While Americans are parsing their historic legislation on health care, I’ve been thinking, I really ought to see a doctor.
In May it will be six years since I last consulted a physician.
Don’t get me wrong. I can see my GP any time I want and it won’t cost me a penny. No insurance forms to fill out, no co-pay, nothing. But the sign in the waiting room that says an appointment lasts for 10 minutes, and is for one complaint, is putting me off. If I have more than one complaint I am advised to inform the receptionist.
It doesn’t tell me what to do if I don’t have any complaints at all.
I know I should be glad, but instead I think, I’m 56 years old. I should see a doctor! I could be dying! How would I know?
I am the worried well.
And maybe I should be worried: I have never had my cholesterol checked. My blood pressure hasn’t been taken for years. Colonoscopy? You must be kidding. (Apparently I should be grateful that you are kidding, because I hear they aren’t very pleasant.)
Government policy means women over 50 get a mammogram every three years, so I have not been entirely without medical attention. I have had two of these examinations, carried out by specialist technicians in a trailer that visits my GP’s car park. A card is sent through the post summoning me, and on the day and time prescribed I climb into the trailer and am immediately directed to undress to the waist behind a curtain. The technician manipulates the steel plates, pushes buttons, retreats behind a screen, and we are done. She hands me a pamphlet explaining that I will get a letter within a fortnight with results. The next woman is already waiting as I descend the trailer’s steps. I look at my watch: five minutes max. Not that I needed more – it was a model of efficiency.
Nevertheless, I have been thinking that six years is a long time at my age to be doctor-less. It’s possible that my GP thinks I have already died, and I begin to consider what problem I might bring before her (one at a time, of course) so she knows I haven’t (but might!).
The list of possibilities isn’t promising: My right foot has itched for most of those six years, but I never thought it was worth bothering her about that. My right ear itches too, but I already tried that one on her, without affect, 10 or 15 years ago. I can’t turn my head far enough to ride my bike safely, but a mirror on the helmet gave me a non pharmaceutical solution to what I guess is degenerative arthritis. I’ve got through menapause. Everything else I can think of that’s wrong with me I know damn well would be a lot better if I drank less, slept more and weren’t a bloody hermit.
But yesterday the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Alistair Darling, since you ask) stood up in Parliament to deliver the annual Budget speech and solved my dilemma.
The Budget is when the Chancellor declares his master plan for the economy. How much the government will take in, how much it will spend, how it will spend it.
In the Budget speech the Chancellor reveals the income tax we are going to be paying next year (a lot), but that’s only the start. He gets to decide what’s spent on filling potholes in the road. How many university places for 18 year olds will be on offer. How fast the government will pay its bills. How much more petrol, wine, beer and fags (or anything he likes) will cost from the moment he sits down (or any moment he chooses). I will never forget the year the then Chancellor decreed that from midnight Value Added Tax would be levied on all takeaway food heated above the ambient air temperature, as long as it was ordinarily expected that the food would be consumed before it cooled. At the stroke of twelve the price of fish and chips went up by 17.5%, but not bread from a bakery (because, though some like it hot, it only got that way en passant – if you see what the Chancellor meant).
That’s how much power our Alistair has.
So yesterday, while I was listening to him wittering on about how he was going to fund apprenticeships to solve the problem of young persons not in education, employment or training (in the UK Neets are the new Yuppies), and how he was going to save money by making 15,000 civil servants move out of London to, say, Luton, my ears suddenly pricked up when I heard the Chancellor say that he intended to allocate sufficient funds so that everyone over 40 could have a health check every five years.
A check up for the middle-aged every five years! That makes me one year overdue.
It’s just what the doctor ordered.