To your health

Fredericksburg, Virginia

The huge popularity of your TV show Doc Martin here in the US has nothing to do with the balmy Cornish setting. What really turns us on are the scenes in the Doc’s surgery, where no one ever pays a bill.

Contrast that with the bedlam of an American doctor’s office. A panicky patient hunched over the front desk waving his insurance card at the frazzled nurse as she waits on hold for a claims adjuster in a distant state to rule on how many haemorrhoids are covered. When the adjuster finally comes on the line she can’t hear him because the panicky patient lobs a barrage of questions and instructions at her. ‘Tell him it’s not a co-pay because I just had one operation, not two. The first time he didn’t get it all and had to go back in, so that counts as one!’ The other patients in the waiting room can hear all this.