From the Editor’s Desk: Advocate (Premium)

Note: I’ve decided to move the From the Editor’s Desk editorial to the site so that it can appear as a normal article, can be found with search, and is more easily discoverable. I have been posting this past year’s editorials, which originally appeared in the Thurrott Premium newsletter each Monday, into the forums. And so I’m going to look at moving those into the main site as well. —Paul

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As you might imagine, I’ve spent the past month or so obsessed with some of the health-related topics I’ve discussed recently, most specifically my daily glucose measurements. But thinking about this topic more broadly, two things stand out to me. One is that notion that our healthcare system is so broken that insurance companies aren’t just doing what’s best—and what’s less expensive in the long term—for the customers, but also for them. And two, how important it is that we all advocate for ourselves, not just with health-related matters but in all parts of our lives.

Regarding the former, my wife and I walk each morning and we spend much of that time talking about anything and everything. This month, a lot of the talk has been about health-related topics, of course. And because she writes about health and nutrition anyway, and literally speaks each week with doctors, nutritionists, and people who have had positive health outcomes, I’ve been able to map what I’m doing to her own body of knowledge.

And it is astonishing to me how often the system gets in the way. This one came from an article she read, not a person she met, but there was a pregnant woman who came down with a urinary tract infection and needed a common antibiotic—one that you could get over the counter here in Mexico, by the way—that cost all of $12. But insurance company bureaucracy delayed and then prevented her from getting it, and she ended up with complications that required expensive hospitalization and monitoring to ensure that she didn’t give birth prematurely. Treating her after the problems occurred cost that company a lot more than just getting her the inexpensive antibiotic she needed up-front. And we can only imagine the mental damage this episode caused this poor woman and her family.

We aren’t going to fix the healthcare industry here. But what we can do is advocate for ourselves, as I did recently with my doctor, something I’d not previously done for much of my life. And while health care is obviously right at the top of the list when it comes to those times in which you need to stand up for yourself, it’s not the only example. Indeed, we will probably never run out of examples. But I do have two recent experiences that help demonstrate how important this is.

In 2015, I purchased my father’s 2007 Mercedes C280 and drove it home, cross-country. I used this vehicle for a few years and then passed it along to my daughter Kelly, probably in 2018. (At which point my wife convinced me that the two of us only needed one car, which, among other things would—and did—save us a lot of money with insurance.) She has been in three accidents since then, the first of which was minor but her fault, the other two of which were the fault of others. We have a local friend who owns car repair businesses, and he did a great job with the bodywork needed from that second accident. But now she’s in North Carolina, so it’s more complex.

Anyway, Kelly called my wife to tell us that a car had hit her vehicle on the front driver’s side and then sped away, leaving the scene of the accident. She gave chase, which I found out because I heard my wife admonishing her. “Give me the phone, please,” I said. She did, and I said to Kelly, “You did the right thing. Good for you.” To which she exclaimed, “Thank you, Dad!” In the moment, she was taken aback a bit by her mother’s response.

Everyone’s heart was in the right place, and my wife was just worried about Kelly’s safety, of course. But as Kelly explained, the person who hit her was a woman with little kids in the back seat, so the risk was minimal. And when they got to the woman’s house, she apologized, the police came, and long story short, that woman’s insurance company is on the hook for the new repairs. Curiously, the car was totaled—it didn’t look that bad to me—so Kelly will be getting a (new to her) used car soon.

I came out of this episode profoundly proud of my daughter. She did the right thing, not just for us—our insurance company would have had to handle the repairs and our rates would have gone up, otherwise—but more importantly, for herself. She did not let herself be victimized. I love her for that, and I love the person that she’s become. It’s the greatest gift for a parent.

And then there’s the example of the opposite case.

Good friends of ours visited us here in Mexico City, as they had last October, for a bit under a week. They’re smart and successful, and we have a lot of shared interests and life experiences. But one of the many ways we differ, which to date I’d never really thought much about, is our respective approaches to travel. I’m compulsive about making travel as pain-free as possible. Travel is by nature horrible, and even more so these days, so I like to do what I can. Accounts at all the major airlines, frequent flyer status with one of them, rewards points on a credit card to help pay for flights, and so on. I do what I can to minimize the terribleness.

And yes, I may be a bit much when it comes to my travel-day rituals—just ask my wife—but these friends are on the furthest possible end of that spectrum. When they fly, they use some price aggregator service to get the lowest possible price and don’t book directly with airlines, they never upgrade, they don’t have airline accounts, let alone status, and they often have longer, multi-leg journeys getting back and forth on trips. I don’t understand how anyone can be this way. But they are.

They were supposed to fly home last Monday, right before all the Thurrott.com transition stuff went live, and my wife and I knew it was going to be a busy, stressful week. But their flights were canceled that morning, and American Airlines rerouted them on a three-leg, all-day journey instead. Clearly, when things go wrong as they did last week—there were all kinds of weather issues in the northeast U.S. with resulting flight delays and cancelations—the airlines will accommodate their best customers first. As clearly, my friends were not even on that list, they were leftover scraps.

This happened to my wife and I about a year ago. Our solution was to get one of us on the phone, and the other on customer service chat, and do what we could. Because we had the apartment, we could stay days longer at no additional cost, and we got business-class flights home later that week. And because we had status, we got a non-stop flight with seats in business class. I told my friends that they had the same lodging benefit at least, and to move past the masses trying to figure out Monday and Tuesday and just fly home Wednesday.

They did not do that. They didn’t do anything. And eventually, their new flights were canceled too, and we watched over the next two days, helplessly, as more terrible flights were offered and then taken away. I have no words for the lack of action or alacrity on their part, but they did … nothing. Until Tuesday night, when one of them finally called the airline, which then just gave them tickets the next morning on another airline. That seemed OK, but the horrible ending to this story is that when they showed up at the airport the next morning, there was no record of their tickets, and they had to figure out a way home in person. It took them almost exactly 24 hours, door-to-door, to fly home, and they finally arrived at 4:30 am the next morning.

Dear God. My reaction to this episode is a combination of shock, sadness, and, honestly, a bit of disdain. Stand up for yourself, for crying out loud. They should have been on the phone the second they received the first flight change. The airline doesn’t care when (or even if) you—a literal nobody to them in this case— get home. This is on you.

Of course, you can take things too far. There are too many examples of people I’ve seen out in the world confusing entitlement with self-advocacy. Indeed, I’m sure you’ve all read stories about people acting up on planes, like the guy in first class who recently caused his plane to return to the originating airport because he was upset that he didn’t get the meal he wanted. These people are all around us, acting out, and believing that the world revolves around them.

It doesn’t. But your world does. So do the right thing for yourself. Just do it only when warranted and while respecting those around you.