New Year’s Leap of Faith
With best wishes for a Happy New Year! I’m going to kick this one off on a personal note. I’m now on the mend, but spent the holidays knocked out by one of those bugs that drag on and on — nothing life threatening, but enough of a bother to focus my thoughts on what lies ahead for “health care.” I have dim memories of early childhood days, before “health care” and its attendant insurance became a prime obsession of the federal government. I swear I can dimly remember a time when going to see the doctor was pretty straightforward. If you got sick enough, you went. If you felt really awful the doctor even made house calls. Maybe the doctor even knew your name.
These days, even with much of ObamaCare yet to unfold (so we can find out what’s in it), to get sick is to enter a bureaucratic labyrinth in which your only real guide is whatever you can Google on the Internet (which the FCC now proposes to regulate on our behalf). I’m not talking here about life-threatening illness, fraught with deep and costly complexities — which is en route to a regulatory nightmare of its own. I’m talking about the simple stuff — the kind of bug where one day you’re feeling fine, the next day you’ve come down with something that leaves you living on toast and drugstore medication. When it’s still going on a week later, you decide it’s time to see a doctor and find out if he can prescribe a cure.
But to see a doctor, especially if you get sick outside the immediate range of your “primary care physician,” is no simple matter. Doctors aren’t just busy these days with taking care of patients. They are staggering under colossal loads of regulation, potential liability, and the ever more urgent priority of deciphering and complying with the government edicts, codes, demands, incentives and behavioral tweaks and stomps which are supposed to produce medical efficiency and justice for all.
I guess the really smart patients must be constantly booking a month or two ahead for any and all contingencies. But the rest of us, unable to foretell the exact date on which we will fall suddenly sick enough to want a doctor, make no such provisions. The fallbacks are to go to an emergency room — where you can wait for hours, tie up facilities intended for cases more desperate, and walk out with a four-figure bill, and then, even if you have a health plan which picks up part of the giant tab, you can spend months fielding a blizzard of unpredictable, inexplicable and randomly arriving bills for “co-pays.” Or you can go to one of those same-day-appointment clinics, where you can wait for a couple of hours until a nurse practitioner shoves a stack of prescriptions into your hand with the explanation that they don’t know what you’ve got, and there’s no telling when the lab tests might come back — but here’s an assortment of prescription drugs you can chug down as a cocktail on the chance that one of them might do the trick. If you feel worse, or the drugs themselves make you sick, you are advised to… see your doctor (but if you could do that, would you be at this clinic in the first place?), or go to an emergency room. If you try to call back, to check on test results perhaps, you discover that while the clinic has a direct line to its local billing department, and another direct line to its nationally centralized call center (Located in Florida? In Bangalore? In Manila? Who knows?), there is no way to actually place a direct call to the medical staff at the local clinic you’ve just been to. Short of physically going back over there, your only option is to put in a request that they call you, and then wait, and wait, and wait, until maybe they do.
OK… it could all be far worse. And with time and more federal intervention, it surely will be. But in the thick of this, late last month, while I lay pondering, among other things, the giant leap in our health insurance bill that followed the passage of Obamacare, I did have a small epiphany. It was this: In the matter of getting medical care, I used to have some general idea of how it worked. I have no idea anymore what really lies ahead. I have no idea how it is going to work. I do have a “primary care” physician right now who’s terrific, when I can get to him. But medical care has become such a political battleground that predicting its future feels like predicting the fate of Poland on the verge of World War II. Like the legislators who passed it, and the president who signed it, I have not read the entire 2000-or-so-page “Affordable Care Act.” Nor do I want to. The general mess is obvious, and I am not at all confident that reading it would do much to enlighten me about the exact effects on my life, or how to prepare for them. America’s economy is a vast, complicated, dynamic thing, and central planning ever more tightly imposed on the one-sixth of it that is the medical sector is bound to produce colossal waste and absurdities. But how exactly will that translate into what happens when you, the individual, get sick in the year 2016, or 2020? All I know for sure is, thinking about it makes me queasy all over again.
First, very glad you’re feeling better healthwise, if not for the health of our great land. My son and daughter-in-law recently had a severe stomach bug like the one you describe and wound up with a $14,000 emergency room bill including absurd charges for MRIs (for stomach probs???) I think someone was practicing their defensive medicine a little too intensly.
Yes, a lot of folks here in Texas are concerned with the things you are; that the Gov’t is hell bent on screwing up our country for reasons that are just not logical unless you consider that they just hate people. Or something. We’re also super worried about the admins’ current war on our successful Texas economy and our (so far) robust energy sector which is producing jobs and sustainable economic viability among States, some with huge deficits, unsustainable obligations and no way around their coming catastrophes without passing the hat around to us. Remember what Jindal said upon meeting Obama post BP spill: Obama thinks good energy industry jobs lost via his witless moritorium could just be made up with “unemployment” compensation. Lord save us from ignorance. Glad you’re back in the saddle to help shine your bright light on the stupidity.
This is chaos by design.
Claudia, love to see you look into the Wheeler murder.
Man who know our biowar capabilities and cyber war insider.
Heard his kitchen floor boards had been dug up.
Heard he had threatened administration with outing them over their use of gas, Prothene is it, in kill of birds.
You are as good as it gets in investigative reporting.
Help to stave off the knaves.
This article, not the Constitution is what the new Congress should read aloud when they begin business day after tomorrow.
The first law that Congress passes should make it mandatory for every newspaper in the nation to permanently publish this article above the fold on the left hand side of the first page.
It should be mandatory reading for for every television and radio news broadcast.
It should be mandatory reading for every college, school, training facility and university in our country and a copy of it framed and prominently displayed in the entrance of every government and public building in our country; as well as all our our embassies overseas.
Better than anything I have read yet, Ms. Rosett summarizes the absolute absurdity, chaos, ill intent, malice and insane level of mess and stupidity that our government leaders have created.
Reading the Constitution is cute, novel, quaint, whatever; but the act is academic. The People know what the Constitution says. If the members of Congress don’t, or they have trouble remembering it, or they simply don’t like it then the have no damn business working on Capitol Hill.
If they seriously want to fix what is broken the first, smartest thing each member of Congress should do is commit this article to memory.
Then they should make themselves fully aware of one more thing.
The People of the United States of America have had enough of the government making a mockery of the Constitution and screwing around with their lives. They will no longer accept cop-outs and excuses from any elected official.
Congress, you are now on and using up the People’s time.
That privilege will not last forever!
The People of the United States of America have had enough of the government making a mockery of the Constitution and screwing around with their lives. They will no longer accept cop-outs and excuses from any elected official.
I’ll believe this when, instead of being reelected, four of five of those who are making a mockery of the Constitution are tossed out at election time.
Some districts are hopeless but at least half of those who voted for this bill should have been defeated instead of rewarded with another term. Our bark is worse than our bite.
Keep the faith Pat and keep your eye on the ball.
Americans as a general rule are easy going and difficult to anger. But, there is a line in the sand of no return. Our esteemed elected leaders crossed that line and pissed the people off like they have never been before.
Conservatives cleaned house this past election; and they are waiting in the wings right now for the next election.
There are still a few establishment Republicans that are about to feel the rage, find out that their days are numbered; that their fun and games time is over.
These are the things to dwell on, not the stereotypes of the past.
You know, what is really pathetic about the Obama administration, not to mention Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, is that even though Obamacare has passed so many months ago, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, can tell me what it does and what it’s all about.
And I’m sick and tired of liberals on TV talking about pre-existing conditions and having your kid on your insurance until he/she is 26. I was kind of hoping my could would have a JOB and their own insurance by the time they were 26. But, I guess with Obama as president and the economy stinking the way it does, they probably won’t get their first job UNTIL they are 26! Anyway, nobody can tell me what is in Obamacare and why I will benefit from it. All that I know is that my insurance premiums are still skyrocketing when that pathetic excuse for a president assured all of us that passage of Obamacare would bend the cost curve DOWN, remember that? Remember how he assured us that we would actually SAVE money under Obamacare? Remember all of that junk and all of those promises?
I will make you a promise. I will do everything in my power to prevent another liberal from either going to Congress from my district or being elected President. I will vote, I will convince anybody who will listen to me, I will contribute money, I will make calls, I will hand out literature, I will knock on doors, and will hold up signs, I will put up yard signs, in short, I will do everything in my power to prevent any of these thieves and jerks from ever getting back into power. Will I succeed? I don’t know, but at least I’ll know I’ve tried my best to stop this insanity from ever happening again.
Here is another element to add to your beautifully described uncertainties: The first responders that we encounter in the bureaucratic jungle will increasingly be uneducated, but credentialled people with lifetime tenure. They will be well schooled in PC baloney but unable to come up with a working diagnosis of your specific problem. Common sense and life experience will increasingly take a back seat to rote remedies. The smart people will leave the bureaucracies, and the idiots will be left as gatekeepers.
I wonder if the blizzard of complexity is another tactic of the left.
The three most complicated things in the average persons life are income taxes, medicare part D and private health insurance. Most people have given up decipering all three and either accept the default (i.e., trust that private insurance is reimbursing correctly or depend on an income tax provider) or spend weeks every year struggling to understand, and still making costly mistakes. I suspect the average person pays more than a thousand dollars more than legally required for those three items.
Layer Obamacare on top of that and the complexity is more than all but .1% of the country will be able to cope with. The frustration level will be so high, that many will beg for socialism, where everything is “free” and you have only to show up at the clinic and wait your turn got a couple of days for whatever it is that you will get.
Just remember friends: our socialists believe they are doing all they are doing FOR OUR OWN GOOD. Please remember that dealing with so-called “free markets” for medical care (ie, insurance companies)wasn’t at all simple or pleasant either. That’s why our socialists wanted “single-payer.” So that at least we’d all be able to know the rules. Would that have worked better than the mess we have now? Probably not because absent competition and choice, however uninformed the latter, the only thing worse than a free market is a government bureaucracy that makes decisions with no fear of a competitor coming up with a way to do it better.
Thanks for the article, Claudia. You got sick, but you used the sick time to come up with this for us.
Surely, along with socialist government interference and bumbling, one of the causes of the high cost and difficulties associated with becoming sick or injured is the shortage of American doctors (supply and demand), which seems to have been perpetuated by the AMA in concert with universities. One almost never hears of concerns about this issue.
Ditto’s sister! You’ve hit the nail on the head after your return. Your feeliongs are spot on and shared by many.
I’m old enough to remember trips to the family Doc and my mother paid in cash, a fee for a service. Office calls were $5.
I often wonder what health care would be like if there was no health insurance,a world where we pay directly for a service. The health care market is tremendously manipulated, what with ever growing technology and insurance plans. Insurance is actually a voluntary form of socialism. Fine, but now I “must” have insurance. How else will I be able to partake of the new and marvelous medical technology? How else can I live forever at a reasonable cost?
Maybe, if we must persist in this health insurance debacle, we should push for a voucher system to cover the health basics and klet the medical practitioners compete for our business. there has to be a better way than what is looming just on the horizon.
You’ve tapped into the wide-spread uncertainty and insecurity rampant here, in flyover country. As long as it persists, the economy will not rebound in any noticeable, sustainable way. Instead of aspiring to thrive and grow, we’re all focused on basic survival. Yes, I will meet my obligations (mortgage, utilities, etc.). Hire? No. Expand? No. Buy new equipment? No. Upgrade technology? No. Vacation? No.
Alas. Life,politics and technology become ever more complex and incomprehensible. Most of us plow along trying to cope with the everyday problems while the least qualified assure us everything is getting better.
Those people who discovered today that they shared the Mega Lottery prize are about to learn that money won’t buy happiness.
Of Course….
It’s the Rules that cause all the problems…
Why didn’t I see all this before?
Oh, I remember
Asbestos
Doctors high on dope
opium cure alls
Lobotomies
Mega Vitamin therapy
The E-Meter
Well, that one could still work, if the doggone FDA would just get out of the WAY