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Dragoneer and the American Health Care System
a year ago
As you probably know, the owner of FurAffinity, Dragoneer, passed away yesterday. I don't come here to solicit sadness, but anger and a call to action.
I knew he wasn't doing well lately, but the picture that came together after I was reading his social media to figure out what the hell happened wasn't pretty. It's a total indictment of the garbage pail that is the American health care system.
It's divided our country into the haves with quality medical care, and the have-nots with nothing who live in perpetual fear of a health crisis. A good example of the haves is from my own life. In mid-2012, I was coming home from college to visit family when I got a call from my mom. She was in the ER with critical anemia. Because of her quality healthcare - I come from a military family and military healthcare is squared away at least - we were able to get her diagnosed relatively quickly with a form of cancer that unfortunately cannot be cured but that she still lives with to this day. The medication she takes I think is somewhere along the lines of $20k+ a month, completely covered by insurance. As much as I'm pissed that Obama kowtowed to the health insurance companies when drafting the ACA, I'll always be grateful for the removal of lifetime caps and preexisting conditions as a means to deny coverage. She'd be long dead (and honestly, I believe my dad would be too for separate reasons) without sterling medical coverage. That's actually what brought me to the fandom in the first place - check my join date. With the stress and the sadness of not knowing what would happen in the near future, I turned to FA as an outlet. Here I've met wonderful people, lifelong friends, gotten in my fair share of arguments, participated in my fair share of memes. Dragoneer should be remembered as a person who put this website on his back and resisted influences to make the fandom into the sanitized, corporatized experience that it has been threatened to become and may very well become in the future.
But regardless of your coverage in America, shit is expensive. I woke up early one morning with extreme pain in my side, which I was able to quickly diagnose as a kidney stone because - don't judge - I liked to read medical care books as a child and recognized the symptoms. I walked about 45 minutes from my apartment to the hospital at about 4 in the morning in excruciating pain because I knew that if I called an ambulance it was going to be about $500 out of pocket. And that's *with* my own coverage.
So let this set the stage for what happened with Dragoneer. Apparently, he gets Covid, suffers from long Covid, and in the process develops significant symptoms. It looks like he was running a borderline high grade (101-103) fever for weeks and suffering from severe bouts of coughing, at times with blood. Time to go to the ER, right? Well, the problem is that ER visits in the US are expensive no matter who you are (again, remember an ambulance ride alone is hundreds of dollars at least), and if you don't have comprehensive coverage you can instantly be saddled with thousands of dollars in debt. So he suffers at home until it becomes unbearable. Eventually he does go to the ER, where they run tests including imaging and discover very concerning growths on his lungs. This is where any competently-run healthcare system would ensure that a pulmonologist is contacted and an immediate follow-up is undertaken. The ER has exhausted their capabilities, and a specialist would need to take it from there.
Only, that's not what happens. They apparently stick him with a huge bill, say "you should really call this number to schedule a follow-up" and apparently leave it to his primary care provider to provide a referral. Here's where the mother of all ball drops comes in. Here's a guy suffering with serious symptoms who needs immediate treatment, and he's left to fend for himself? Why is he even in contact with his primary care provider and not immediately with a specialist? Why did he have to be proactive, only for his PCP to screw up the initial referral, and eventually to have his PCP call and wonder incredulously why his appointment with the pulmonologist wasn't expedited?
So this guy suffers for a few more weeks before he's finally able to see a pulmonologist, who needs to perform a lung biopsy to see exactly what the issue is. He gets prepped for it, undergoes the procedure. That was about three days ago. He's now dead.
I don't care what the ultimate diagnosis is. Either (a) he died of a treatable condition that he suffered through for months, or (b) he didn't have access to the palliative care he needed and was in a lot of pain for months. Oh, don't forget the part where he was hit with a $25k bill right before he died to stress him out a bit more as icing on the cake.
Fuck this system. The lack of caring, the lack of compassion, the lack of anyone giving a shit anymore is untenable. Either you have to fight and scrap for whatever you can get or you're screwed. Any Americans reading this, we need to do everything in our power to fight the healthcare lobby that continually fucks us and all of our loved ones over. NOBODY can think this is acceptable, and NOBODY is happy with how it works now.
Oh, and by the way, back up all your shit on FA while you can. I can assume he had some kind of succession plan in place but this ain't a moneymaker and these kinds of efforts usually succeed or fail on the back of one person.
I knew he wasn't doing well lately, but the picture that came together after I was reading his social media to figure out what the hell happened wasn't pretty. It's a total indictment of the garbage pail that is the American health care system.
It's divided our country into the haves with quality medical care, and the have-nots with nothing who live in perpetual fear of a health crisis. A good example of the haves is from my own life. In mid-2012, I was coming home from college to visit family when I got a call from my mom. She was in the ER with critical anemia. Because of her quality healthcare - I come from a military family and military healthcare is squared away at least - we were able to get her diagnosed relatively quickly with a form of cancer that unfortunately cannot be cured but that she still lives with to this day. The medication she takes I think is somewhere along the lines of $20k+ a month, completely covered by insurance. As much as I'm pissed that Obama kowtowed to the health insurance companies when drafting the ACA, I'll always be grateful for the removal of lifetime caps and preexisting conditions as a means to deny coverage. She'd be long dead (and honestly, I believe my dad would be too for separate reasons) without sterling medical coverage. That's actually what brought me to the fandom in the first place - check my join date. With the stress and the sadness of not knowing what would happen in the near future, I turned to FA as an outlet. Here I've met wonderful people, lifelong friends, gotten in my fair share of arguments, participated in my fair share of memes. Dragoneer should be remembered as a person who put this website on his back and resisted influences to make the fandom into the sanitized, corporatized experience that it has been threatened to become and may very well become in the future.
But regardless of your coverage in America, shit is expensive. I woke up early one morning with extreme pain in my side, which I was able to quickly diagnose as a kidney stone because - don't judge - I liked to read medical care books as a child and recognized the symptoms. I walked about 45 minutes from my apartment to the hospital at about 4 in the morning in excruciating pain because I knew that if I called an ambulance it was going to be about $500 out of pocket. And that's *with* my own coverage.
So let this set the stage for what happened with Dragoneer. Apparently, he gets Covid, suffers from long Covid, and in the process develops significant symptoms. It looks like he was running a borderline high grade (101-103) fever for weeks and suffering from severe bouts of coughing, at times with blood. Time to go to the ER, right? Well, the problem is that ER visits in the US are expensive no matter who you are (again, remember an ambulance ride alone is hundreds of dollars at least), and if you don't have comprehensive coverage you can instantly be saddled with thousands of dollars in debt. So he suffers at home until it becomes unbearable. Eventually he does go to the ER, where they run tests including imaging and discover very concerning growths on his lungs. This is where any competently-run healthcare system would ensure that a pulmonologist is contacted and an immediate follow-up is undertaken. The ER has exhausted their capabilities, and a specialist would need to take it from there.
Only, that's not what happens. They apparently stick him with a huge bill, say "you should really call this number to schedule a follow-up" and apparently leave it to his primary care provider to provide a referral. Here's where the mother of all ball drops comes in. Here's a guy suffering with serious symptoms who needs immediate treatment, and he's left to fend for himself? Why is he even in contact with his primary care provider and not immediately with a specialist? Why did he have to be proactive, only for his PCP to screw up the initial referral, and eventually to have his PCP call and wonder incredulously why his appointment with the pulmonologist wasn't expedited?
So this guy suffers for a few more weeks before he's finally able to see a pulmonologist, who needs to perform a lung biopsy to see exactly what the issue is. He gets prepped for it, undergoes the procedure. That was about three days ago. He's now dead.
I don't care what the ultimate diagnosis is. Either (a) he died of a treatable condition that he suffered through for months, or (b) he didn't have access to the palliative care he needed and was in a lot of pain for months. Oh, don't forget the part where he was hit with a $25k bill right before he died to stress him out a bit more as icing on the cake.
Fuck this system. The lack of caring, the lack of compassion, the lack of anyone giving a shit anymore is untenable. Either you have to fight and scrap for whatever you can get or you're screwed. Any Americans reading this, we need to do everything in our power to fight the healthcare lobby that continually fucks us and all of our loved ones over. NOBODY can think this is acceptable, and NOBODY is happy with how it works now.
Oh, and by the way, back up all your shit on FA while you can. I can assume he had some kind of succession plan in place but this ain't a moneymaker and these kinds of efforts usually succeed or fail on the back of one person.
Speaking as a Brit, Americans have every, every right to be furious about their healthcare system.
It's awfult that the american health system wasn't able to help him properly
So RIP Dragoneer, and condolences to his family, and for the great loss that this site has got
It's disheartening to know the story behind his death. Unfortunately, instead of we seeing an investment being made to build a NHS in the USA, we are actually witnessing the corporate lobbies trying to destroy the public healthcare systems in other countries. Here in mine, most public obstetrics ER are not working during this month, because of a lack of health personnel available to work during the Summer holidays season. Just the other day, a pregnant woman who had a spontaneous abortion was left to die with a severe haemorrhage at the doors of a hospital, because she was denied entry. She was saved from death when she was taken by the firefighters to another healthcare unit, more than 100km away from her home. This would be something unthinkable to happen just a few years ago.
Let us brace ourselves for the times to come, because there's definitely something eerie going on...