My uncle’s tale illustrates the fundamentally American tragedy of experiencing financial and medical catastrophes simultaneously, and having to choose between rationing one’s own care or depleting precious financial resources for potentially lifesaving treatment that could as well be futile.
From my perspective as a surgeon, an additional tragedy is that my uncle never got the chance to know his cause of death with certainty. There is a small chance (approximately 5 percent) that his jaundice arose from a benign or treatable condition such as lymphoma, an autoimmune process, or another noncancerous condition, and that if he had received full treatment he would be alive and well today. But a diagnostic surgery would likely have added $100,000 to his final medical costs. Thus my uncle weighed the odds and rationed his own care to preserve his daughters’ inheritance for their future benefit.
To answer the question I posed at the end of the previous article, I do not believe that my uncle was treated fairly by the system. Sadly, he was just a few years too young to receive Medicare benefits, despite having paid into the system for decades. I was especially struck by the feedback about my uncle’s story from readers in France, Poland, Canada, Cyprus, and other countries with universal health care who were stunned to read of the dreadful timing in this desperate situation.
