I make a good living. I should have a larger retirement portfolio than I do, as my husband and I keep our living expenses within bounds, and I am a moderately successful self-employed professional. However, every few years, or sometimes a few years in a row, I find our household being bankrupted by the medical-industrial complex.
This year has been uniquely devastating. My husband is a 75-year-old bone-cancer survivor. Two years of radical chemotherapy left him with a suppressed immune system, which means for most of the pandemic we’ve been hiding from people the way Gremlins hide from sunlight.
A few years ago he had a two-year bout of C. diff, for which the drugs cost thousands. He finally beat it.
A long-term result of the C. diff left him with bacteria in his teeth and gums, which resulted in him needing $25,000 worth of dental work. He lost his upper teeth, now has upper dentures, and had serious gum work done on all his bottom teeth. Medicare covered a tiny bit of this. Dental work is not considered worthy of proper insurance in this country. And without the dental care he would have developed sepsis and died.
This cost was on top of his Medicare deduction from his Social Security and his $471-per-month drug-plan copay.
We’ve had some truly INCOMPETENT primary-care physicians over the years. We found a great doctor in 2006. He was an independent. Didn’t take insurance. Fee for service. Had studied at Loma Linda hospital. Great credentials. Finally a great primary-care physician. His wife, a Harvard-trained attorney who had retired from the law, ran his practice. Well, with the COVID pandemic, his wife burned out on medical administration, partly from all of the death they had to deal with. And she had a few COVID deaths in her own family. With his wife retiring from medical administration, he joined a boutique primary-care practice starting January 1, 2022. He’s no longer fee-for-service. He went concierge. He takes insurance now. But the annual “concierge fee” for 2022 was $3,000 per patient per year. It is going up to $4,000 per patient for 2023.
Then there are MY medical costs. My insurance is $1,189 per month for second-from-top-level insurance. It goes up 14 percent next year. I have arthritic knees from being a 10-to-15-mile-a-week runner from my late teens to early 30s. At 6 foot 1, I am a




