You Can’t Afford Me
**7. What can you pay today?**
I fought her on it for a week. I said it was invasive, I said it put the burden on the patient, I said nobody wants to write a number.
She said, “They’re already thinking about the number. You’re just deciding whether they have to think about it alone in a parking lot.”
Andre Boone brought Zaya in for her follow-up in June, running, furious about having to hold still.
He put forty dollars on the counter toward a balance that Denise had already quietly zeroed, and Denise took it anyway, because she understood exactly what it was, and wrote him a receipt.
Question seven on his form said **$40.**