Bills, Bulbs, and Bewilderment

Imagine this: You're out of light bulbs, so you swing by your local Ace Hardware—because, of course, Ace is the place. You grab a pack, sign a slip on your way out, and that’s it. No payment yet.

Two weeks later, a bill shows up: $3.99 from Ace.

A month after that, you get another one—$1.99 from Philips, the bulb manufacturer.

Two months after your original visit? $0.99 from UPS for transporting it to the store.

And just when you think it’s over, a final invoice rolls in from a contractor you’ve never heard of, charging $1.99 to cover shelf-stocking services.

Confused, you return to Ace and ask what the hell is going on. Their response? “Oh, it’s to reduce liability in the supply chain.”

You’d walk out shaking your head, wondering what happened to the good old days when you could just buy a goddamn light bulb.

And yet—this is exactly how our medical system works.

We’re told this tangled mess is the result of too many lawsuits. Too many people suing over botched surgeries and bad diagnoses. So the system “adapted” by creating a complex web of billing entities, designed not to make care more affordable or accessible, but to spread the liability around like some kind of goddamn Ponzi scheme of responsibility.

And I don’t know. I kind of want to call bullshit.

How the hell did we go from handing a doctor fifty bucks and walking out healed—or at least helped—to this marvel of bureaucratic monstrosity?

It makes me not want to go.

Which, I suppose, is the point.

And don’t even get me started on Flexible Spending Accounts.

Or Health Savings Accounts.

Call them what you want—they’re parasitic little ticks that cling to the edge of this monstrosity. They take money out of my paycheck before I even see it, supposedly to help me afford care. And then they have the audacity to question me when I use it for, you know, care.

Like I’m trying to buy a box of Twinkies at St. Vincent Cardiovascular Center.

Really? You think I’m smuggling snack cakes through medical billing codes?

You fuckin’ prick.

I know—I love to point out problems without offering solutions. But sometimes, the only sane response to insanity is to scream into the void and hope someone else hears it.

And maybe—just maybe—they’ll bring back the fifty-dollar doctor visit before we all go bankrupt trying to get a Band-Aid.