Suffering is free. Healing isn't.

Middle class is on its marry way to distinction, and that should bother you, if it's not already making you sick to your stomach.

And if you are already nauseous, and middle-class-soon-to-be-declassed, then you (should) know that you cannot afford medical care anymore.

A lot of things are now happening around the globe and we see modern, developed, so called first-world, countries doing exactly the thing they've been accusing of all those developing, third-world countries whose politics and economy they actually steered and influenced over the course of history.

You might now wonder what all this has to do with your money and household economy. Everything, and then some.

Europeism and other illnesses

In Europe, we have always been proud of our "free healthcare" - which was never free, but who bothers with such miniscule detail. Hence, we've taken immense pride in paying whatever taxes we were served to pay because there was something to fall back to once we are no longer in position of paying any taxes.

I dare you to be proud of your tax bracket these days. Especially at the same time when you get sick.

While medicine is expanding and new technologies and treatments are developing at faster pace than ever in history of humanity, human being, as the centre and sole purpose of entire that science is being reduced to one single health issue - further reduced to one single symptom - at the time.

I mean, I get it. On one hand, social media and now AI make us dumb and dumber. On the other hand, capitalism knows no limits on profit and anything is commodity. But still... Medical education and the way how medicine is practiced in public healthcare, in a world of ever shortening attention span and increased profit hunger, perhaps, shouldn't be adjusted for those two little (in)conveniences.

And yet it has been, so we have to adjust as well.

Gaslighting 101

As we walk around half-diagnosed in the best case, just to get our conscious relieved by knowing what we suffer of, we are ungrateful sons and daughters of bitches for daring to expect treatment and alleviation of suffering.

The money of the world flows much faster than our mental capacity manages to grasp that we are left with enormous personal responsibility to handle medical conditions, completely on our own, which accidentally very often go beyond DIY home remedies.

Over the course of 8+ years of living in Sweden, I've been unlucky enough to explore aspects of Swedish public healthcare personally, and witnessed the experiences of others around me. With great relief I can now finally raise middle finger to anyone whose only attitude ever basically was "suck it up, it's all in your head".

And the reason why I can do it is because I actually got real medical treatment, and prescriptions for medicines that actually help with my very real, yet invisible, health issues. It even came with backup plan in case that current treatment plan doesn't work work my specific situation. Suddenly, I'm no longer miserable and fatigued from chronic pain and years of sleep deprivation and life seems to be actually good again.

What makes it tragicomic is that solution was never something sophisticated, rather simple and straight forward, and yet never offered where it should in the first place. Which leaves me with remaining afterthought, deeply engraved fear and cloud of "what ifs" that still holds me back.

What if I hadn't had money on my bank account to privately pay for whatever doctors I needed and everything around it? What will happen next time, when I get sick and cannot buy myself a private consultation or life saving procedure that will never be offered to me through public healthcare?

When you get reduced to one symptom that on its own doesn't make you worth to be taken seriously, and when you are sent down to rabbit hole of chasing your own tail, and when you are led to believe that you don't deserve better, while feeling like shit and knowing it in your bones that something is really off, there is now a word for it.

It really doesn’t help our case the fact that we still hold ourselves so firmly to the past and long gone days when things were happening elsewhere and when life was good where we were. It doesn’t help us either that distraction and ignorance became both lifestyle and main strategy for businesses and politicians alike.

The cure

Money. Lots of it.

Access is everything. It has always been, but now it applies to your health as well and with no exception. Access to the right and adequate medical care at the moment you need it makes very clear difference between years of suffering and deterioration for those facing the gaslighting and life of prompt and adequate mitigation or management of a condition with not a second longer or unnecessary suffering than it was needed to get better.

There is a rise of private labs and clinics doing all sorts of body scans and tests. Now with AI, there will be more of them each day. They are not medical care providers, you cannot get any actual help there, but you can get peace of mind or some very bad news for that matter. Well, you can buy them. None of those come cheap, but that is actually much more you will ever get from your public primary care provider and probably even specialist you meet through public healthcare.

Preventative medicine is no longer of interest for anyone since keeping us healthy significantly limits profit margins. And now, curative medicine gets less accessible equally fast as middle class is being sent to oblivion. Your health is becoming more expensive commodity with every breath of polluted air you take.

From there, your chances for remaining healthy are in playing expensive game of health insurance and for becoming healthy are in expensive private healthcare sector. Your health related expenses are no longer belonging to “foundational needs” nor “freedom expanding” label, they are now marked as “friction costs”, even “freedom contracting” on a very bad day.

You no longer get to choose health pillar over money pillar, you must choose one to protect the other. That makes pay-or-suffer the latest business and political invention of modern democracies wannabe autocracies which brings them closer to the ultimate goal of stripping you of your freedoms in the same way you are stripped of your symptoms.