health care and couches

                Tracy would like to find a love-seat for our living room to better accommodate guests to our home, and that got me thinking about health care.  I finally understood that health care is not a love-seat, and it should not be a love-seat.

                But that’s what it is now.

                We have high end and low end health care, cheap freebies, discounts, blue-light specials.  We have pitch-men and hawkers on TV selling drugs for the pharmaceutical industry, hospitals advertising their services and staff like they were ball clubs with the best recruits from this year’s draft picks.  We have doctors seeing patients on eight minute rotations.  Seeing patients.

                Maybe that’s the telling remark.  Seeing patients.  They aren’t seeing people anymore.

                And I think that’s a shame.

                I think if doctors were still seeing people, there would not be a health care debate.  Health care has become big business, and health care should not be about business, it should be about people.  We’re not couches.  Big business not only doesn’t care about that, it doesn’t even come up on the radar.  People are units on a balance sheet, bottom lines on a business report, lumped together with other expenses to be cut, trimmed, handled.  People also consume drugs, which brings in profit, they use services which brings in profit, they fill beds, which brings in profit, so people do have a function in the health care industry as long as they are cut, trimmed and handled profitably.

                Health care is not about health care anymore.  It’s about selling couches.

                People are fed up with it.  I’m fed up with it. 

                Here’s the kicker.   Doctors and nurses, formerly the primary part of health care, are pretty much relegated to the sidelines in what used to be their game.  Oh, they perform a function, but only on someone else’s terms, following rules they never imagined.   I really believe that most doctors and nurses do care about their patients, see them as people.  The industry has churned out lots of money hungry doctors for sure, but I still believe most are not that way.  I have no respect for those in it for the money; but that's a reflection of our society in general now, not about that profession in particular.

                I think doctors, who at heart got into the profession to help people, let health care get away from them.  They were busy doing what they did best, and that is the practice of medicine, and they didn’t really much care for the business of health care.  They let someone else take care of that.  Doctors in general made pretty good money, so they had fairly deep pockets, and there were those who saw an opportunity to get their own hands into those deep pockets.  The disconnect came because the doctors did know we are not couches, but the opportunists who followed saw no distinction.  As a matter of fact, they saw an extremely vulnerable class of consumer to exploit. 

                And they did.

                Because I’m not trying to find a second hand love-seat to fit between the two front living room windows that coordinates well with the couch we have.  No, I’m trying to figure out what it means that I’ve had blood in my stool for five days running.  Preparation H isn’t taking care of it.  I’m a little bit concerned, but trying not to show it. 

                I can’t call a doctor, because my insurance card says I have to be pre-approved before I can go to a doctor.  So I have to talk to a sweet, young telephone receptionist in some other part of the country about my bloody stools first.  And she determines whether or not I can talk to someone else at the insurance company about the same thing to determine if I can see a doctor about it.  And that doctor won't be the doctor I need to see, because he or she is a GP; he/she will need to refer me to a specialist.  And there will be a battery of tests, some of which I will actually need, some of which will be billed out to satisfy the health care industry.  And at some point, someone who gets it, who understands medicine and people will say something like, “if only you had come in a week or two earlier, we could have done something to help.”   But the health care industry will have transferred a lot of money from me, or my insurance company to others in the health care industry, a couch will have been sold.  And if I live, my rates on my insurance will go up, or my insurance will be cancelled and I will have a pre-existing condition that no insurance company will cover.

                If I don’t have insurance, I just keep buying Preparation H and hope for the best. 

                And there are some people out there who wonder why there are those of us who want someone, anyone, even the government to stop the craziness.

                I read of a doctor while I was in Belize who doesn’t take insurance payments, doesn’t take government payments…she works on a cash basis only.  And she said she likes it just fine.  A lot less paperwork.  More time with her patients.  She pays no malpractice insurance and has a sign up stating so, and indicating that if patients agree to her services, they also agree to not sue. 

                Seems to be working for her, and for her patients.

                When I find a doctor with a similar philosophy here in Jupiter, or near here, I will stand in line to see that doctor. 

Comments

[dkg]

Rog, you & I have gone round & round re: health care; don't think you have talked to enough doctors & nurses!
As an aside - you might try yogurt to counteract the nasty stuff you had to take upon your return to the states - it probably sanitized your GI system & yogurt can help that side-effect!

[Rg]

Diana; thanks for the tip...will stock up on yogurt. And will talk to more doctors and nurses...I think we both agree that frivolous lawsuits and malpractice insurance is a real problem. But I do still think that the objectification of people within the health care industry is a problem, and can be laid at the feet of the present business model.

[Jim]

Rog,
When brother Rick got sick - I sat in a Doc's office and listened to him talk of gleoblastoma while holding Mary Beth's hand - He had little insurance - The profession stood up and took great care of him. The brain surgeon had been a rock scientist. They all - from nurses to MD's took on the case with little or no money involved. There are still a ton of great caring people out there. Generalization in Health Care and in Politics leads to a Swamp.
Just say'n

[Rg]

Jim...one day I will learn to write with more clarity...but we agree on that point...as I tried to say, there are a LOT of caring doctors and nurses, but health care has been hijacked by a business model that devalues the person. Little point in pointing fingers looking for someone to blame; the question is, how do we fix it? I think doctors and nurses would love to get back to medicine instead of paperwork created by both government and insurance companies.

[Sandy]

I would like a nice love seat. Inexpensive - made in America. Oh, but wait...really need a kitchen first. Or maybe just a house without holes...and a roof that does not leak. We're in our 50's and really need comprehensive physicals and teeth worked on...but that's not going to happen anytime soon - the government wants too much money for money we borrowed against Jim's retirement to keep our construction company going...but wait...that company no longer exists. Geez, guess we'll never get that love seat.

[Fort]

None of us have love seats, but appears we all have love. Wise man once said....
All ya need is love.

[Ben]

interesting story