This is an actual conversation that happened in our departmental Zoom meeting on Friday.
Colleague: the injured employee adamantly refused to take an ambulance to the hospital. He kept yelling at people that he couldn’t afford it. He waited for 4 hours at work until his mom could come pick him up and take him there. (Night shift; there was no one to drive him.)
Boss: I don’t get it. Why didn’t he just go in the ambulance?
Other colleague: this happens all the time when people can’t afford healthcare services.
Boss: there are people who can’t afford health care? I’ve never heard of that.
Other colleague: attaches a bunch of links in chat Yeah, medical debt is the most frequent cause of bankruptcy. Lots of people don’t want to take the ambulance—they have to pay for it out of pocket, and can’t afford to do that.
Boss: well, I’ve never had to deal with that in my life.
Stringgeek: screams internally
Boss is in his mid-70s and is a very fine slice of white bread. He has lived in/near the same large metropolitan area his entire life, an area that has an extremely robust healthcare infrastructure. I wanted to ask in what decade he stopped consuming the news. It was especially hard not to say, “something something white privilege”.