Problems with our healthcare system? I hardly think so. Consider the following unexpected boons that I have recently derived from dealing with my own health care provider:

1. Music. Just last week, my health care company put me on hold and switched on its automatic music long enough for me to hear “Parsifal” in its entirety, something I have never accomplished at an opera house. And opera is only a small part of my health company’s repertoire. Where else could one hear the entire oeuvre of the Captain and Tenille before being told that a representative would be available shortly and being switched to Chris Bottie and Diana Krall? It is like to listening to a college radio station or WBAI without the politics.

2. Looking busy at the office. I am on the phone for hours at a time, leaving the impression that I am participating in important conference calls. Occasionally I scream with rage and pound my fist with frustration, creating the impression of a macho negotiator. Often co-workers pass by to see me holding the phone to my ear while I doodle, roll my eyes or stare off vacantly into space. This of course convinces them that I must be the recipient of special words of wisdom from the boss.

3. Less time at the doctor’s. That’s right. Usually by the time an answer to any urgent coverage question arrives, the medical personnel involved have died, retired, moved to another state or switched health care provider affiliations. Ditto in many cases for the patients. Thus, much time traveling to and from hospitals and idling in doctors’ waiting rooms is avoided, and life is made much easier for everyone, if shorter for some.

4. Exercise for the mind. On the few occasions when they actually talk to me, health care company personnel engage in brain-teasing enigmas, self-contradictions and non-sequiturs; the documents they send me use a prose style falling somewhere between Chinese fortune cookies and the oracles of Delphi. It is a heady intellectual experience, like reading Becket, seeing a Tom Stoppard play or talking to Pirandello. Thanks to my health care company, I no longer feel old and desperate. Now I feel young and desperate, like an undergraduate who needs to change majors.

5. Sense of accomplishment. When my health care company approves a biopsy in a particularly tender part of my anatomy, I pump my fists in exultation, order Dom Perignon, and feel as good about myself as an investment banker at bonus time. This feeling lasts for days. It diminishes only at the event itself, with the realization that the procedure has been approved, but not the use of anesthetic.

6. I develop the patience of Job. Also the same untreated boils, plagues and pestilences.

7. The ability to confront life-threatening conditions without angst or existential dread. Instead, thanks to my health care company, I am completely preoccupied with unanswered questions, annoyances, and anger. Who has time to rail at the injustices of an unseen, unheeding God or an empty, unfathomable universe when there is an even more unfathomable, more unheeding health care company to rail at? Who cares any more about whether there is life after death or a white light at the end of a tunnel? If you deal with my health care company, the questions become more basic: Is there anyone at the other end of the telephone? Others may fret about predestination, transubstantiation of matter, or reincarnation. If you think those are hard questions, try understanding Exclusion A (3) to Rider 4 of Plan with Co-Payment Waiver as Approved for Non-Smoking New Jersey Residents—all the while remembering that, like life itself, anything my health care company says is Subject to Change without Notice.

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James B. Kobak, Jr. is a largely retired lawyer who has been writing humor pieces for years; these pieces have appeared in places varying from The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Travel & Leisure to regional magazines and newspapers, literary magazines, and sites such as Suddenly Senior and Humor Outcasts (where he is a contributor). He has also published a novel (Up Front From Behind), The Wimp’s Guide to Cross-Country Skiing, and, most recently, Tennis Anyone? The Wimp’s Guide to Tennis and Other Racquet Sports. He’s started a substack at jimkobak.substack.com