Category: America

mad men


I’ve followed Mad Men religiously this season. Partially because I think it’s good TV in all of its pretentious multilayered symbolism, and partially because it’s fun to follow a TV series closely enough that the next day blow-by-blow commentary makes sense to you. (Two examples: New York Times’ “Talking Mad Men”, and Wall Street Journal’s “Speakeasy”. Also, Salon.com’s recaps.)

And, it’s fun to see the 1960s brought back to life by ambitious well-researched costume and set design people. I remember the 1960s, even tho I didn’t live through them in New York. I recognize the clothes, the music, the political events. I realize I’m heavily influenced by what happened then. Because I was a kid in the 1960s, what I learned about the world I understood to be normal. Riots, assassinations, deeply rooted, sometimes violent, conflicts between people of different races, different generations, or different ideologies. I’m thinking more and more about what all those things really have come to mean to me.

how much do you know about your colon?

I had a colonoscopy in December*. It’s a standard cancer screening procedure in the United States once you’ve turned 50. They didn’t find any cancer, but both the doctor and the paperwork I was given (the paperwork included fresh pictures of my insides; one showing my intact appendix) stated that I have a “grossly redundant colon”.

In plain language that means that my colon is several times the length of a normal person’s. It’s a nuisance for a doc trying to navigate a tiny camera, but it’s not dangerous, and has no symptoms.

A grossly redundant colon is a hereditary condition, though.

So at one point I asked my parents about it, to learn which one of them had given me my extra-long intestines. My parents are both in their 80s, and have lived their whole lives in Sweden, a country with national health care and some of the best research hospitals in the world.

Neither of my parents knew anything about the length of their colons, because neither of them had ever had a colonoscopy.

According to an article in the New York Times today Americans pay more for medical procedures than people in any other well developed country. In the case of colonoscopies, American medical centers bill insurance companies $7-8000 for a screening procedure that would cost $650 in another country, if it’s even performed. Only in the US are colonoscopies the go-to screening test for colon cancer, because there aren’t, actually, any data to support that colonoscopies are better than less expensive screening methods. Another example: A nasal spray that costs $108 in the United States will run you $21 in Spain.

“The United States spends about 18 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, nearly twice as much as most other developed countries.”, the NYT article states. Winners? Health care providers, manufacturers, drug companies, all working together to drive up costs. Losers? Whoever pays the insurance premiums.

* Also known as the day when Dan wasn’t white enough to drive me home.