Wednesday, November 15, 2017

The Right Man for Healing and a Rare Find

Hippocrates of the Hippocratic Oath
I was not sure my ENT specialist was a good fit for me even though I read the glowing praises framed on his office walls, praises coming from his patients, colleagues, and other doctors. The young man seemed to know what he was doing but his bedside manner was brief and rather cold.

I attributed his demeanor to his introverted personality, his professionalism, and to his respect for his patients’ time. Very punctual, he very seldom made anybody wait to see him, he was always on time.

One day I realized that he was much more caring on the inside than he let people see. A young woman with her mom and a three-year old in tow had an appointment to see the doctor. The receptionist, Lupe, asked her if she was prepared to pay for that day’s visit. The young woman had a grief-stricken look on her face and wondered how much the visit was going to be. The receptionist told her that she did not know because each patient was different, depending on the problem. The prospective patient replied in a sad and disappointed voice that she will reschedule until such a time that she would have enough cash on hand to pay for the visit.

Lupe kindly explained that her insurance, Obamacare, had a huge deductible, and unless she met this deductible for the year, it will not pay the doctor anything. She offered to ask the physician, left the young woman waiting, and returned to tell her that the good doctor will see her anyway.

I decided then that this man was the right person to see in an ENT medical emergency or a problem requiring a caring specialist. His humanity, in addition to his medical professionalism, punctuality, and his education in the U.S., made him, in my opinion, an exceptional doctor, a rare find.

At the other end of the spectrum was the endocrinologist’s office in Fairfax who told me, they are no longer taking any new Medicare patients, just the already established ones who were in transition to Medicare. The receptionist’s explanation was that Medicare does not allow their patients to be seen every three to six months as needed.

I was told previously by a doctor friend that Medicare made low and very slow reimbursements to physicians because of Obamacare; therefore I did not believe the office’s explanation. Personally, I would not want to be seen by a doctor who put her profit motive above the care for a patient, any patient.

But I pressed on. What if I paid in cash, could I then see the doctor? The answer was again no because, she said, they had a contract with Medicare and thus could not accept cash payment.

Having read the pertinent section of the law, I knew this was part of the Affordable Care Act as well, the euphemistically named piece of legislation Obama’s administration and Nancy Pelosi’s Congress forced down middle class America in the middle of the night, “pass the bill to find out what’s in it.”

We did find out all right, and we did not like the price we had to pay for it in order that the Democrat Party could unilaterally force an entire nation, one fifth of the economy, to become a socialized medicine nightmare for decades to come.

More insultingly, members of Congress have their own subsidized and separate health care insurance and can see whatever doctors they wish to see.

It used to be the case in America once when patients could pay cash for doctors’ visits and the fees were affordable. But that gradually changed thanks to modifications in health insurance, new cafeteria health insurance plans, in-network and out-of-network type of employer insurance, and health savings accounts that disappeared at the end of the year if unused.

If you lost your job or quit, the insurance terminated, and you were at the mercy of Cobra insurance for a while, at confiscatory monthly premiums, but nothing as expensive as Obamacare premiums today that can easily exceed a family’s mortgage and car payments combined.

Lack of insurance portability across state lines had always been a problem for Americans seeking affordable insurance. Aggressive law suits against doctors and medical malpractice awards by the courts, forced doctors to drastically buy more and more expensive malpractice insurance, making care more expensive for the average patient who did have insurance. The infamous $50 aspirin in a hospital setting was legendary.

As a student without insurance in the early 1980s, I paid $10 cash per visit to my children’s pediatrician. Once we could afford and bought insurance, each visit was $85. The pediatrician made a comfortable living, had a thriving practice, but he was certainly not a millionaire.

If you ask most doctors today what they spend a good portion of resources and time, it is not patient face to face care time but electronic documentation, record keeping, and staff to handle insurance justifications and payments – bureaucracy.

Primary medical care, day-to-day healthcare, is now provided by a general practitioner, a family physician, a gerontology, pediatric, or family nurse practitioner, a physician assistant, a registered nurse, and even a pharmacist who coordinate and triage specialist care that a patient may need.

Secondary and tertiary care is harder to find as physicians are cutting their losses and focusing on accepting private insurance rather than Medicare and Medicaid.

We are headed to a single payer socialized medical insurance which will limit doctor visits and access to procedures based on rationed care. The entity that will hold the key to your ability to pay for and receive medical care when you need it will be the federal government, the same bloated, out of control entity that spent your Social Security lock-box savings and has doubled the national debt in eight years of the Obama’s administration.

12 comments:

  1. Financially, Obamacare is killing middle class families. Money that might be put aside for kids college fees, or basic living expenses, are being eaten up for medical coverage they may not even need. Obamacare is a disaster. Anyone who has lived under socialized medicine, single payer, knows all the negatives. We have got to get government out of health care period. The cost of healthcare would plummet and maybe we could get back to $20-$50 dollar cash office visits.

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  2. Well said, Ileana. And government-run single payer health "care" will, inevitably, burden us with a vast array of health mandates, such as dietary, weight, and exercise requirements, all regularly monitored. Finally, in our last years, in government's overdue effort to cut costs, it will "care" for us by offering a neat medical way to end our lives. In the "land of the free."

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  3. Ileana, the special insurance available to all members of Congress, the Supreme Court and 5 muckety-mucks from
    Puerto Rico is the Office of Attending Physician. Those enrolled in the world class program pay a whopping $503 per year, with the U. S. taxpayer picking up the rest of the cost. I use this one perk as a barometer of if I can trust my Rep or Senators. If he/she consistently informs his/her constutuency of this perk, I will be open to other thoughts and actions of him/her. To date, no one I know in Congress has alerted his/her constituents of this largesse.

    A co-worker and his wife are on the Affordable Care Act (I don't refer to it as Obamacare anymore). They will be 62 & 63 in '18. This year, they paid $150 of the $1,500 monthly 'tax'. In '18, they are to pay $800 of the $1,500 monthly tax. They can't afford this, so they will be w/o health insurance.

    I realize it is easy to pick on the Democrats in ramming the Affordable Care Act upon us, but, as we have seen, there are many Republicans who want much of what is embedded in the ACA. It is my belief that the backstablishment atop the GOP forced some, if not many members of the GOP in Congress to vote against the ACA, for the purpose of driving separation of the citizens of U. S. along party lines. '..., divided, we fall'.

    The purpose of government-controlled, single-payer health insurance is to deny health care to an aging population, especially those who are people who believe in God and are patriots. The IPAB will use the mountain of meta-data to facilitate the denial of health care to those who pose a threat to the efforts of those pushing for a global government.

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    Replies
    1. Dear Celtic Tiger,
      Outstanding commentary! I was amused by your comment about the five "muckety-mucks" from Puerto Rico. I've never heard that term before.

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  4. This is proof positive that the government should not be in the insurance business. All government health care programs have nothing to do with caring for the health of American citizens, it is all about who controls the money paid for health care.

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  5. Bill,

    Thank you. Until people are willing to acknowledge that a group of charlatans is pushing for a global government in which the masses serve the self-appointed & self-serving elite, little will be done to save us. Government is a tool of organized crime, in which the masses are divided along every natural fault line, and those comprising the masses refuse to admit this reality.

    Most are fighting only half of the enemy because they believe those atop 'their' party will rescue them. To fight all of the enemy, we must fight both parties and those pulling their strings.

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  6. I recall recently how a 64-year old bi-polar lady from Belgium was euthanized and her son was not notified until he had to go to the morgue and sign papers to retrieve her body. By this standard, a good number of Americans and of Congress would have been euthanized if euthanasia became legal in this country. We are treading on dangerous territory and Americans are still lulled into a false sense of security. When will they wake up?

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  7. The primary care dr we had since 1990 retired last Dec without giving patients any notice.

    Another dr in 3 man practice moved to Massachusetts. Practice is now 1 Dr and a nurse practitioner. We HAD TO see a dr to get tests to be eligible for new prescriptions so yesterday we saw practitioner.

    Be4 making appt, wevtried for days to find a new dr office. All are Indians or Jews. Indiands not trained in USA and the ones we chose will not accept our Aetna supplemental ins.plan, which is part of our Mobil retirement pkg. Other drs, the Jews r not taking any new Medicare patients.

    The nurse was fine but she treated us like we had one foot in the grave. Told us we needed to walk AT LEAST 10 min a day OR ELSE, AT OUR AGE our muscles would atrophy. She asked me if I would commit to that.

    I said, without hesitation, no, I won't.

    Shocked, shesaid why not?

    I said because I wont sit here and tell u I will do something I know full well I wont do. That would e lying. I said all the people my age who are walkers tell me about their knee problems,their hip replacements, their slips and twists causing back pain, and broken wrists from falling. Seems to me walking does more harm than good. I am an active alert person and that's good enough.

    She then asked me if I wold help her encourage Spencer to walk and lose weight. Again, I said no. Ive been married 48 happy yrs without being a nag and I wont start now. He would not like that and I refuse to do it.

    She managed to get me to agree to an ekg, which I hate becuz u have to bare your chest and blow into a machine that measures breath. I felt like I was being chastised by one of my kids.

    Sigh,
    Chriss

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