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Apres moi, le deluge!
I am one of the lucky ones. Over the next several years, millions of my fellow boomers will become eligible for Medicare after spending a big chunk of their lives with no health insurance, and hence no regular health care. Not long after they sign up, many will discover serious health problems that would have been much less dangerous, and required much less costly care, if they’d been diagnosed years earlier. And our Medicare system will be engulfed by a tsunami of red ink.
Like I said, I lucked out. I’ve had no access to employer-based health insurance since 2003, and not nearly enough income to afford insurance on my own; but a couple of years ago, some extremely generous family members insisted that I get an individual policy and allow them to pay the premiums.
A week after my first general physical in five years, I learned that I had Type 2 diabetes. The good news was that I’d caught it early on, and that if I simply switched to a more sensible diet, I might never need insulin injections. Since then, well, I can’t say I never fall of the wagon, but now that I definitely eat more (and exercise more faithfully); my blood tests have headed in the right direction.
Two months after that general physical, I had my first-ever colonoscopy. Together with the advance preparation this procedure requires, a colonoscopy rank above root canal and listening to Rush Limbaugh among my top-ten least favorite activities. But that exam revealed some benign polyps that could easily have become cancerous, had they had not been nipped in the bud. A few months after that, I learned that I had uterine cancer, and would need a radical hysterectomy. But this was very early-stage cancer that had not metastasized, so there’s been no need for chemotherapy or any other follow-up treatment.
I am 60 now, but I like to think that (as long as I watch what I eat, and don’t let the exercise bike in my bedroom collect dust) the next serious health problem—whatever it might be—lies two or three decades down the road. Within the next few years, however, far too many of my contemporaries will face some very unpleasant surprises. A stitch in time—or a scope, a scan, an incision, or simply the right meds each day—would not only save lives, but also save a bundle for the American taxpayer.
—Helen Lipson
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