What do you think of the medical care you receive?!

What do you think of the medical care you receive?

A loved one has suffered with chronic headaches for over three years.......has been to the best places for help........no diagnosis forthcoming.......and precious little real caring and help. What are YOUR experiences!

It's adequate... but really you need to be your own doctor today. The HMO system has left us with medical care based on the bottom line, money, so doctors no longer have time to deal with you the way they would like to. The HMO system requires them to get you out the door quickly and with a minimum of expenses.

If you want a real experience, go to a new doctor's office next time and tell them you don't have ANY insurance at all. You will notice that:

a) They spend more time with you (and don't overcharge you for it, it's a regular office visit rate and not really that much more than an insurance co-pay would be);

b) They consider more options for your treatment and review each of the options with you, so you can choose the best one for your financial situation; and

c) They really do care about how much it all costs;

d) They give you lots and lots of free samples of medication to try. (Seriously, some will even give you a bag to carry it all out with!)

It's because they know you mean a lot less paperwork, a lot less hassle, and once you pay the bill (right away), it's done.

I had to do this for a while when I went to college and it was incredible. It was like I went into a totally different medical system! I ended up happy to pay the hundred dollars out of pocket vs. a $20 or $40 co-pay that I would have had with insurance. The free sample meds ALONE made up for it, and I got a geniuine, old-fashioned 30-minute office visit vs. a 10-minute in-and-out HMO rush job.

Now that I'm back on a typical health insurance plan, though, it's business as usual.

And now, I spend hours online before ever going in, trying to self-diagnose, looking at all the medical info I can, finding out the treatment options, and looking at the latest drugs and their side effects. It helps that I know a lot about meds and general healthcare treatment, but all I know came from experience looking things up!

THEN you can go in to the HMO/PPO provider and tell THEM what YOU think it is, and how YOU think it should be treated. They will either agree or disagree. 9 out of 10 times I've found they agree and off you go with your prescription.

Now, this isn't the way to run healthcare, and I always feel like asking the insurance company for my cut of the physician's salary, since I'm having to do their job for them. But it's a reality of the system we have.

And every time I hear about socialized, government run health care I literally cringe. The HMO concept was the original attempt at socializing health care and containing costs, and it is without a doubt a total failure. If the government does to health care what it did for social security and welfare and medicare, we're doomed.

So what's better?

Ditch the HMO concept entirely. Pay as you go for doctor visits (it will drastically cut the waste-of-time visits by people and their kids), extreme tort reform to eliminate all the extra CYA legal costs involved with healthcare and pharms, price control for pharms vs. international prices (make them the same, so drugs in Canda cost the same price as drugs in the USA), and 80%/max indemnity type plans for all other major medical insurance. That's it. Simple, easy. Cheaper.

The HMO argument was that it would be more efficient (not), cheaper (not), promote pre-emptive health care (doesn't), and improve overall quality (didn't). A failure in all regards. Beware the same promises from government healthcare.