Health care

The other evening I watched a documentary called “Diagnosis” which shared the efforts of a doctor at a teaching hospital in Connecticut, I believe, who used crowdsourcing to get ideas about difficult diagnoses for those who had conventional illnesses that had doctors stumped. I’ve had my own experiences where a doctor has made a mistake and another stepped in with a correction. Fortunately, none have been life threatening for me, but my experience has served as a reminder that we expect our doctors to know everything and then get angry when they miss something. And when I think of all of the advances that have been made in the last twenty years, for example, I am amazed that they do as good of a job as they do. Medicine is indeed a team sport which is becoming more and more rare with the proliferation of specialists, all of whom seem to be so booked up so far in advance that one has to wait months or even a year or more to see someone or to pay out of pocket if that provider is in a different PPO.

Yesterday my daughter took me to Urgent Care for what I had self diagnosed as a chest cold. While there they ran tests for Covid, RSV, and flu and then decided that I had bronchitis, something I have struggled with for much of my life. But I was amazed that in an Urgent Care facility they could take a swab from my nose and within hours have results. In the same way, I have been awed by the study I was enrolled in a year ago in which they spliced part of a gene and inserted it into the back of my eye to correct the AMD I had in that eye. A year later it is still working. Amazing.

My only regret when it comes to modern medicine here in the US is that it has been hijacked by the insurance companies. My hope is that soon we will have universal health care as most other nations have, even the poorer ones. There is no reason why so many in our country should go without basic health care and why we should pay more for our medications than others do in the rest of the world. Or why pharmaceutical companies should be allowed to spend more on advertising than they do on research. And yes, I realize that supporting hospitals, Urgent Care facilities, family practices, specialists, etc. is expensive, but so much could be saved by cutting out the insurance companies which take out a huge cut before the health care providers are paid what the insurance companies decide they are willing to pay.

* Over 15 years ago one of my family doctors did research on the savings that universal health care would provide and came up with well over a billion dollars that just the state of Pennsylvania could save by having their own universal health care administration for simply state employees. He found that the insurance companies operating in our state had overhead costs of anywhere from 20% to 40% in comparison to Medicare and Medicaid that operate with about 9% in administrative costs.

I am extremely grateful that I have such good health care coverage and that I am able to pay the premiums that Medicare and my supplementary plan costs. Life would be very different for me if I was dependent on Medicaid or, even worse, had no health insurance. I am hopeful that the Democratic party will be able to stay in power long enough to fix our broken health care system by instituting a universal health care plan that could improve the lives of millions in our nation and save trillions in dollars. I recognize it won’t be easy. The last time they tried to establish a universal health care plan the insurance companies spent billions to defeat their efforts…which only goes to show that their primary goal is to pile up vast profits rather than to serve the public. Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I am still of the mind that the government and businesses major goal should be to provide needed services. And yes, they need to be able to make a profit, but there is no excuse for the kinds of profits Elon Musk, Amazon, Walmart, Facebook, to use several examples of corporations and individuals have made and all without having to pay their fair share in taxes. And don’t get me started on the flaws of trickle down economics. The only way to maintain a healthy capital driven economy is to recognize the power of a trickle up economy where the common man holds the power of the purse.

OK, that is my rant for the day, but I can’t end without adding that I am extremely grateful for the health care that I receive and that I have faith that in the end the American public will be strong enough to elect representatives to our state and federal governments who will be able to stand against the special interests so that we can indeed have a government that is of the people, by the people, and for the people. Without that we will never be able to stand free.