Thursday, September 17, 2009
A run-in with French health care
John Long
Recent columns
From the RoundTable blog
As the debate about health care reform goes on, I thought it might be worth sharing my one experience with a European-style, government-run health system.
My wife and I were part of a college tour to France and were in the enchanting town of Bayeux. The entire group shared a meal at a local restaurant, which most of us thought delicious but which was apparently tainted. The hollandaise sauce, I contend. Later, my wife woke up sick; I followed suit a few hours later.
In the morning, I stumbled to a pre-arranged breakfast meeting with my students, to find only a handful present. I soon learned that a dozen others were ill, and the number was climbing.
The local health department, probably worried we'd brought some American plague to town, ordered our guide, a resourceful British woman living in France, to bring all the sick people in. Though my wife and I were feeling a little better by then, we complied and climbed on the bus.
Now, according to most accounts, the French health system is one of Europe's best, with high satisfaction rates and limited waiting lists. While enormously expensive, it is often held up as a model for other nations to emulate. But our experience did not come close to that vaunted reputation.
We arrived at the local emergency room after a walk of several hundred yards from the parking lot. We entered through a door opening from an alleyway into a small corridor where there was a single, unisex restroom and a waiting room with 10 or so chairs. That day happened to be one of the French national holidays, which seem to occur about three times a week, and therefore there were few medical staff available to serve us. The sickest of the students were taken in for examination, and the rest of us waited. And waited. Soon, more students began to filter in by ones and twos as they succumbed to the ailment.
The crowded waiting room was sweltering, at least to we the afflicted, and the restroom was filthy. Without being too graphic, the facility was not clean to begin with, and with a bunch of students in various stages of intestinal distress, was soon uninhabitable. Most students preferred to walk a few hundred yards to cleaner public restrooms in a park.
Meanwhile, the sick kept arriving. With no place to sit inside, they lay down on the corridor floor or spilled out into the alley and collapsed on the pavement. No chairs or blankets were ever offered, though a surly nurse did bring out a stack of cardboard bedpans for the nauseous. Later, two male orderlies appeared, who only stood and smoked and leered at the sick American girls before hopping in an ambulance and driving away, blowing diesel fumes over the ailing kids. Before we left, a nurse gave a mop to the other faculty member on the trip and demanded he clean up after the students, as if it were his responsibility.
The alleyway also led to the fantastic museum of the Bayeux Tapestry, for my money one of the most interesting objects ever produced by Western civilization. So through the day, dozens of tour groups paraded past us, most aghast at what they saw. One physician from another nation even stopped to take photos, so appalled was he by the miserable conditions at the squalid little germfest.
To make matters worse, most of us, including my wife and me, were never seen by medical personnel despite hours of waiting. Our resourceful guide was able to finagle some medicine samples, which helped a bit. But by late afternoon, pressed by our schedule and with most of us assuming it just had to work through our systems, we left the town behind. Over the next day and a half, we all recovered and avoided hollandaise sauce the rest of the trip.
So what can we learn from this experience relevant to the current debate? My answer may surprise you: Conclude nothing. It is bad practice to base policy decisions on anecdotal evidence alone. After all, someone else could write 750 words about receiving wonderful care in a French hospital. Study the evidence, listen to the facts, look at the full picture, and ignore horror stories designed to sway emotions, not intellect.
But still, through my day of queasy pacing outside of a French hospital, I never could escape the nagging fear I was glimpsing the future of American health care.
Long, director of the Salem Museum and a history teacher at Roanoke College, is a Roanoke Times columnist.
