Arthur Salm: American vs. European health care - Pt. II

In his column on Monday, Arthur Salm described Manuela Griffin’s health-care experience while vacationing in Austria last March. A blow on the head sent her to the hospital. After 20 days of intensive treatment, including surgery to reduce cranial bleeding, she spent another 20 days in a rehabilitation hospital. The care was outstanding. The bill: $22,000. “Had I not said I was an American,” her husband Geoff, tennis director at the Balboa Tennis Club, said, “it probably would have been free.”

Today, in Part II, Salm tells what happened to her brother-in-law, Chaz, when he was suddenly hospitalized right here in San Diego.

One family. Two stories. No comment.

STORY #2

Chaz Griffin, Geoff’s older brother, is a teaching pro at Balboa Tennis Club. A one-time tri-athlete, he has always been in outstanding physical condition. But in March of last year, he started feeling ill, and he couldn’t shake it. He was prescribed antibiotics. After two weeks of resting at home - “something I never do” - he forced himself to return to the tennis courts to teach.

He felt so bad, though, that he had to cancel a lesson halfway through. Now he had congestion in his chest and a tingling sensation in his fingers and in his back. A doctor told him not to worry about it, and prescribed stronger anitibiotics.

The next morning, a Sunday, Chaz got up at 8 a.m. to teach a tennis clinic with Geoff. Twice while walking to the courts, his legs nearly gave out under him. On the court, he couldn’t control his “feeds” (when a teacher hits balls to students).

“I got to where I couldn’t hear people talking,” he said. “I dropped everything and walked away. There are these large steps that go up from the courts, and couldn’t make it up them. I had to go around to the smaller steps. I thought it must be an effect of the stronger antibiotic.”

Chaz managed to get home and stagger into bed. He talked his wife out of calling a doctor. The next morning, he swung out of bed, “and my feet didn’t work. I fell flat on my face.”

He was pretty much paralyzed from the waist down. His brother, his father and a friend managed to get him to UCSD Medical Center. “That’s when the hell started,” he said.

He was placed in a wheelchair, where he sat for 6½ hours. Meanwhile, the paralysis was spreading; he was losing strength in his upper body, and was starting to slump in the wheelchair. “I was begging them to let someone see me,” Chaz said. “Finally, a doctor came, and said, ‘Admit him real quick.’ ”

He was placed on a gurney much too short for him — Chaz was more or less scrunched up on it. “Then they stuck me against a wall for another 3½ hours. Finally, they put me in a room. My roommate was a drunk who kept pulling out his IVs and spraying blood all over the place…

“They thought I might have meningitis, so I got a spinal tap, which was a lot of fun. While this was going on, my wife asked about me, and they told her I had left.”

See related: Read Part I of the Griffin family health care saga

More from Arthur Salm in Opinion

But he speaks highly of the doctors who, on his second day at UCSD, came up with the diagnosis: Guianne-Barre Syndrome, an autoimmune disease that causes inflammation of the nerves, often brought on by a viral infection. They gave him a triple dose of gamma globulin to more or less shut down his immune system. On days three and day four he lost the use of the muscles in arms and then his face. He began having trouble breathing and was admitted to intensive care, where he spent three days.

He was at UCSD for 17 days, followed by another 17 days in a rehabilitation hospital. Today, he’s teaching tennis again, and although still not 100 percent, he’ll probably make a complete recovery.

Now for the money part.

While Chaz was lying scrunched up on the gurney, a man came and asked him to make a deposit. Chaz and his family have no health insurance. He put $300 on a credit card. Thirty-four days later, when he got out of rehab, he was asked, “How would you like to take care of this bill?”

It was $300,000. With no assets to speak of, Chaz applied for Medi-Cal. He got it. They paid it.

“I’m very grateful to the community at large that was there for me,” Chaz said. “I can’t afford to insure my family. They say I don’t make enough money to get into the Healthy Families program, which I’d like to, because there you do pay something, and I think I should.” His children now get health care through Medi-Cal.

“I’m a Republican,” Chaz said. “I’m fiscally conservative about most things. But not health care. It’s outrageous. You’ve got to get insurance companies and lawyers out of it.”

Although he’s distrustful of big government bureaucracies, he’s more or less in favor of Single Payer, which he calls socialized medicine. “It’s easy to be a conservative when you have a lot of money,” he said. “It’s not so easy when you don’t.”

Arthur Salm is an SDNN columnist.

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