Infinitive Splitter

I came up with that title while lying in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm at 5:30 in the morning about a month ago. I had just had morphine or some other D-Day type potion administered directly into my bloodstream, so I was free to think more about how to describe my first visit to the emergency room than about how to describe the pain in my abdomen. (I told the doctors it was a seven on their stupid one-to-ten scale, since I was hurting enough to spend the dark hours of a Monday morning in the emergency room, but I could conceive of much, much worse.)

I hadn’t been hospitalized in more than 25 years — since the week of my birth, actually — and my only experience with anesthesia and zoo-strength painkillers came when I had my wisdom teeth out in 2003, so once the pain had been quashed, it was kind of neat to be there. I told the chaplain as much when she stopped by to ask indirectly which certified wizard should say magic words in the event of complications, and to my surprise she reacted as if she hadn’t heard that before. People who are healthy all the time, like I am, get kind of a thrill out of our occasional (and straightforward and manageable) medical crises.

I changed my mind by the end, and I’m happy to be free from the possibility of a second bout of appendicitis. But I still like appendexcitement.

Now here’s the most interesting part, to me. According to benefits summaries that have trickled into my mailbox in the last couple of weeks (in two rounds, since the hospital didn’t bother to submit two-thirds of the charges to my insurance company until I asked it to), the hospital determined that I had incurred $19,276 in costs. Of that total, my insurance paid $7,857, and I owe nothing. The hospital was a preferred provider, which means it had agreed in advance to give my insurer a discount on my care. That’s a 59 percent discount just for having the right insurance and going to the right hospital.

Since I had chosen the hospital by myself, at 2 a.m., while in seven-out-of-ten pain, on the basis of the hospital’s reputation as the facility of choice for ailing political fat-cats, this outcome was fortuitous.

Also fortuitously, this whole episode occurred at the beginning of my last week at the job that paid for this insurance; I’m on a different plan now. That’s a hassle, but at least I still have coverage. Almost 50 million people in this country don’t have that, and about one in 15 will have some appendexcitement in their lives.

Heck of a way to run a health system.