Medical Bills, Private, Government Insurance, Out Of Pocket
Read more articles on Health and Medicine.September 26, 2008
Posted by neillevine
September 26, 2008
Posted by neillevine
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When you get sick you need to see that bills are paid to get dignified medical treatment. That is a signature purpose of medical insurance. It is supposed to make life easier for the indisposed.
Both my parents had job related medical coverage. Yet despite the promises that were implicit, there is a significant difference between hypothetical benefits and what is actually delivered.
I am not merely talking about routine visits to the office. I am talking about major medical bills.
My father was basically a life long postal worker. My mother was a school aid. So they both had coverage. They also had Medicare.
Yet when my father collapsed and was picked up by an ambulance, the first Brooklyn hospital he was taken to sent him home after a day without much of an explanation. It was obvious he had had a stroke yet that was not what the hospital was saying so my brother had to take him to my mother’s doctor and from there he was hospitalized and then placed in a nursing home under my mother’s insurance, which having been paid for by the school system was better than that provided by the U.S. Postal Service. Neither I nor my brother were happy with the treatment my father initially received and we discussed suing but eventually abandoned that approach die to circumstances beyond our control.
When my mother got sick, she was hospitalized and then placed in a different nursing home. Unfortunately, she survived long enough for my brother to spend her savings down and when her money ran rout the nursing home saw to it that she was covered by Medicaid. Nursing homes, by way of explanation, charge on the order of nine thousand dollars a month, not cheap by any means.
I am on disability. I am currently seeing both a cardiologist and a neurologist and I often feel horrid, tired and weak. I am having trouble getting out of bed in the morning. My neurologist thought I was depressed and was willing to prescribe medicine that I did not believe was necessary. For reasons I am not clear about, he likes to listen to my heart and conceded recently that my pulse was low when lying down compared to sitting upright.
Each of my doctors is chairman of his respective department and my cardiologist is even a high ranking executive at the Brooklyn hospital both of them work at. Now this is all fine and good but I am the kind of person who likes clear, to the point answers and that is not what I am getting. One reason is that ability to pay has a role in medical treatment. Were I able to pay for treatment out of pocket such as with cash my experience is that I would be getting different answers and seeing a different scenario for my treatment. In case you were not aware, I generally think of politicians as lying, cheating, scheming scalawags and that is probably the nicest thing I want to say about them in public.
One thing in particular my cardiologist does is ask if I have chest pain, meaning a cardiac incident, something I believe I would be hospitalized for, not a thrilling situation by any means.
So you can understand why I would be particularly interested in transferring to a doctor affiliated with either Columbia Presbyterian or Mount Sinai in Manhattan
but that is not currently happening. One reason is while I may be sick I do not meet politically influenced standards that I seem to be deliberately on the short side of as per my complaints on water policy and water power. In case you were not aware, politicians have a heavy hand in medicine from policy to standards to delivery to research.
My current medicines include Nexium, Diovan, Gemfibrosil, lMetropolol and Simvastatin from my cardiologist and Aricept and Namenda from my neurologist. (I am getting forgetful.) I take them as prescribed and assume they are helpful.
One prime example that illustrates the gist of my Complaint is that the government does not, in general, pay for unlimited visits whereas a patient paying out of pocket can see a doctor as needed. I say let politicians be cheap at their own expense. I really don’t need either jealousy or stupidity in my medical treatment.
While my cardiologist likes giving me tests my neurologist talks to me, I suppose to see where my head is. He tends to be far more beholden to the local politicians than I am since, for example, the local government in crowd believes everyone is equal except for themselves.
So as I have said for politicians there is one standard and if you have cash there is another. Yet, as we all know, everyone here is equal.
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Comments welcome. I consider this a very important topic.
neil