Healthcare Heaven is Seattle Grace

I’ve become newly preoccupied by certain fantasies, a doable substitute for other people. A vision as I’m pouring water for tea: lying on the beach under white hot sun, a square of chocolate dissolving on my tongue. Crossing Dean onto Classon, a group lifts their arms to their eyes to block the light, then all lift their legs in arabesque. Walking around an empty grocery store, taking my time, piling bundles and bundles of dill into a small purse. These dreams come at random intervals in my full time quarantine job, which is watching all of Grey’s Anatomy.

Grey’s Anatomy, a show that is still on air, is also a daydream: a healthcare fantasia where insurance issues don't exist, or, if they do, they are worthy of a plot point on par with a brain aneurism. As a pandemic continues to expose the (already glaring) cruelty of our healthcare system, the more Grey's Anatomy's medical insurance plot contrivances feel like pure escapism. 

At Seattle Grace Hospital / Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital / Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, extreme care is the norm. The only danger is the inevitable unpredictable ways our bodies can fail us, via fog storm-caused truck pileup on the Seattle freeway, plane crash, shooter, sepsis, drowning, heart attack, rare bone disease, irreversible coma following routine procedure, “bleeding out,” dragged under a bus, heart attack, hit by an exploded bomb in a body cavity, complications from Alzheimer’s, heart attack, hiccups that portend a toxic megacolon, heart attack, tumor bleeding into lungs and trachea, electric shock, hit-and-run, etc. 

Surprise deaths do not discriminate, but usually strike down those who are fine and talking to the sicker patent who is their friend, when all of a sudden they’re “crashing” or have fainted or have become tachycardic and that is how you know.

But when people die, for the most part, it’s not because they can’t access proper care. It’s not because the hospital has refused their insurance, or they can’t schedule a biopsy or find an in-network specialist, or find out their insurance will only cover a certain number of refills so they need to ration, maybe because this would make less good TV. 

Doctors on Grey’s Anatomy love to commit insurance fraud. They have done so at least twice, when a tragic and very sympathetic character comes into the hospital seeking treatment and the doctors know they must do something. One re-injures a patient so his pre-existing condition could be classified as an emergency. A doctor marries a man who needs a kidney transplant but has shit insurance. They fall in love, which is overkill.Another writes her daughter’s names on her patient’s scans so that her insurance can cover a child’s lymphoma. When a neighborhood bartender collapses from a rare aneurysm, the surgeons rally together to fund his procedure with an eleventh hour research grant. And when an unhoused man receives plastic surgery on his severely lacerated feet, his surgeon gives the man hundreds of dollars of his personal camping gear so the man can keep up post-surgical care while living in a Seattle park.  

Yes it’s America on Grey’s Anatomy, but an America without ruthless bureaucratic nightmares that are left to its people to handle. On Grey's Anatomy it's entirely impossible to know what year it is, Amazon and Instagram and pharmaceutical company price gouging disputes don't exist, and no one is left between their own rocks and hard places without a doctor who will drill through both with a bone saw, who will make this country’s mass injustices their personal cause.