily fit into the work roles offered to us by our society, we face a choice. We can put aside our artistic calling and try to do the jobs that are offered to us. Or we can try to fashion for ourselves a life that suits our nature, enduring the insecurity and sacrifice that comes with such a choice.

(snip)

A just and wise society would care for its artists. A just and wise society would recognize that on the margins of its norm live its geniuses, and though they are strange and sometimes difficult, they must be cared for, for they are the treasures of our time, and they produce the treasures of our time. But our society is not just and wise. Still, the artists in our society choose to do their work and find a way to survive somehow, sacrificing things such as health insurance and paid time off.

(snip)

Then one day not too long after that we learned that Tom had died. He had gotten a toothache. He had gotten a toothache but had not gone to the dentist because he didn't have health insurance to pay for the dentist. He lived with it. Then he got sick but thought he was OK. Then he collapsed and the emergency medical people came and they told him he should go right into the hospital. But after reviving he said he'd be OK and he went home and made himself some soup. He lasted a couple of more days like that. Then he got really, really sick and they put him in the hospital but by that point the infection that had begun in a tooth had spread massively throughout his body and despite the doctors' best efforts Tom could not be saved.

He died because he didn't go to the dentist and didn't go to the doctor because he was trying to be an artist and didn't have health insurance and didn't think it would kill him.

(snip -- *must read* the rest at link)

[Withywindle]

5. Thank you SO MUCH for reposting that!

very important post. I missed it the first time around.

[nashville_brook]

8. cary tennis is an amazing writer, and he really nailed on this.

i graduated in the arts with the intent of buckling-in for a long ride of starving artist-ness -- and did exactly that for about 8 years, until i just couldn't go without insurance any longer. i could have dealt with the sporadic paychecks -- i was a whiz at living cheap with lots a roommates; communal this-and-that. but, getting into my late 20s, when mortality finally set in, i had to make the decision to give up full-time "art" (by art i mean publishing/writing/photography and the occasional painting). i even had a business model and had cashflow, but i wasn't making enough for indie insurance (by a long shot).

i've since been employed in one soul-sucking shithole after another...and by soul-sucking shitholes i mean the nature of the business i did (marketing for healthcare co's, financial services, etc.), not the actual places i worked (well, not all of them).

i'd gladly get the hell out of my job and go back to my scaled-back life with sporadic paychecks, if i had access to adequate healthcare.

what makes me crazy is that we're creating a world with no art -- where you literally pay for your art with your life. think of all the artists, musicians, writers, thinkers we'd have -- how many non-corporate voices -- we'd have if we hadn't driven them all away from their work under the threat of never being able to see a doctor. literally, the world takes away your ability to LIVE if you decide that what you need to do is to be a voice counter to, or apart from, the corporate totalitarian state.

so, it's everything for me -- it's not just the tragedy of Chilton -- it's that we're creating a world that is designed to kill Chiltons. it makes me want to yell, scream and cry all at the same time. but instead i'm going to go make bbq chicken.

[Withywindle]

9. mmmm, bbq chicken!

We need to enjoy what small pleasures we have in this cruel, fucked-up world. Some of the comments on your original post were really depressing.

How are people who enjoy music but won't support musicians any different from people who use electricity but won't support coal miners?

[Ms. Toad]

10. Yes. My daughter the artist - with $60,000 a year

medical bills can now choose to follow her heart, rather than being forced into a job she hates merely because it will provide her with access to health insurance with the hope that perhaps there will be a few minutes left at the end of the work day which she can devote to what feeds her soul.

Since she was 2 she has been telling people she IS an artist (not going to be, but IS already). That was a year before she started having the first symptoms of one of two costly chronic illnesses. I fought for her right to pursue both the full academic and full arts track in high school (in small high schools it is assumed that intelligent people are not artistically talented/interested, so the honors academic classes are scheduled in conflict with the upper level arts and music classes). Nonetheless, from the time she was old enough to understand I had also told her that once she got to college she would need to work toward something (in addition to being a starving artist) because the art she wants to do would never pay her health care bills. That was when she only had one illness, which cost a few hundred a month.

Then her freshman year in college hit, along with her second illness. This one stole her above average ability to do the cognitive reasoning that would earn her a job with health insurance - and getting through college with any major other than art looked like an impossibility (and just getting through college would be a struggle).

With health insurance reform her sophomore year, I can breathe a little easier. The only thing she is capable of doing, at the moment, is also what she wants to do - and it is no longer an automatic death sentence (or bankruptcy for her parents).

[Withywindle]

11. I wish your daughter ALL the best - I hope there's enough real change soon enough to help.

We have such a paradoxical, messed-up attitude towards creativity and artists. The extreme few who get to a certain point on the pyramid financially, we idolize, and all the rest we treat as bums.

To my knowledge, there has never been a human society anywhere on the planet, at any time in history, that didn't have some form of the arts--music, dance, visual arts, storytelling, etc. Shouldn't that tell us how important how important they are to us? Right up there with food, clothing, shelter, and sex; certainly well ahead of war and money.

[Ms. Toad]

12. The first, critical, change takes place in September -

she can take time off to heal, or be a part time student, without being forced off of my health insurance. She doesn't age out of that option before 2014 when she will be eligible for insurance under the exchange (unless she is lucky enough to get into a job that provides coverage).

It's not perfect, but not being forced to be tied to a job in order to be eligible for insurance that is not based on her health is HUGE.

[nashville_brook]

4. chilton was a national treasure.

[Starry Messenger]

6. It does suck

I remember thinking about all this when the Ramones started dying. Being popular and respected as an artist doesn't mean you actually get the big bucks needed for early care and treatement. This is a cruel country. :(