The Brawl

There was a brawl at the pharmacy counter at Duane Reade on the Upper West Side of Manhattan recently. The tedium of waiting in a long snaking line down the cold and flu aisle was suddenly interrupted by two patients locked in a middle school fist fight, complete with pulling hair and schoolyard epithets.

Tension runs thick in our nation about health care.

Four years ago the principal pollster for the Bush campaign, John Van Lohulzen, predicted that health care would be the dominant issue in the 2008 race. The Bush camp was fully aware four years ago that health care would skid into such demise that frustrated patients would be coming to blows at the pharmacy counter. Van Lohulzen saw that patients were blaming other patients for the crisis – “overuse, unnecessarily expensive use, misuse of emergency rooms, fraud in the system, etc.”

Winnie had been kind enough to stand in line and drop off my prescription. It was a frustrating task not only because the lines are always long but also because verifying insurance coverage for domestic partners is an ordeal. The last time around the cashier could not make the computer find my name in the system causing Winnie to patiently explain our family configuration and our insurance coverage several times. “It’s not a gay thing,” she assured Winnie, “we don’t care if you’re gay. I’m gay.” She pointed to another cashier. “She’s gay.” She pointed to a pharmacist. “And her Mama’s gay!” But after outing half the staff she couldn’t make the computer understand how to find a patient who received her insurance through a domestic partnership.

On the day of the brawl, Winnie had finally made it to the front of the line when the customer tension broke apart. One customer had been arguing with the pharmacist, who is perched high above patients and peers at them over a wall of antacids and laxatives. She was shouting up at him that she needed her pills right now and he was insisting that she get a valid refill authorization from a physician. Her kids were playing loudly behind her, prompting the customer at the nearby drop-off counter to declare to no one in particular, “Some people really don’t know how to take care of their children.” The shouting woman stopped mid-sentence, turned her head slowly, and said “whose children are you talking about?”

And then the woman needing a valid refill prescription flew like crouching tiger over at the woman needing to drop off her prescription. That is how Winnie, wearing her clerical collar and clutching my prescription, came to help break up her first fist fight. After the screaming and punching and hair pulling, causing disarray among the magazines, tissues and condoms that had been neatly displayed at the drop off counter, the fight ended and all the customers dutifully got back in line in the right order.

Jan Van Lohulzen was not a prescient policy analyst – in fact he wrongly predicted that the “conflict” in Iraq would “subside” and that the economic “recovery” would “continue” by this election season. But his polls showed him without a doubt that frustration with the health care crisis would boil over by the 2008 elections.

A few days ago the Democrats approved party platform language that declared, “All Americans should have the coverage they can afford,” and stated that the party is, “united behind a commitment that every American man, woman and child be guaranteed to have affordable, comprehensive health care.”

We’ll see.