There have been a lot of days in the last twenty-odd years where you could say that.
Stranger
Why are we discounting the simplest explanation? It’s by far most likely that the patient’s insurance is not, in fact, compliant with the ACA or any other relevant regulations, and the company is just lying and running a scam. This explains nicely why they say they have no co-pays, and are now charging a co-pay.
It has indeed proved useful on numerous occasions.
I suffered a fall and fractured my skull, had bleeding in my frontal lobe, and had to stay in the emergency ward for three days to see if I was going to need a hold drilled in my skull to relieve pressure from swelling. I had three CT scans and multiple consults. At the end of that, i got a firm handshake and well wishes from the hospital staff. Canadian health care may not be perfect, but I never had to worry about a co-pay, deductible, or worse. The thought of not being able to “afford” to be sick or injured is unconscionable, and I can’t believe a country like America allows it for its citizens.
Only for those who lack the moral fortitude to not earn enough money to afford medical care, and those too stupid to avoid getting cancer or encephalitis. Sick people are just lazy slackers with bad attitudes, right?
Stranger
I honestly feel nauseous when I read about health insurance horror stories (and they’re all horror stories to me) from Americans. It’s something I can’t wrap my head around. I just can’t imagine going through something like when I had gallbladder stones and was in agony, even trying to think about insurance and if I’m covered and then knowing I’ll have forms to fill out and calls to make after.
I feel so sorry Americans who end up bankrupt because they were unlucky enough to get sick.
I don’t know what’s more unbelievable to me, that the health system exists the way it does or that there are actually people who think it’s great 
It’s the least Christian thing from a supposedly Christian country - denying healthcare to the sick and poor.
This pretty much sums it up.
What the fuck do you want, the government to pay everyone’s medical expenses? Where do you suggest the government gets that money with a big wall to build?
Here’s an anti-Pit post.
I was diagnosed with breast cancer in October. I’m self-employed and purchase my own insurance, and so far, it has paid claims without a smidgen of hassle. 
This has been almost as big a load off my mind as it was to find out that I did not need and would not benefit from chemotherapy.
Back to the OP, no disrespect intended, but I find it nuts that you’re annoyed with this patient. You’ve told them they may have a possibly serious disease, so of course, they’re freaking. You then tell them they need another test to confirm it or rule it out. Of course, they’ll jump at it without thought to their insurance. THIS is the point where you should’ve informed them they should be sure their insurance covers it. They can’t be the first person you’ve encountered who doesn’t know their insurance doesn’t cover something. It sounds to me like you need some procedures in your office to deal with those situations. I doubt very many people know the mind-numbing minutiae of what tests and re-tests in what situations their insurance covers. You stressed this patient and made their already-scary situation worse.
It shouldn’t be unbelievable that people think current U.S. healthcare has decent coverage, because for most it does. It’s the exceptions (and there are too many) that furnish the horror stories.
What struck me most about the OP was the (apparently) grossly inaccurate result on the first lab test (something that can happen in any healthcare system), and why it probably would’ve been better to repeat that one test before moving on to a battery of others.
It’s well known that if a bunch of screening blood tests are done on a healthy person, odds are that one may show a markedly abnormal result as a false positive. Years ago, I had a liver function test result that was indicative of serious liver damage. My first reaction was that I probably had chronic viral hepatitis secondary to job exposure, Mrs. J. was at risk too and we were in for serious problems. The repeat test was flat normal. There was never an explanation as to why the first reading was so abnormal. :smack:
This source gives an illustrative example - if you get a standard chemistry screening profile (Chem-15), odds that all 15 test results will fall into the normal reference range for a healthy person would be only 46% (though the false positive abnormal reading(s) tend in such situations to be mildly out of range. Still, it’s an indication that if the person seems healthy, jumping to conclusions (or going overboard in further testing, or worse, therapy) is not a good idea.
I thought Mexico was going to pay for that wall, Vincente Fox’s amusingly profane tirade to the contrary notwithstanding. No? Well, shit, Donny, what campaign promises can you keep? Can’t put the bitch in prison, can make the spics pay for a wall, can’t repeal Obamacare, can’t bring back coal jobs to Kentucky or assembly jobs to Indiana, can’t even find those “three to five million illegal ballots”.
Seems like Don the Vulgarian’s biggest accomplishments are number of Twitter posts per day and spending the most time on the golf course. He’s in the running for “Least Effective President” with William Henry Harrison and Zachery Taylor, and despite their advantages of dying relatively early into their respective terms Trump appears to be chugging along competitively in functional non-progress despite his double fisted Big Mac attacks and bowl of Colonel Sanders Extra Crispy diet plan.
Stranger
From the link: *“About 44 million people in this country have no health insurance, and another 38 million have inadequate health insurance.” *
That’s 82 million people without proper insurance. That’s more than just “the exception”.
No, my position is that we already know this sort of thing happens. This is a very mundane story that has no remarkable features in it. I thought “Surely the OP knows there are shitty health insurance plans. I guarantee they’ve met or heard about people who have no insurance at all, so it can’t be a shock to encounter a person with a plan barely above that. Also, people are dumb, so (s)he can’t be surprised to hear someone yelling at a doctor’s office that they should’ve somehow understood how the patient’s insurance works. That must happen three times a day, every day. Then there’s some part about the ACA and the individual mandate, but this person has a plan, so the mandate is satisfied anyway, so that can’t be what this story is about.”
So I truly can’t understand the OP. It’s like a story where someone says “I ordered the medium fries at Wendy’s, and get this, they charged me $1.99!” My response is “Uh hu. Yeap. That’s…that’s certainly how that works, mhmm.”
Ahah! Now we’re getting somewhere!
A stupid customer yellilng at you? You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t? Now that’s a rant I can get behind!
That’s not what’s happening though. A better analogy would be seeing someone starving on the street because all they’ve eaten in the last 3 days is a cup of coffee that they bought with some change they found and saying “well, no wonder you’re starving, you only bought coffee - what do you expect!?”.
It’s not about only buying coffee, it’s about not having enough money to buy proper food so that you don’t die.
Americans hate each other a lot, and because of that we’ll never get UHC. Whenever it is discussed, people start dog whistling to turn whites against non-whites and the middle class and working class against the poor. ‘why should middle class whites pay so poor black people and latino immigrants can see a doctor’ comes up a lot. People think the UK is a classist society, but the US has very deep racial and class divisions that get in the way of any social welfare program.
Plus the medical establishment is a 3 trillion dollar a year industry now. Nobody wants to take it on. To truly reform health care, we’d have to cut the industry down to 2 trillion a year. No industry gives up 1 trillion a year in business without a fight. Plus now that our health care system is 18% of our economy, nationalizing it is difficult. We should’ve implemented UHC back in the 60s when we were spending 6% of GDP on health care. Now people balk at the price tag of UHC despite the fact that it’ll actually be cheaper.
Basically, as americans, we are fucked. Totally fucked. Help isn’t coming. I do wish other nations would politically pressure us to adopt UHC though. Just like the US uses political and social pressure to make other nations improve their human rights, I wish other nations did the same to us to make us adopt UHC (or more fair elections, or ending plutocracy, etc).
As I mentioned upthread, even in deep blue states like California or Vermont, all they do is give lip service to health reform while not actually doing anything meaningful .
I was under the impression that the ACA rendered “health care Taco Bell” non-existent.
Except there’s no evidence that the person with the coffee is starving, or that they’re too poor to buy food. All we know is that they didn’t buy good food and wants the restaurant to pay for food that evidently didn’t taste very good.
This is identical to a “free refill misunderstanding” story where the cafe bills a customer for 6 cups of coffee and the patron complains that they should be billed for one, with free refills. The shopkeeper replies “We don’t offer free refills,” and the patron says “Well I thought you did, and that’s your fault!”
Sometimes I think I’m the only person that actually cares about what people did and did not write. It’s like 99% of the world just sees the word “healthcare” and thinks that’s some ticket to just respond with any ol’ comment tangentially related to healthcare. It’s like you (generally speaking) read “This lady had healthcare insurance and it ended badly” so you go “Well let me tell you about healthcare insurance ending badly!” with total disregard for the rest of the conveyed story.
Tell me, where does the OP say that the patient is poor?
What difference does that make? if they can’t afford the bill, they can’t afford the bill. Tell me, where in the story was the actual cost mentioned? Some tests can be very expensive.
I don’t see any mention of a restaurant until your idiot supposition. Just how much food do you think someone can buy for the price of a cup of coffee?
What is it with you asshole conservatives? Instead of fixing a broken system, you look for ways to blame the person without even knowing anything about them.
Why do you consider adequate healthcare to be an evil thing?
As someone who works in, or maybe adjacent to the health care industry, and whose customers are doctors, I hear you, OP.
I am amazed at the number of non-medicine things PCPs (particularly if they are running their own practice) need to be proficient in in order to stay in business, stay accredited, get paid (and get paid fairly), and keep the lights on. It’s overwhelming. While it would be nice if the doctor could answer definitively in the moment exactly what each patient’s insurance will and won’t cover, and at what rate, that’s just not a realistic burden to put on the docs.
I also understand, though, why the patient yells at you; doctors are the human interface of the health care industry. They don’t have a relationship with (or direct access to) anyone at BCBS or wherever, so any problem is your problem.