REVELATION: Book One of THE RECARN CHRONICLES by Gregory N. Taylor Page A

frequently being
refused costly medical treatment. After this age was reached,
pensioners were expected to suffer in silence until they died
naturally, until their disease finally overcame them and killed
them, or until they could take no more and visited one of the many
Self Termination Centres, committing assisted suicide, and thus
relieving their families of a financial burden and society of an
inconvenient embarrassment. The families of those who took this
step of self-termination received a tax-free windfall payment to
the value of one year of the eldest child’s salary. This caused a
lot of friction within families and many an elderly parent was
persuaded to go to an early grave because of the greed of their
children.
    Of course, this policy only
really applied if you weren’t wealthy. Money talks in any language,
anywhere in the world. If you were from a wealthy family you could
buy the surgery you needed. The world was full of children who had
contracted serious life-threatening illnesses at a young age, only
to be bailed out by their well-off parents. Those families had
never had to face the heartache that the Boone family was now going
through. It was a given that moneyed families would buy their way
out of problems – including medical problems – just as they had
been doing for centuries.
    And there was no shortage of
doctors and surgeons willing to line their own pockets at the
expense of others’ misfortunes. Indeed, it was a major reason why
the numbers of applications for medical universities were
increasing year by year. Doctors knew that they could augment their
already substantial incomes by offering private, off-the-record
services to those that could afford it. On the streets the
Hippocratic Oath had become known as the Hypocritic Oath . Doctors were still obliged to swear the
Hippocratic Oath before being allowed to practice medicine, but
nowadays this was a mere formality; it was lip-service. Nobody
expected to have to adhere to the oath that they had sworn, nor
were they expected to do so by the system. Private health plans
still existed for those that could pay the monthly instalments but
these payments were now so high that medical insurance was well
beyond the resources of the average citizen.
    So, many people were forced
to sell their prized possessions in order to find the funds to pay
these medical expenses. If they had no possessions of any real
value to sell, they would be forced to call upon the services of
loan companies, many of which were not officially recognised and
were certainly not averse to physical brutality if their clients
didn’t keep up with repayments. The irony is that many of these
unscrupulous companies were set up by small syndicates of doctors
and surgeons, who gained on two counts; they lent the money – at a
very high interest rate - to pay for medical services that they
themselves provided, again at a high cost. It was the perfect
income stream.
    The Boone family wasn’t
poor, but they weren’t rich either. Maurice, an accountant, didn’t
earn enough to pay for private medical insurance, and even with the
addition of his wife’s income as a call-centre manager, their joint
annual income couldn’t sustain medical insurance as well - not if
they wanted to feed and clothe their family.
    Dr. Stefansson closed the door
to the ante-room. He made a great play of ensuring that he and Mr.
and Mrs. Boone could not be overheard, but it was just an act.
Everybody in the hospital was in on the scam. Operations needed
operating theatres so hospital administration staff had to be paid
off. Surgical staff were required, and they cost money. Except for
the surgeon, the anaesthetist was the major
expense as he or she literally held the patient’s life in their
hands. One miscalculation in dosage (deliberate or not) would end a
patient’s life, and the patient’s family knew this. The anaesthetist would be paid handsomely for his or her
services, and payment was always