Reply #31: I'm glad to hear that about [View All]

[liberalhistorian]

younger doctors; if that's truly the case then there is, indeed, hope. Your husband sounds like exactly the way a doctor should be, please thank him for me. I know that medicine is probably one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, of professions; I don't think you could pay me enough to go through what most of them go through every day. It's good to hear what he does with generic drugs, too, there's no difference between them and the "brand" drugs; they're the same thing except for price.

As frustrating as it is when doctors don't accept Medicaid, from an economics standpoint I can certainly understand it. Doctors have to live, too, and office staff, overhead and insurance premiums must be paid and none are cheap. Medicaid doesn't even pay enough for them to break even and I would frankly consider its payment schedule to be insulting, if I were a doctor. And it's only going to get worse, I'm afraid.

When I was in labor with my son (good God, almost fifteen years ago, yikes!) I had merconium (sp?)staining, which was noticed when my water broke. I was in labor for an additional 14 hours after that before they finally decided to do a c-section, since I hadn't dilated at all for over six hours. The nurses later told me that a c-section should have been done when the staining was first noticed, and not fourteen hours later; it could have really harmed my son. They also told me that the reason the docs didn't do a c-section was because I was on medicaid at the time, and the c-section would have cost them far more than a regular delivery since it paid less for them, so they waited until the last moment until they couldn't wait anymore. Still pisses me off royally almost fifteen years later!

One thing I try to make republican doctors aware of is that, if they don't want nationalized health care for humanitarian reasons, they should at least want it for pragmatic, economic reasons. They'd actually make more money. They'd have a guaranteed income, with no more chasing of insurance companies for payment and patients for non-covered payment, and half of their income wouldn't have to go to billing and insurance paperwork and to maintaining the middleman.