I was kind of the comic relief in my household. We had a chronic illness in the family. And so, a lot of emergency room visits, and my role was to be silly and add levity, and we're Jewish. So every Passover is a performance. You kind of learn to role play and do voices at the Passover Seder.
Look, if you have somebody who doesn't have health insurance, who doesn't have a doctor or dentist, and in order to deal with their cold or flu or dental problem, they go to an emergency room - in general, that visit will cost ten times more than walking into a community health center.
There's only a couple times when fame is ever helpful. Sometimes you can get into a restaurant where the kitchen is just closing. Sometimes you can avoid a traffic violation. But the only time it really matters is in the emergency room with your kids. That's when you want to be noticed, because it's very easy to get forgotten in an ER.
No one should have to choose between medicine and other necessities. No one should have to use the emergency room every time a child gets sick. And no one should have to live in constant fear that a medical problem will become a financial crisis.
The last thing you want to do is play a long gig on a hot night, pass out, and wind up in a hospital emergency room.
If one of you pass out and go to the emergency room, the hospital has to see you. But when you go to the emergency room, you've had a stroke, or you've had a heart attack. If you had preventative medicine, you could maybe be taking your high blood pressure medicine so you wouldn't have a stroke and cut down the costs.
If you're not paying for it through the health plan, you pay for it in the emergency room.
Let's not kid ourselves about just how cheap offshore labor really is. We not only pay substantially less per hour: we also avoid the costs we would incur if these workers immigrated here. We don't pay for their medical expenses when they show up in the emergency room without insurance.
There's two systems of health care: the one for the rich that's really good, then there's the one for the inner city, where they leave ladies in the emergency room unattended for 24 hours until they drop dead.
The traditional way that society looks at healthcare is to let people get terribly sick and then have an emergency room to take care of them and spend a lot of money on acute care for people who would have been kept out of hospital in the first place if they had had a lifestyle change.
