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ramblings |
Transition vs. Standards of Living
2002.07.28
I happen to live in one of the most expensive places in the world I am told. Here it is not unusual for the typical engineer to command a 6-figure salary nor a medium-sized condominium to sell for $1.1 million. I watch my pennies, but I know that because of my salary I can afford to do things like electrolysis, therapy, and surgeries after saving up for a few months and being conservative with everything else. Let's contrast this with a girl I just met.
She lives in a hole of a town out in the middle of nowhere. I'm told it's about 50,000 residents, no lakes anywhere, and the nearest major city is about an hour away. The highest-paying jobs in town earn about $8/hour---median wages are around $6/hour. Her house cost her $10,000 and with improvements she's done she said she'll be able to sell it for maybe $25,000. She says that to pay for surgeries she'll sell her house.
Okay, wait a minute. Sell her house? $25,000?!!! If I had a mediocre house around here and I sold it, it would probably go for about $410,000. What's that I smell? It's the stench of a serious disparity of standards of living.
We all know that transition is expensive, but to cost someone to sell their house? Something has to be wrong here. I mean, surgeons are billing patients easily at $10,000, $25,000, $50,000; how can some people afford this? It just isn't fair.
It's at times like these I feel really lucky to be living in an area where the standard of living is very high cost because it makes buying things in other places (or even countries) much less expensive in relative ratios to what money I pull in. At the same time it makes me disconcerted that there are people, who are in no way poor, who cannot afford the benefits of medical technology because they have no spending power.
I feel sorry for my friend that she has to endure this. She seems like a smart girl but out of circumstance she ended up basically starting her life over in a tiny town. So now she is in a conservative environment, almost no transgendered help, and weak spending power. She had to drive out the 1,500 miles to the Bay Area to get procedures done and she said she was picking campgrounds and cheapo hotels because that's what she can afford, and really she's just pushing herself farther into debt.
I'm not sure there is a solution to this problem. I mean, inequalities exist in every locale and it'll never be possible to curb inflation in one area versus another. But it would be nice to get some kind of a tiered medical procedure structure so that people in certain areas of the country (or world) can pay up to a maximum of some percentage of their salary and the government would help subsidize the rest. I do not want to imply that people get a free ride. I want to make this "land of opportunity" be more like a "land of equal opportunity". OK, this is getting really idealistic.
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