It’s election time, and other than the Supreme Court antics, the for and against Obamacare is alive once more with the left still believing that everybody is covered with health insurance and the right knowing that is not true. I have heard from my liberal friends about their love for the Affordable Care Act, but all who love it are insured by their employer and have never had to go to the website to get insurance. They have not seen those who did and can’t use it because of the high deductibles. So let’s leave this for a while, and let me tell you a story about our modern healthcare system.
I live in a university town with a large university health system and medical school. A few weeks ago, I woke up with a headache and later a pain in my jaw. I went to the golf course and before playing joked with a doc friend about TMJ and whether or not he would fix it or send me to a dentist. After playing nine holes, I felt ill and could not keep my club in the swing plane so I left for home. The headache continued and I could only take “Tylenol” since I was on a blood thinner. The next morning my wife and I left for a planned trip for the weekend, and as the headache continued I lived with it. We returned home on Sunday and the next day the headache had gotten worse, and now I also had a problem opening my mouth and chewing. I had an appointment with my regular doctor in a few weeks and to get in early was next to impossible, so I went to the university health system outpatient clinic. My vitals were normal, but my neck was swelled and I told them my symptoms. Two doctors decided to x-ray my sinuses, which were clean, so they proceeded to print out three pages for me to read about handling stress and sent me on my way. No help with pain or referral to another facility or doctor. Nothing was wrong, My neck had swelled up because of stress. A couple days later, still with pain in my head and jaw and with my neck still swelled, I visited the university health system ENT clinic. I asked for and old doc friend of mine, but he was not available so I took another doc to examine me. After a scope into my throat and sinuses and feeling my lymph glands in my swollen neck, he declared that there was nothing wrong with me. Apparently, I was hurting from old age or something. No help with pain management or referral for further testing.
I talked to my heart doc to see if the blood thinner was causing a reaction, and he wasn’t interested and said to keep taking it. I called the drug company, and after a poor response I called another drug company that made a competing drug. They told me that their drug could cause headaches and some muscle ache and weakness but never reported in the jaw area. I stopped taking the drug and went back on aspirin therapy as I had done before starting the thinner. After a week there was no change, and the symptoms were getting worse. My appointment with my doc was near, and the morning before, I took my wife to the ENT clinic to see the doc that was the old friend. The doctor asked that I come into the examination room with my wife and told me that I looked bad. I told him my symptoms, and he looked at my ears, nose and throat. In a total of two minutes he was writing a note on a pad and gave it to me to take to my doctor. What he wrote was the name of the disease that I have, and with a blood test and biopsy it was confirmed. I learned that without treatment I would have gone blind and that my condition was considered an emergency for treatment. It took one dentist and seven doctors, five co-pays and three freebies to diagnose my problem. I am now getting treatment and should recover completely, but it will take a long time. I had lost fifteen pounds in three weeks and had a lot of muscle atrophy.
The problem is that without my ability to keep pursuing this, I would have been in real trouble. The Obamacare insurance holder with a five-thousand-dollar deductible would have probably quit after the first or second visit. They would have ended up in an emergency room with thousands of dollars in bills, which they could never pay, and may have been harmed beyond recovery by the disease. The clinics work on numbers of billings and forget that they are there to practice medicine. Their rejection of my request for help by dismissing it was pure malpractice, and I have reported the incident to my insurance company. Forty years ago, I would have gone to my doctor and sat in his office until he could get to me. He would have practiced medicine and tested until he found an answer to my problem. Now we collect co-pays and go to the next number. The cost of medical treatment is far beyond its worth, and we are being blackmailed into a system that is making the administration of health care very rich without giving us the care we need.
The next time you hear the call for continued Obamacare and a refusal to really look at the problem, ask if they would be willing to sign up on the website for one year and really find out what it is all about. We have a problem in health care, and a politician is not going to solve it. May God help us.
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