My Operation NOT at LA's Cedars Sinai

To get operated on I must change my medical insurance back to MEDICARE from where it had lodged, unknown to me, with an insurer I thought was for prescriptions only, but which effectively cancelled my Medicare. My hernia operation was scheduled for last Friday. Got a call from Cedars Sinai hospital (Donna Reed died there; onscreen I loved her, but we never met, groan, ha ha ha; maybe Cedars did NOT care for her right!)  Cedars, private, has oodles of old ladies as volunteers unpaid, old and dizzy. One of them called me jubilant that she could announce to me that my Friday appointment had to be cancelled and that it would take me 30 days to reestablish Medicare. Rats! Now I spend most of my walking around time pushing my guts back into my stomach. Medicare can be reinstated retroactively! How I'm gonna love exploding Cedars' smug volunteer program. The over-eager volunteer shouted at me - she's deaf, not me - that my hernia repair cost "Twenty thousand dollars!" a sum my Screen Actors Guild, Blue Cross medical insurance, would not pay. Three of my children by a previous marriage were delivered via C-section at Cedars Sinai solely because the physician wanted the exrta money, not because my then wife couldn't deliver all on her own; she was healthy as a horse! but loved to be fussed over, so went for it. SAG did pay for that, all three of them. Two years ago I had a lump taken off my left lung via keyhole surgery at Cedars Sinai. Afterwards I was told the removed lump was cancerous; a biopsy done during the operation made the same discovery. Ah, but ten days later I was called in and the surgeon announced that the biopsy was incorrect and that I did not have cancer. Sentiment overcame me and I hugged the surgeon. I believe that what had happened was that on July 3rd of that year the chief of the biopsy lab went on vacation for the July 4th weekend. An underling had made a mistake. I do not know if he too was a volunteer.

All hospitals in America are in trouble. What used to be called King - Drew (That's Martin Luther King Jr) hospital and is now called King Harbor hospital has just been closed down. That is, even the ER (Emergency Room) has closed. Within days, I predict, there will be riots to rival the Watts riots of some years ago when angry mobs burned down over 800 buildings in South Los Angeles. This time I might join them. This time I WILL join them.

I don't want this to sound too much like a joke, but because of her expertise on the subject of Medical care, and its absence, we really do need Hillary as President. Universal, democratic health care is imperative. Medicine for the rich only is anathema.

This is the God's honest truth: if it hadn't been for labor unions in my life I'd have been dead long, long ago.  The Sailors Union of the Pacific kept me alive and afloat on the oceans blue, and the Screen Actors Guild and Medicare kept me alive in age. I wanna go on living, and I do, oh do I want to not have to hold my guts in much longer.

The Bob Hope Medical Center, who sent me to that surgeon, has "Promised" all will be set right this coming week. We'll see. But, I'm still gonna declare war on Cedars Sinai.  (Bob Hope is dependent somewhat on SAG.) 

In short, Cedars Sinai, like nearly all hospitals in America at the present time, needs an overhaul. I'm the guy for the job! Oh oh oh oh the hystrionics I will uncork! I've already begun. I started when I screamed, while driving, at the contrite-sounding, sweet mannered hernia surgeon on the cell phone that he oughta get a life and stop doing penny ante patch up hernia jobs for $20,000 and do something honest by which to make money. He pleaded I didn't know him well enough to make that charge. What? he'd been doing surgery in darkest Africa?! Not bloody likely.

Well, I got that off my chest. Now I have to get a tummy tuck, ha ha ha ha ha ha.....maybe I could do it myself, no?

Barry

http://journals.aol.com/bbartle3/Vengeance/