The
Blue Cross/Blue Shield website — like most advertising vehicles of companies that purport to provide intangible services, but in fact screw you out of your money — bears photographs of a collection of people of all races, ages, and genders, all of them visibly satisfied customers whose ear-to-ear grins are no doubt directly traceable to their belief that, whatever life foists upon them, Blue has their back. As an aesthetic matter, I find this sort of suggestion wholly implausible.
A Big Mac, granted, when placed in front of a hungry customer, can curl the corners of one's mouth into a smile wholly attributable to McDonald's. But people just don't walk around smiling all day because they bank at
Citizen's or
Fleet or are privileged policyholders with Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Likewise, just as T.S. Eliot faulted
Hamlet for its
lack of an "objective correlative", I find it a bit of a dramatic stretch to suggest, as a recent TV commercial does, that a black middle-aged male would take such satisfaction from his home security system that he would stand on the end of a pier and shout over a placid lake at the top of his lungs, "NOW I CAN FINALLY RELAX!" (no doubt dispersing his anxiety to his white neighbors, who pile their angelic children into SUVs and flee to more remote summer-home venues).
Well, my picture is not on the Blue Cross/Blue Shield website, and I ain't relaxin'. They're telling me down at the MGH Travel Center that BC/BS won't front for the
battery of immunizations I need to get before I go to Brazil. Bad news for BC/BS: you didn't have Phutatorius in mind when you devised that particular cheap-out policy, and I'm going to stick you for it. My plan? To forgo the immunizations and do my damnedest to contract yellow fever, so that when I return to the States, stricken with illness, You Know Who can pay through the nose for my extended period of hospitalization. This green Jello and chicken broth are on you, Blue!
Of course, now that I've gone and written that, you can bet BC/BS will void my policy before the end of the month.
From what I hear, though, the hip disease to get down in Brazil these days is "
The Dengue," another mosquito-borne inside-outer, but one for which there apparently is no vaccine. It seems to me that the accrual of the definite article "the" can be a great reputation-builder for a disease — I am, for example, a prouder survivor of a routine bout of "The Croup" than I am of the scarlet fever and pneumonia that could well have extinguished the Lux Phutatoriensis in my early childhood. Since November's Amazon trip will of necessity expose me to a "The" disease, I don't see the need to spend my hard-earned cash on a measly yellow fever shot just to limit my insurance company's risk.
So there you have it — Phutatorius will brave the tropics like the great Spanish explorers of old, or at least the Blues Brothers: unprepared and unprotected, convinced he is on a mission from God, and most likely with a few communicable diseases of his own to introduce into the ecosystem. Onward to glory!
And if I change my mind in the meantime, I still have my vaccinations appointment blocked out at Mass. General.
