A Doctors' Visit

I visited friends in Matamoros, Mexico, last week, with three medical residents. The doctors were interested in discovering which were the obstacles to medical care that faced those who live on the Mexican side of the border. We met in a neighbor’s home, and listened to stories. One woman, about sixty years of age, had been diagnosed with colon cancer in 2003. She complained that presently she had had to travel about an hour for her chemotherapy. She had recently been struck by a car and was suffering from the effects of the accident. A nice man, also about sixty years of age, complained of chronic bronchitis that he had contracted after years of welding work in factories. He admitted that his smoking habit was probably a contributing factor. He showed us a tube of an albuterol inhaler that the local clinic gave him.

He told us that they charged him a dollar each time they gave him one.

Ten minutes away, in Brownsville, Texas, that inhaler would cost him about twenty dollars. If the woman with colon cancer had been living in the USA, she, being very poor and without insurance, would have died long ago.

After the stories, we shared a soft drink. Our Mexican friends talk gaily away; we mostly sat in silence. I think that they were feeling better than we were.