This BS that America has the worlds premiere healthcare has to be exposed!

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

Share your healthcare nightmare stories here. I will start by sharing the following post from Daily Kos. Enlightening and horrifying.
I would like to add that I am NOT looking for malpractice stories, but more like public witnessing about how the healthcare coverage that you either had or didn't have effected your outcomes or the financial hardships you and your family have endured due to lack of coverage. I hope this will be a long and enlightening thread.

http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/8/1/155243/8957

Kossack Melody Townsel reveals her health nightmare. Be Warned.
by nyceve
Tue Aug 01, 2006 at 12:52:43 PM PDT
This diary is long, painful and personal. It's about Melody Townsel, one of our own.

It's about a near fatal traffic accident. It's about the tragic state of the American health care system which allows insurance companies to stand between and block health care for you, for me and for Melody Townsel.

If you can't bear any more of these health care atrocity stories, I understand and so will Melody. But you should know that what Melody describes could be your reality or mine. And be assured, it is happening countless times to American citizens across this country. Every. Single. Day.

If all this is too demoralizing, then I suggest you stop reading right now.

[Benhurst]

1. Is there anybody who still thinks we have the best medical care?

BushAmerica: the World's Only Superpower and Third World Dump.

[Fovea]

14. I think America has a great system for those who can afford

to buy their own doctor. Otherwise it is a burning disaster.

Note my SIG line...

[Ravenseye]

21. Sort of what I've said in the past

If you're rich, the best place to live in the world is America. You can buy the best doctors, the best education, and whatever else you want, and then pay the lowest taxes for a devleoped nation. This country is all about the rich.

Meanwhile if you're middle class you get screwed left and right.

If you're poor you'll probably just end up dead.

[girl gone mad]

2. And Parkland is one of the only...

hospitals in Dallas that will even take the uninsured.

[w8liftinglady]

38. I worked at Parkland for 5 years

I saw many patients who would have benefited from transplants die...I saw women who died while pregnant due to NO prenatal care.I remember one Christemas whe we lost 5...yes 5..pregnant moms over 12/24-12/25...and..no-they were not illegal aliens...they were your neighbors.I remember a doctor throwing his body across a 17-yeAR-old,crying-when we couldn't save her.It is a travesty.I worked in a MICU-we didn't even deal with moms...but they were SO sick,they came to us.Our healthcare is atroicious.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

3. ok, well, I'll start with 2 personal stories very simple

1. My mother was a tourist in Paris maybe 8 years ago. She fell walking down the steps of a hotel and hit her head on the pavement. She was taken in an ambulance to a French hospital where she was kept overnight for observation and seen by several excellent and caring medical professionals. Her bill was approximately $200.00 ( I will admit that she did have some kind of trip medical insurance, but her impression has always been that the bill for the French medical care itself was not all that large)

2.About a year ago my husband had chest pains and went to the ER. We have coverage and almost everything was covered. He was there for about 4 hours, had an EKG and was released. From what we can tell from what the hospital sent us, his expenses would have been approx $2,000 had we not had insurance. 4 hours, 1 test = $2000.00

[Ravenseye]

13. They wouldn't have done that test if he hadn't the insurance

They would have made him either pay up front or agree to a payment plan first. Poor people with chest pains and no insurance go to the ER and are told to go home and relax. They dont' get the EKG, and usually aren't even suggested it. They're given an asprin and sent home. Then they die.

One of the reasons that death from heart disease is much higher among the poor.

[ForrestGump]

15. And an uninsured person presenting at the ER with a head injury

gets an X-ray.

A well-insured person with the same injury gets a CT-scan.

[Ravenseye]

18. depends on the head injury and the person

Poor homeless guy comes in with a head injury...if he's lucid and not bleeding they might make him sit in the waiting room for a few hours (after a cursory examination) to make sure he doesn't keel over, then they'll wrap him up and send him on the way with hot coffee and a bandage if he's lucky.

[knitter4democracy]

33. Depends.

All of my hubby's patients in residency and here who need a CT get a CT. He's never been questioned or fought on that.

Still, these for profit places scare me. Thank goodness we don't have them here.

[killbotfactory]

34. And they are charged 50 bucks for the aspirin

[bbinacan]

4. Sorry

Never had a problem. Including 2 emergency room situations. One was no big deal. The other, I had my nose broken in a bad way and a slash in my arm. 22 stiches in all and a "reset" of the nose. Got great care.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

5. But, you got great care with no repercussions because you had healthcare

in the first place! ( I would assume) Again, I am not looking to find medical care horror stories, I am looking for-
How was your outcome effected by whether you did or did not have medical coverage?

[bbinacan]

29. My apologies, I

misinterpreted your post.

[Ravenseye]

16. You sound like a perfect example of the problem in this country

Follow me here, i'm not attacking you...

You're a perfect example because you don't see what's behind the curtain. I was like you once. Had good health care all my life from my parents, then my job. The money for my insurance was deduced from my paycheck and I never even thought about it. It wasn't part of my takehome so it was just like taxes. I never thought about it. i went places when I got sick or injured and showed my card, paid them 5 bucks from my wallet and got all the care I needed. Never thought about it.

That's the problem. The poeple with good care don't see or know what goes on behind the scenes. They don't have to pay a separate check for health care every month so they dont' think about it. They don't realize how much those doctors visits actually cost, how much their ER visit costs, how much that cast costs, how much the stiches cost. They don't realize it, and so when it comes to talking about National Health Care they say (i know you're not saying this) why? What's wrong with our system? I get good healthcare.

IF everyone had to personally do their own insurance in this country, from taking care of it, to arguing bills, etc...we'd have national heatlh care within months.

[Fovea]

22. And patients like me pay for your excellent care.

I can't get insurance I can afford after being disabled from two heart attacks and a stroke.
So I pay $85 for a visit every other month or so, $255 every time I have labs, i.e. every other visit.
I pay ~400 a month for prescription drugs. Why? Because you would pay $35.

And your insurance company gets volume rate prices because the hospitals shift the cost to them.

This, BTW for someone who worked at this very same hospital for 12 years.

[Ravenseye]

25. Well, HE pays $35 but the insurance company pays the rest

They may bill out say 200 bucks for something. If your'e you...which you are, you can't say "well I'll give you 150 for it". They'd just laugh. So you pay the whole thing.

He comes in and pays his $10 dollar copay, and they bill the insurance company 190 bucks. The insurance company says "we're only going to pay you 100 for that." and the doctors office pretty much has no choice or they won't be able to use that major coverage and most of their patients will leave. So they take it.

You pay 200
He pays 10, the insurance company pays 100
he pays the insurance company 300 that month.

him -310
You -200
insurance company +200
doctor +310

Lets say you need to go twice that month...

him -320
you -400
insurance company +100
doctor +520

of course we have to take medical malpracice insurance into play as well which probably adjusts it to

him -320
you -400
insurance companies +360
doctor +260

if you're lucky...so in someplace with national health care, lets say both you and the guy make the same amount of money so pay the same amount into a progressive system.

him -150
you -150
national insurance +40
doctor +260

Half the cost, you both get the same treatment, and the doctor gets paid the same amount. Nice and easy eh?

[bbinacan]

30. My apologies, I

misinterpreted the OP's post. I need to read things more thouroughly before I comment.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

6. Good morning! Hello out there? nt.

[donheld]

7. If indeed we have the best medical care

Who the hell can afford to get it. Most of us can't.

[Vinca]

8. Which story do you want?

Right after our health insurance lapsed and we couldn't afford to renew it, I had a gallbladder attack that resulted in pancreatitis. Normally, this condition requires about a week to 10 days in the hospital, much of it in intensive care, because it's a life-threatening condition. It's usually followed by another hospital stay to remove the gallbladder. Without insurance, I paid up front for a doctor's appointment, some blood tests to determine if my vital organs were functioning, then went home to bed with a heating pad for a couple of weeks. I consider it my closest call with the Grim Reaper. And here's an interesting twist to the story. A Canadian was visiting my neighbor and had virtually the same medical event happen. They drove her to a major medical center about an hour north of here and admitted her. The hospital called Canadian health care for authorization and the Canadians decided it would be more economical to treat their citizen in her own country. Canadian health care then FLEW A PRIVATE JET to come and pick her up and take her to a Toronto hospital. Can you imagine? Even with the cost of a private jet it was cheaper than an American hospital?

[Ravenseye]

20. I'm not surprised

Look at an itemized hospital bill for the U.S. sometimes. Every price is jacked up likea 1980's defense department bill. 1 dose of tylenol cost 20 bucks at the hospital where my wife had our first daughter. Seriously. 20 bucks. 1 dose. One of the ways they got the overall bill up to $16,000.

So yeah. I'm totally not surprised that Canada flew her to Toronto on a private plane.

[rainy]

9. "Sicko" look for this new movie by Michael Moore

I don't know when it is coming out but Sicko is the name of it and it will expose our health care system for what it is.

[Ravenseye]

23. I have mixed emotions on the movie

I love Michael Moore and his other movies and books, but I worry that him covering this very important topic will just make the idiot conservatives in this country even more irrationally fearfull of universal care...no matter what Moore says or shows.

We can't get what we need without everyone being on the same side here, and we need conservative americans to realize that national health care is in their best interests as well, in that it will get them better care, and be cheaper for them. That's the main draw. They don't care about the poor or the 40 million uninsured. They just don't. Theyr'e selfish.

Anyway...i'm looking forward to the movie, but know that it's probably going to make my job harder in convincing conservatives that universal care is in their best interests.

[knitter4democracy]

10. Don't get me or my hubby started!

He's an internist here in Michigan, and he has many stories of just how bad it can get for his patients. We mull over moving to Canada at least once a month, since he'd make about the same there and have a lot less headaches. His chief resident when he was an intern was from Canada, had come to the US to do residency because he's heard how much better it was, and he and his wife ran back home to Canada as soon as they could after they were done with residency. They were pretty ticked off by the time they were done with the American system.

He's much happier here in Michigan, where every hospital is non-profit and where he's never had an admission blocked because of money issues. When he was in med school, he had that happen many times. The hospitals around here seem to be run very differently compared to other ones in other states. I'm not saying they're perfect (oh, they're so not), but he's much happier up here than he was in med school--no one's told him to send a patient somewhere else after doing the history and physical and all like they did in med school.

[Patiod]

26. I've had experiences with California's two-tier system - creepy

The for-profit hospitals are very nice.

The county hospitals look like something our of Soviet Russia, with poor families waiting outside, and metal detectors at the doors and guards searching your bags - I wasn't allowed in to interview a doctor because I had a small cassette recorder with me, and no recording devices were allowed (and this was pre-HIPAA).

Pheonix was similar, except their county hospitals weren't quite as creepy.

[knitter4democracy]

32. Our hospitals aren't like that here.

I wouldn't say they're stellar, but it's really nice that all hospitals have to treat all patients.

For profit hospitals scare me. I always wonder what costs they're cutting.

[ForrestGump]

11. The US has state of the art health care,

but only if you can afford it.

I come from a country that had socialized medicine and a system that was one of the best in the world, but -- as has usually been the case with such systems -- it reached the point at which it could not support itself and it all but collapsed. It's not yet as heavily 'user-pays' as is the US, but it's a shadow of its former self and waiting lists and so on can be horrendous. I had the misfortune of having a serious accident as the system was in decline and I had a miserable experience. For that matter, I've worked in developing nations where I am happy I did not seriously injure myself because, although the personnel in such places can be very good, there're limits to the resources available.

The US, though, has no excuse. Maybe fully socialized medicine is invariably unsustainable, but current access to health care in the US is a national shame (or, at least, it should be cause for shame). The facilities are here -- probably some of the world's best -- the peope are here, and the cutting-edge biotechnology and medical research are here. And the money is here, or could be if the government placed a priority on health care. Yes, there are free clinics here and there, but they're not even a Band-Aid in the big picture.

I worked within a US health-care organization for a while and saw first-hand just how inflated costs are for procedures (especially things like MRIs and CT-scans), how influential were the drug companies, and how unethical many facilities are in their treatment of patients and potential patients...they break the law, even, and get away with it because, for example, the people coming into some of these ERs without insurance do not know their legal rights.

It's sick.

I've got no health insurance right now, because I'm self-employed in a rather sporadic-income gig, and if I fall off my motorcycle and hurt myself significantly (the way people drive, I have near misses almost every time I leave my driveway)...well, I don't even want to think about what that will do to my life, and I'm not talking about my physical wellbeing.

A real and effective national health care program, with significant resources shunted toward prevention programs, should be a burning priority for the US government. There's a lot of money in medicine, and that seems to be the priority to this government, for sure.

[Patiod]

27. And the big insurance companies are going to allow that?

You think the Frist family is going to give up its place at the trough? I think not.

[Ravenseye]

28. It can be sustainable

I mean look. I don't know what country you're talking about, but the U.S. right now per capital spends something like 3 times or more the amount per overall citizen than any other country does that has socialized medicine.

Just keep people paying what they are now, make it more progressive so the rich pay more, the poor pay less, and we'd be fine. There wouldn't be waiting lits, doctors would just have to work slightly longer hours (one my wife had to go see recently worked 4 days a week from 10 to 3...what the fuck?)

The problem is the insurance companies and doctors and hospitals overcharging. There is a happy medium.

[Ravenseye]

12. $16,000 to have a baby

I've learned alot about our fucked up health care system in the past few years. Ever since I started my own company and had to deal with the insurance companies personally my eyes have opened. Prior to that I worked for companies with 100% coverage and 5 or 10 dollar copays. Sure I had 200-300 bucks taken from each paycheck, but it was just a line, like the taxes. I didn't even think about it because it was gone before I saw it.

Now though I know. I know how hospitals charge too much in order to get as much as they can from the insurance companies, and if you don't have health care you're screwed. A couple of examples.

For our first child, my wife had a c-section, which I'm partially convinced was the hospitals and doctors fault. There is a rash of c-sections in this country, and I'd say there was a 50% chance that my wife wouldn't have needed one had the doctor actually cared about natural births. That's another story though. So she had a c-section, and had an infection, so she was in the hospital for about 4 days total from labor through pushing, through c-section, through 3 recovery days. She could still barely walk when we left the hospital, but they pretty much kicked us out, and we wanted to go. Later on we got the bill for it. $16,000 and change. To have a baby. If we hadn't had insurance it would have cost us $16,000 to have a baby. That would have wrecked us. What kind of country do we live in where it costs that much to have a baby?

As a side note, for a while we didn't have coverage after our daughter was born (she was covered under CHIP) simply because we couldn't afford it. My wife found out she was pregnant, and I immediately filed to get at least her, if not both of us on Insurance again. Before it went into effect though we went in for an ultrasound because she was bleeding. That ultrasound, which showed nothing, has cost us $800 dollars. When she was first being looked at it was a trainee. She even told us that she was and she'd bring the official person in soon. We had no problem with it and let her proceed. She did an abdomnial scan and saw nothing, and then the real tech came in and said "oh no you shouldn't have done that, she's too early to see anything externally we need to do the internal one" and then did the internal one. We ended up getting charged $300 for the internal, $300 for the external, and $100 bucks to examine each of them by another doctor. $800 total. We tried to argue the charges for months saying that we can see owing $400 dollars, but not for the test that they said shouldn't even have been done, by the trainee. We couldn't even find who to contest a bill with at the hospital. We got the runaround for months from one department to another. Finally we found someone who said they could help us. They called back a day later and said "The technician shouldn't have said that. you still owe the $800 dollars."

Later we went to a separate independent scanning place for a second ultrasound that wasn't affiliated with the hospital. An ultrasound there, including the doctor looking at it on the spot and talking to us cost us $110, which seemed far more reasonable.

In conclusion, as a small business owner, a father, a husband, and an American....FUCK YOU if you think we don't need Universal Health Care.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

35. I paid US$ 1200 here in Brazil for the exact same thing

AND we were effectively uninsured, since the #$%&*!!!! healthcare plan dropped all hospitals that were close to us just prior to the delivery. FUCKERS!!!!

There IS public healthcare in Brazil, but its quality is... frightening. Two-tier, if you will.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

17. Having dealt with "Gatekeepers" in my job.

I spent 10 years as an Employee Assistance Counselor for a government agency. We dealt with a lot of alcoholics, addicts and mental patients.

Some of those people needed hospitalization because they had OD'd, were suicidal, psychotic, etc.

Just two instances of dealing with Gatekeepers.

One guy, who was a crack addict, was suicidal. He had become an informant for the cops to avoid prosecution and been found out. He had attempted suicide previously, was still using when he could get it, the cops were pressuring him, and he had been threatened by the coke-dealers. This was in Portland, OR. The Gatekeeper for the insurance company was in Indiana. A "psychiatrist" for the Insurance company decided against treatment. He never contacted our client, never contacted his primary care doctor (who agreed with us that he was suicidal), and refused to speak to us directly.

10 days later his body was found in the Willamette River.

Another case was with an alcoholic who had Kaiser insurance. He showed up in our office covered with wine sores, incoherent, shaking uncontrollably, very, very, sick. Kaiser offered their "out-patient" program which consisted of group meetings. When we objected that the man was literally dying before our eyes, they suggested bed rest and lots of liquids. After a screaming match, in which the Kaiser Rep hung up on us, we physically carried him to Kaiser and demanded that they take him in. They did, but reported us to our boss.

Two of very many encounters with a wide range of Insurance Companies.

To be fair, a couple of the Insurance Companies were cooperative and accepted our recommendations without complaint.

[aikoaiko]

19. Best health care, mostly yes: Best healthcare insurance: Mostly no.

With few exceptions, we are the center of the world when it comes to cutting edge health care and regulations. When it comes to paying for it -- we don't do nearly as well as we could.

[Patiod]

24. There's a Merck ad with a waitress talking about her statin

She says "I talked about it with my doctor and......blah, blah....now you can say a waitress gave YOU a tip!"

My first reaction was "yeah, like a waitress can afford to visit a doctor for routine health care!" How sad is that.

[samsingh]

31. that's like saying we have a true democrasy

and that the last two elections weren't stolen

[Lifelong Protester]

36. Universal health care...

it HAS to become our mantra, people. We need to make it our number one political priority. Screw all this money we are wasting on prosectuting an illegal war, we need to keep the dollars HERE, take care of the population HERE. I'm tired of the 'how are we going to pay for it?" hand-wringing. The political will can find the dollars, believe me.

[Corgigal]

37. My husband had back and chest pain

so not to take any chances we both went down to the local ER. He is under Medicare part A and B.
They took him in the back and did some lab work. Then they decided he should have stress test and a follow up MRI.

When he got done it was after 5 p.m on a Friday night and the hospital wouldn't let him leave. They would not call anyone in to read the results because he could wait until either Saturday or Sunday. I told the nurse this was crap and he wanted to go home and she told me she understood but if he left Medicare will pay nothing.

So a month later we got a bill for 750.00 dollars for the overnight stay. Our portion of the Medicare bill is 750.00 dollars if he stayed one night or 30 days. Surprise, only one night was needed.

So I started paying the damn thing. When it got down to 500 dollars they forward it to a collection agency. Still think this hospital is playing the system with taxpayer dollars.