Here and subsequently here I bemoaned my recent experiences with Kaiser.
Today I had another fun one. While showering on Saturday I found a dark spot on my left shin and immediately thought "OMG! Melanoma!" After I dried off I took a close look and determined it was more of a scab, and thought nothing more of it.
Fast forward to Tuesday, when I noticed that there was a red halo forming around the scab. "Infection!" I said, and made an appointment to ask my doctor to look at it. I kept the appointment, he looked at it, gave me a prescription for some super-antibiotic ointment (Mupirocin), and sent me down to the pharmacy.
Bad enough that the ointment was $30, but when I checked in for the appointment they demanded I cough up my co-pay up front before I even saw the doc. And worse, they'd quietly bumped the co-pay for visits to $25 from the $15 it was last year and the $7 it had been for the previous six or seven years.
I'm increasingly convinced the American health care system is designed to put profits into the hands of insurance companies. Patients are just a necessary evil.
Posted by Linkmeister at April 9, 2009 01:05 PM | TrackBackI had to smile : "Patients just an inconvenience." Remembering Wm. Clinton and B. Obama ran with healthcare as part of their platform years apart...I was reasonably sure that was a 'tongue-in-cheek' statement of a raw truth posed as humorous quip.After all, even GM said it was putting them in the poorhouse even before the current fiasco. But in case you aren't sure it's true
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_health_of%20nations
http://drinkliberal.blogspot.com/
You may have to scroll around a bit at drinkliberal to find healthcare material - but there's lots of it and I think it worthwhile poking around for. I did, after all.
I'm a little confused, here, Linkmeister - I've been with Kaiser for something like fifty years now, and I can't recall a single visit where I didn't have to cough up the co-pay before I saw the doctor. Is the other arrangement some kind of Hawaiian variation?? I understand the annoyance that the co-pay had gone up - my, have we had that the last couple of years! - but this feeling of resentment because you have to pay to see the doctor puzzles me, because it's ALWAYS been like that.
I do agree that we'll never have real health care until we get the profit motive out of the way. Health care is and should be a subsidized service. And you have Kaiser - you've got it good. Imagine if you had Blue Cross - they'd have told you the infection was MRSA and then denied coverage.
Posted by: hedera at April 14, 2009 11:56 AM