In this labour ward, the special deliveries come from Chanel

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/04/labour-ward-chanel-us-hospitals-britain

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I visited a friend in hospital this week, one of the huge New York medical centres that takes up an entire city block. At first glance it looks no different to an NHS hospital in Britain, with squeaky floors, harried doctors, and gift shops selling flowers in the lobby. As you get away from the atrium, however, you start to see differences.

There are no open wards; recovery rooms contain two beds at most. This is a private hospital, which is to say that it isn’t run by the city of New York; but the distinction between public and private healthcare is convoluted in the US, where doctors are “providers” who can pick and choose who they treat, according to their insurance plan. (The New York Times reported last year that half of all doctors registered as available to low-income patients with state insurance wouldn’t actually give them an appointment.)

If you have adequate insurance, on the other hand, you choose a hospital as you might choose a hotel, browsing reviews online, reading the medical equivalent of Yelp! and then calling and trying to get on their highest-rated doctors’ patient lists. The chairman of obstetrics at one big New York hospital actually compared his unit to the Ritz-Carlton.

No one wants to be sold to when they can barely get up to go to the loo

The hospital I visited this week happens to be where I gave birth. It’s a great hospital, with caring doctors. It is also a multibillion-dollar operation, and the most shocking part of my experience there eight months ago wasn’t the spinal block, but the fact that when I left after five days I was given a gift bag from Chanel. It contained some body lotion, a bottle of Coco Noir perfume, and a note congratulating the hospital for its “excellence” and “all new mothers on their very special deliveries”. It was signed, “avec les compliments de Chanel”.

To anyone from the European system, this will bring on a shudder: the conjoining of healthcare with the marketing of luxury goods is at best iffy, at worst grotesque. Oh, bugger off, I thought; no one wants to be sold to when they’re wearing surgical stockings and can barely get up to go to the loo. Other mothers in the unit were given Ralph Lauren baby clothes – a sponsorship deal operating on the assumption that no one could possibly have a problem with designer babywear or a $195 “cashmere keepsake” babygrow.

It made me recall with fondness the experiences of a friend who had surgery at the Homerton in east London. When she came round, she had the temerity to ask for herbal tea and was told in short order that it was PG Tips or the high road, which in the US is probably grounds for a medical malpractice suit.

Related: Topless protesters march through Manhattan in call for equality

9/11 re-remembered

I got lost in the corridors on the way to finding my friend, and wound up in the wrong wing, passing the burns unit. You get used to 9/11 being a historical event, detoxified by years of public ceremony and memorial. And then you see something unexpected to bring it home again. By the elevator, I passed two huge murals made up of collages and cards from the children’s ward, thanking occupants of the burns unit for their heroism and wishing them the speediest recovery; all were dated September 2001.

Topless Times

It has been a week of naked people in the US, from the topless hustlers of Times Square, to Miley Cyrus hosting the MTV Video Music awards in what looked like two belts and a fly curtain. Bill de Blasio wants to boot the topless “performance artists” from Times Square, a move New York magazine described as “pearl-clutching”. The mayor perhaps misses the point. People are always complaining about the Disney-fication of Times Square and how it’s not what it was in the seedy 1970s and 80s. These women aren’t provocateurs; they’re just part of a bona fide historical re-enactment.