One of the topics I’ve been meaning to bring up here is health insurance. I’d been procrastinating about getting insured — trying to avoid the expense by coming up with some way to justify going without. After all, some 40 million of my countrymen and gazilliions of other people manage somehow.
But I think that when it comes right down to it, if things hit the fan and I really needed a lot of expensive health care for some reason or another, I’d want all I could pay for and then more. And if I couldn’t guarantee that I could pay for it, I’d still want it and I’d probably swallow my pride and fall back on charity, or, <ulp>, government programs.
Which seems dishonest to me. If I know ahead of time that I’d probably behave this way, I should probably sign up for insurance so I know I could pay my way.
But I think I must have seen this expensive conclusion coming because I kept putting off thinking about it. Until last week, when I was trying to do some cleaning in the kitchen and reached out to catch a block of knives that fell off the counter. The knives slid out of the block and through one of my fingers. Nasty, jagged cut. Blood everywhere.
10 stitches later I’m fine, but I got to sit in the trauma center at General Hospital and consider that it could have been something worse. So I applied for insurance (and was promptly denied, so I’ll have to try somewhere else). That’ll crowd the budget a bit.
