When I travel, I carry a heavy knapsack on my left shoulder, and for the past two weeks, I’ve been traveling a lot. I’ve also had a persistent ache in my left shoulder, occasionally in my left pec, and persistent aches and pains in my left arm. I’ve had no shortness of breath and no sweating. Ibuprofen does a good job relieving the pain. So does changing my position. In other words, I am showing all the marks of a muscular/skeleton problem and only one of a heart attack.

Nevertheless, when I called Harvard Vanguard, our excellent (and impossibly expensive) health plan, to see if I could get an appointment with an acupuncturist or possibly a muscle-shoveler, they had me come in for an EKG.

They knew I wasn’t haven’t a heart attack. I knew I wasn’t having a heart attack. But they’re hypochondriacs. So, I had an EKG confirm that I wasn’t having a heart attack.

I appreciate the care. I appreciate more that they were reasonable enough to let me wander in when it was convenient instead of sending an ambulance shrieking to our house. But the doctor – friendly, professional, attentive – spilled the beans. He told me about a guy who came in with unalarming symptoms, passed his EKG, and dropped dead 2 hours later. “They sued the pants off of us.”

I admit I’m an alarmist. If I get ink on my fingers, I assume it’s skin cancer. But I’m also a rational alarmist and can usually talk myself down off the ledge, at least since the time in grad school when I had a doctor inform me that that lump in my chest was a rib. Our health care system is far worse. It’s a fear-based alarmist hypochondriac. The result is that I get medical care that most of the world would die for, so to speak. But the system is optimized badly.

(By the way, if I drop dead of a heart attack in two hours, nothing I’ve written here should be construed as preventing or inhibiting my survivors from suing the clinic’s pants off.) [Technorati tag: healthcare]

Speaking of health care, Dr. Bill Koslosky points to an NPR story and a report in Time Canada that even some Republicans are getting behind a bill that would expand the stem cell lines currently available for research. Bill wonders if this might occasion W’s first veto.

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