Learning Chicago

But I just gave some poor billing agent for Aurora Medical Center in Milwaukee an earful about how messed up his company is that it couldn’t figure out a way to contact me about a past due bill from a check-up at a clinic  I’ve been going to for 30 years.

I got a new cell phone number almost a year ago, but it didn’t dawn on me to send a text to the clinic to make sure they had it. When I moved three months after the visit they still hadn’t sent me a bill, and I didn’t think to include them on my email to my friends and family with my new address. I finally heard from them about the bill three weeks ago, and I updated all of my information and told them to send me a bill right away so I could clear it up.

Today I got a collection notice. I was perturbed.

See, the doctor I saw, I’ve known for nearly my entire life. I carried his son’s casket out of the church when he died 13 years ago. I know most of the nurses at his clinic. I went to school with their kids, and coached the children of other staff members. But the bills don’t come from the clinic anymore, they come from Aurora’s offices in Milwaukee, where they never thought to call the clinic that actually provided the services to see if they knew how to reach me (I think the doctor has my cell phone number in his phone). “It’s your responsibility to update your information,” the billing agent said to me. “We can’t be looking for you.”

Interesting. They’ll send several bills to an old address, call an old cell phone number, and arrange for a collection agency to send me a notice, but one call to the clinic that actually performed the services that they are billing me for - their own clinic - that is out of the question?

I might have made this point, and I might have launched into a lecture on how this is not the way the clinic would have operated 10 years ago, before Aurora strong-armed clinics up the Lake Michigan shoreline into selling out. That might have happened. And I might have made a point about this being a reflection of why our health care system is a mess (and this has everything to do with corporate health care and nothing to do with insurance. I pay cash. I have “in-case-of-catastrophe” insurance. I’m fine with that – well, not fine. I tried to get price quotes for procedures before I went in, but they couldn’t provide them. Since I thought I might have a heart problem, I figured I better go get it checked out regardless of the cost. So there’s a little more proof that the free market doesn’t work so well with health care. It’s hard to be an informed consumer when you’re worried, or scared, about your health. You just want to fix it).

I preached for a while. The billing agent didn’t say anything. There was silence on the line. “I know you and Aurora probably won’t give a shit,” I said.

Another pause. Then, “thank you sir…” and before he could go into his “is there anything else I can do for you today” spiel, I hung up.

Well, I feel better anyway.

My visit to the Harold Washington Library last night to see Bill Bradley speak got me thinking about the first time I heard Harold Washington’s name when I was nine years old. It was the last day the mayor was alive.

I left school early that day for a dentist appointment. My Dad was driving me home in our Houston Oiler baby blue Pontiac station wagon (our first new car, I think. It had the cool fold out seats in the hatch that faced backward, which my younger sister and I always sat in when all eight of us piled in). The day was suffocated by a heavy gray sky, with the type of persistent rain that even a young boy senses is going to fall all day, leaving no hope of the sun breaking through so you can squeeze in a little time playing football or climbing trees.

My Dad always - always - listened to public radio, either the classical station or Wisconsin Public Radio. To this day I turn to those stations and the deliberate cadence of their personalities to relieve stress on a long drive. On this day I wasn’t paying much attention, just jabbering a bit about my teeth and fiddling with the cheap toothbrush the dentist gave me as my Dad filled the ashtray. Then he turned up the radio.

They were breaking in to report that Chicago Mayor Harold Washington had died.

I had no idea who he was, but my Dad was listening intently. He had left Chicago with my mother nearly 20 years earlier, but we were still attached. My grandmother still got the Tribune delivered to her Egg Harbor home every day. My older sisters all planned to go to college there. All of my relatives on my Mom’s side lived there. I loved the Bulls, and even then I felt I was destined to end up in Chicago, as though it was part of a larger plan beyond my control.

I waited for small breaks in the newscast to ask my Dad questions about who this guy was and why the men and women on the radio were making such a big deal about him. My Dad has never been the type to give a “Son, let me tell you a story,” talk, but somehow he still got certain messages across. Though we lived in a small, rural Wisconsin town sandwiched amongst farmers about 20 years behind the social times, it was clear that we would not use their racist language. We leaned to the left, but it was never spoken, and I don’t recall my parents ever preaching in favor of Democrats or slamming Republicans.

Something in the way he spoke, in the way he looked, and in the way we sat in the car listening for a few minutes after we pulled into the driveway, made it clear to me that this was an important moment without him telling me much more than that this was Chicago’s first black mayor.

Twenty-four years later those few minutes looking out at our muddied, dead November lawn from our no-frills station wagon, remain etched in my memory. So many other moments are long forgotten.