Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.01.2015, Blaðsíða 38

Over three nights of lively discussions,
the panellists covered a wide range
of topics. One panellist surmised, for
example, that by the year 2000, Ice-
land would be reduced to a Japanese
fishing station. Another managed to
predict the coming of the internet,
imagining a TV screen in every home
where one could view any page from
any book.
Many panellists were pessimistic
for the future, harbouring rather out-
landish and dystopian ideas of the
world in the year 2000:
“They will have managed to transfer
learned knowledge between animals,
by moving certain brain-acids from
one animal to another. This, of course,
is highly dangerous.”
“Recently scientists invented a special
hormone which can cure dwarfism. I
can imagine that in the year 2000, or in
the first decades of the next century,
humans will be standardised, so that
every male is 1.71 meters tall, everyone
wears the same type of clothes and
has the same shoe-size.”
“They will have started shrinking hu-
mans, to make room for everyone on
Earth.”
“In the year 2000, male humans have
been abolished, as they will have be-
come as useless as the males of some
bird species.”
“By then, ants will have conquered the
world.”
“In the year 2000, every Icelandic fam-
ily will consist of husband, wife, one
child and a foreign ethnologist.”
“The death penalty of the future might
involve being sent to some kind of a
galactic Siberia. Political prisoners will
be sent to space, as well as others who
do not conform to the prevailing politi-
cal system.”
“Cosmic awareness will be highly de-
veloped, and a 'cosmic council' will be
established for the entire universe.”
“They will have started building habi-
tats on the ocean floor, or at least sum-
mer cottages. If people start settling
there, a separate mankind will develop,
and then we will see a great war be-
tween landlubbers and the seapeople.”
“At the turn of the century, no one will
be allowed to pass away in peace and
quiet. There will be kine-biological
fights over each dying man between
various institutions which cut up our
bodies into a thousand pieces.”
“It is thought that it is possible to
transfer humans electronically from
one place to another, by dissolving the
body and re-assembling it, but on the
other hand it is said to be more difficult
to transfer the soul using this method.”
“In the year 2000, there will be no more
death.”
38 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 1 — 2015Oh. LEMÚRINN
Lemúrinn is an Icelandic web magazine (Icelandic for the native primate of Mad-
agascar). A winner of the 2012 Web Awards, Lemúrinn.is covers all things strange
and interesting. Go check it out at www.lemurinn.is
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LAUGAVEGUR 36 · 101 REYKJAVIK
In the year
2000, there will
be no more
death.
In The Year 2000,
Ants Will Have Con-
quered The World
In 1971, the magazine Samvinnan gathered a panel of Ice-
landers to predict the state of the nation and the wider
world in the year 2000, 29 years into the future. The fifteen-
person panel was made up of respected scholars, sci-
entists and politicians—including several MPs and future
Prime Minister Steingrímur Hermannsson.
Photo
Lemúrinn
Words
Helgi Hrafn Guðmundsson & Vera Illugadóttir
Icelanders in 1971 predict the future
In the wake of the holidays one year ago,
after far too many baked good, choco-
lates, wine, assorted festive meats and
accompanying sauces, and just about ev-
erything else one might binge on during
the merriest of seasons, my husband and
I had a running gag. One of us would ask,
“So, what did you get for Christmas?” To
which the other would deadpan, “Fat. I
got fat for Christmas.” Say what you will,
but it cracked us up.
This year I got cancer.
How’s that for a punch line?
On New Year’s Eve there is a one-hour
pause in the pre-midnight explosions
of fireworks and the country falls silent
as a staggering majority of Icelanders
gathers in front of their television sets to
watch the Áramótaskaup, a sketch com-
edy show that serves to summarize and
make light of the top news and political
events of the previous year.
This year’s “Skaup” was heavy on ref-
erences to the country’s failing health-
care system and the lengthy (though
very recently resolved) doctor’s strike
that has created a backlog of 700 surger-
ies, 800 CT scans and x-rays, and some
3000 outpatient treatments.
In one scene, a nurse is working her
way down a waiting list of patients to in-
form them that they are next in line for
treatment. But, oh, they’ve all died in the
meanwhile.
In another skit, a woman sits across
a desk from two doctors and is told she
has cancer. The treatment will be too
expensive, so she opts to just die. But it’s
not all bad news… the doctors are might-
ily thrilled to be moving on to new, high-
paid jobs in Norway the next day!
Is the situation really so dire? Just how
costly is it to have cancer in Iceland?
Just two and a half weeks (as of print
date) into my experience with the C-
word and my running tally is 22,742
krónur. That brings me up to the point
when I was told, “You have cancer.”
The exorbitant services I’ve sought
for this cost?
• Three visits to my
general practitioner.
• One ultrasound.
• One Fine Needle
Aspiration (a biopsy).

As I’m new to this cancer rodeo, I can’t
say that I know what lies ahead of me.
As with most institutions, it seems that
each piece of the puzzle is only aware of
what is happening within its own bor-
ders thus far and cannot hint at what its
adjacent piece may look like. I do know
that surgery is in my near future, mean-
ing time off work, and— skipping over
any other treatments I may undergo
before I get the stamp of “cancer-free”—
prescription medications to be taken ev-
ery single day for the rest of my life.
I have thyroid cancer, so while it is pre-
sumed at this point that my treatment
will be straightforward—at least accord-
ing to the pieces of the puzzle I’ve been
given thus far—it also means a lifetime
of hormone replacement therapy. An ex-
pensive lifetime.
Doesn’t Iceland have a universal
healthcare system? It does, indeed, and
that healthcare system subsidizes the
full cost of hospital stays, and partial
costs of visits to general practitioners
and specialists. There is also a prescrip-
tion drug payment system in place—re-
vamped in May 2013—that sees patients
paying for their prescription in three
stages. In a cycle that resets each year,
patients are required to pay the full price
of their prescriptions until a certain cap
is met, at which point the prescriptions
are subsidized 85% and, finally, 92.5%.
For patients like those with cancer, or
other long-term or chronic illness, this
equates to a prohibitively high annual
expense in addition to ongoing special-
ist costs.
With my own cancer putting me just
20K in the hole to date, it hasn’t been
too hard a financial punch. But I’m still
waiting for the punchline.
The Cost of
Cancer
Month 1:
A diagnosis
Words by Catharine Fulton