Fix ALL of Healthcare.

[Heathen57]

We are hearing a lot about the crisis of healthcare, on the cable news shows, the newspapers, on the radio and of course the internet. I agree that something needs to be done and done now. We lose, on the average 120 of our citizens PER DAY because of the lack of healthcare. This is unacceptable for a nation that is supposed to be the leader of the world. However, what I am writing about is a facet of healthcare that doesn’t get a lot of exposure, even though it is part of the system.

In addition to paying for the healthcare, I believe that there has to be an overhaul of the system in the attitude of the medical community. After being under the massive thumb of the insurance agencies for so long, they have forgotten the fundamental purpose of all medicine: To Heal People.

Where one notices more than anywhere else is in the Emergency Rooms and Trauma Centers across the United States. The kind of treatment you receive is dependent on the thickness of your wallet or the pockets of your insurer. With the amount of uninsured and underinsured that has to use the ER as their primary care, it is obvious that there is a problem with space, staffing, and so on. But if you are unfortunate to have no insurance or on a state indigent program, then you get the very basic care which amounts to getting you so you can walk out without dying.

Doctors are told that they cannot order any expensive tests. It drives up the cost of the treatment and hurts the bottom line. So they order an x-ray, technology that only shows a bare minimum and skip the CT or the MRI that would show much more detail and possibly, what is wrong. Anything more complicated than a broken bone or a cold, the standard treatment has become to give the patient some pain killers so they don’t feel the pain and send them out with orders to see their primary care physician. In short, what they are doing, or rather being forced to do, is to mask the pain and ignore the source of said pain.
It is not much better if you are lucky enough to see a physician. Almost all doctors will admit that the insurance companies call the shots on the care of their patients. The Doctor will suspect a partially crushed or bulging disc in your back. An MRI would show the damage in detail, but the insurance will insist on the old-fashioned x-ray even though they can very easily mask the problem. Then if the x-ray doesn’t show anything, the next step is to ignore the problem rather than to search for the problem.
It is even worse if you are on a community or state health program. Many times the illness or disorder is known to exist, but there is nobody willing to fix the problem. As an example, our son had a stroke at the age of 23. He couldn’t work and the place he worked didn’t have insurance. His entire left side was paralyzed. Therapy should have been started as soon as possible. However the community program couldn’t or wouldn’t spring for the therapy. It is almost 3 years later and he still has no use or feeling in his left arm and can walk only with braces. In addition, he has two crushed disks in his back that are pushing on his spinal cord causing extreme pain. The answer for all of this is to prescribe pain killers so he can get a little sleep. Instead of being a productive member of society and going to school or working, he is going in for a disability hearing tomorrow. That will give him the state Medicaid program, and the chance to get his problems taken care of and maybe be able to work again. But it has been so long without proper care that the chances are only 50/50 that they can repair the damage.
As you can tell, the system is broken. The whole system, not just the insurance companies. Legislation should be put forth that wrests the decisions from the insurance companies and back into the men and women who have trained for years to know what is needed.

Then we will have to retrain the doctors to take the needs of the patients first. There are probably very few doctors left that were trained before the insurance companies took over. The rest have been trained to put the demands of the insurance companies first, the patient a distant second.
The first step will be to get all people insured. In my opinion the best option would be single payer care, but there is no way to have that yet with all the Senators bought and paid for by the insurance companies as well as the problematic propaganda that we hear from the Conservatives and Fox News.

But as soon as that is done, we have to work on getting the Quality of our healthcare back to acceptable standards. The Conservatives tell us that we have the best health care in the world. It might be there, but the majority of Americans will never see any of it.

What good is “the best health care in the world” if you can’t afford it?

[Warpy]

1. All doctors are educated to put the patient first

but then they get into practice where a lot of their patients have no insurance or bad insurance or just balky insurance and they discover that if they want to do a thorough job, they have to fight to do it.

That's why so many doctors are on our side. They despise the system that bad faith insurers have created.

[valerief]

2. And even if you can afford it, what good is it when they just deny your claims anyway? nt