Excepting the homeless dudes, everyone you know must be very healthy, reasonably well-off, or disinclined to share their problems with you.
I personally am disinclined to share details, but I know quite a few people (myself included) who are putting off or have given up on getting medical care they need (although to be fair there are several tiers of “need” involved).
For me personally, insurance doesn’t cover the procedure I need. It DOES partially cover a procedure that costs about 25% less, but would probably need to be redone in 5 - 10 years, and is likely to create as many problems as it “solves”. Oh joy.
I would wager that just about everyone who works in retail plays a game of “pass the germs”. My brother was working retail a few years back, brought home a ‘severe cold’ that “everyone else” had. He quickly passed it on to other family members. Without insurance then, there was no going to the doctor for a proper diagnoses, but it was apparently not a cold but whooping cough. (As a side note, cases of whooping cough are supposed to be reported to the CDC and treated with quarantine. Obviously, they weren’t. I still wonder how many customers got infected from that one vector of several dozen employees.) I’ve never been so sick before in my life. Just short of “gonna die!” to not quite justify a trip to the emergency room.
I have a cousin with MS. She takes copaxone for it (a daily injectable that runs about $3000 per month). She works at WalMart, so needless to say her insurance doesn’t cover it. IIRC she gets her copaxone through an assistance program provided by one of the national MS charities.
My mom also has MS and takes copaxone – hers is paid for by Dad’s excellent insurance.
My baby sister is a recovering alcoholic. Her low point was discovering she was in danger of liver failure. She didn’t have insurance because she was (surprise) unemployed.
We (her family) paid around $10k in medical bills for her while she pulled herself out. Would have been more but my sister is a nurse so much of her treatment was done for cost - so that was mostly lab work and medication, the doctors consultations were mostly pro bono (or whatever the medical equivalent is).
Once she was dry, she worked a horrible job where she couldn’t cover living expenses - but it did come with INSURANCE - so her medication has been paid for.
Most of them have jobs that provide insurance. Many are professionals, but some work retail- but retail where insurance is provided. So they are hardly “well off”. I know a couple of dudes that have Veteran’s benefits. Some are just healthy.
Just to clarify, I wasn’t being combative, just curious. I’m assuming that DrDeth is young, and his friends are as well, which would significantly skew his results.
No, I have hit the “big 5- 0”. That’s not old anymore, but it’s hardly young.
We discuss things quite openly. They often ask my “medical” opinion, even though I am not a medical Doctor.
One of them went through his second open heart surgery just a while ago, but he has excellent insurance. True, he had to take out a home equity loan, but since he had significant equity, he was OK.
I have a 55-year-old friend who is trying to figure out how to have cataract surgery done without insurance. He has other health problems, but has done reasonably well covering the costs himself. I have good insurance, but, during an unemployed spell, I splinted a finger with plastic cut from the handle of a laundry soap bottle to keep my finger immobile while a deep, flapping cut that really called for stitches healed. (This actually worked well, but was a bit inconvenient.)
My mother has type 1 diabetes. She’s uninsurable due to a litany of other problems, and lives off free insulin samples from her long-time family doctor.
I’ve been losing it at about 2-3 pounds a week, with some weeks when I backslide and either don’t lose at all or gain a couple pounds. Not rapid by any measure.
The bulk of the 30 pounds I’ve lost so far took place in the first two months since I went on Weight Watchers last March… since then I’ve been gaining and losing, gaining and losing. I plan to get serious about it again now, though.
I’m mainly worried about loose skin around my abdomen, which is riddled with stretch marks, lacks elasticity, and doesn’t show much signs of tightening up so far. (I’m 42.) I’ve seen shows on TLC about people who’ve lost a lot of weight that basically have to have a girdle of skin removed from all around their waists, the remainder pulled up like a pair of pants and the edges of the incision sewn together. Sounds serious, expensive, and rife with the potential for complications. (How does one even sleep after something like that? There’s nowhere you can lie down where you won’t be resting on your incision.)
There are treatments and procedures that could possibly benefit me today, but my insurance won’t pay for them. And I have GOOD insurance, and a pretty good income. I don’t need a program, I just need for my insurance to pay for what it says it will pay for.
In the past, I’ve avoided going to the doctor when I had something like pneumonia, because I didn’t have insurance and certainly couldn’t afford any medicine. I finally broke down and went in one case, but we were eating beans for just about a year afterwards. I have an underactive thyroid, and I’ve known about it ever since I was about 14 or 15. However, I didn’t take my thyroid supplements for years and years, because we couldn’t afford it. I’ve also gone without other medications.
Actually, right now I’m pretty fortunate. My insurance will pay for the majority of the stuff I need, even if it won’t pay for everything. But there were times when I went without basic medical care because there was no money.
You might also see about setting up a dental care clinic. Just getting some basic dental care done could prevent someone from winding up with all of her upper teeth extracted, for instance, because she couldn’t afford to get her teeth cleaned and maybe even filled for decades.
Some of these personal tales point to something that is heavily criticised by the on-UHC protagonists.
Apart from the non existant ‘death panels’ in the UK, they will also seriously exaggerate waiting times for treatment, especially surgery.
Looking at some of these cases, seems to me that I would rather have genuine UHC and at least have some idea of when to expect treatment, than to have the US system which is to hope to make it until retirement and get medicaire.
I believe in the UK we have waiting lists down to 13 weeks for non-emergency surgery for most things.The closest to co-pay we have is the charges that are made for prescriptions, which tends to be a fixed amount no matter what the medication - its a sort of cross subsidisation but has caused a certain amount of controversy, goodness knows what people here would make of the sheer scale of co-pays, I think anyone who proposed it would be rapidly out of work.
I think most people need dental work. This is a huge issue even with people that have inusrance. When a dental policy will limit you to $1,000/year and a root canal is $1,500 it doesn’t take much to figure out why dental work is put off.
I need a bunch of dental work, fortunately almost all of it is back teeth so they don’t show (or much). But it’d be nice to eat any kind of food I want again.
Also don’t forget routine tests, I could use blood work to test for thing cholesterol and stuff. That won’t happen anytime soon.
I haven’t had my “annual” girly exam for about 3 years, could definitely use a visit to the dentist, and have some digestive “issues” that can only be diagnosed by having some sort of scope done. I can’t afford to pony up for any of this stuff right now.
And I don’t take my psych meds quite like I should, just because I need to stretch them out. They are about $300 a month since I don’t have insurance, and I don’t ever have that kind of cash just lying around anymore.
I need to have 3 dental implants to replace missing teeth. My dental insurance will pay only $500 towards each, the cost is about $3000 each. Along with this, my insurance will only pay $1200 per year. For me, this means maintaining what I have, not improving them. I had a crown break off this past week and I have a feeling my dentist is going to say I need an implant to replace it. As soon as my divorce is final, this is next on my list of things to get done.
I have been losing about 5 lbs a month, and so far the skin is shrinking along with the fat that is vanishing.
And no, I have absolutely no idea why I am losing weight, I am still not exercising, and still following the same plan given to me by the nutritionist years ago … I do think it is somehow related to the hysterectomy, and no longer being fucked over by my reproductive system, but the gyn oncologist told me that that was probably not the cause, and he had no idea why I was losing weight. I dont care as long as I keep losing weight! If it keeps up, Ill be back down to my original pre 1990 weight in about 2 and a half years
I will chime in for the military dependant [enlisted type]
Navy policy [since I spent just under 20 years as a naval dependant]is to treat the wives as if they are hypochondriacs, and if they have children munchausens by proxy sufferers. It was so bad that I would literally have to wait until whatever condition I was attempting to get treated for was serious enough to hospitalize me. I was mistreated one time quite memorably by being prescribed pennicillin even though my medical folder, which the doctor had in his possession is screaming hot pink with PENNA in 2 inch letters on the cover, for ‘bronchitis’ despite the half inch of visits documenting about 5 and a half months of pneumonia, which he obviously never bothered reading. I gained 150 lbs in 3 years, and the doctor told me and mrAru to our faces that it was because I was sitting on my ass eating candy all day, and refused to do any testing beyond a basic THS, which is useless for most forms of thyroid issues. It took me 10 years to convince them to put me into the diabetes control program, the entire program consisted of being handed prescriptions for metformin, and a glucometer and test strips and being told to come back in a year for another set of prescriptions. I already had a glucometer, and had been dietary control successfully for just under 20 years … I was hoping for something a bit more consultative and proactive. [and considering that I have absolutely no neuropathy or retinopathy, or kidney issues I did pretty fucking well for myself for the 10 years I had been trying to force the damned navy to consider I might actually HAVE diabetes … which took the 10 years to get them to give me an a1c…]
It took his retirement, and my breaking a bone in my foot that made me go to a local doc in a box, and meet a nonmilitary doctor that actually dx me, and get me to an endocrinologist who hooked me up with the head of surgical endocrinology for Yale, get me hooked up with a real endo and nutritionist, and get me hooked up with a gyn who actually listened to me instead of an annual mammo and pap.
Resentful? Fuck yes. Relieved to have made it out alive. mrAru knows a chief whos wife had been refused a kidney transplant in the mid 80s as it was ‘experimental’ who gets flowers delivered to her grave every month.
