Tuesday, at exactly 7 a.m., I arrived at my general practitioner’s office, in the basement level of his house, two blocks from mine in Mellieħa, Malta. There are six chairs in the waiting area. Ikea, I think. People note who got there first and go in, in turn. On his desk, there’s an ancient laptop with a big monitor running a vaguely Y2K version of Windows. He wears a digital Casio watch I remember my dad having in the 1980s. My American doctor’s office had a water feature.
My Malta doctor does bloodwork by appointment only, Tuesdays at 7 a.m. You tell him in advance what you need, and he has the tubes ready, hand-labeled with your resident number. The tubes are tracking the two diseases I brought with me. The number is what gets you into a socialized system that spends a quarter of what America costs per person and still has an average life expectancy of five more years. It’s not the Mediterranean diet doing the work. Malta has the highest obesity rates in adults in all of the E.U.
