I am glad your wife recovered. I don’t want to start an argument but I find it troubling that your wife received better treatment than the average person would. How does that hospital treat people they don’t know?
My wife was a Manager at one of our local hospitals when Obamacare passed. Treatment before Obamacare was based on doing whatever it took to save lives. After Obmacare passed, treatment was based on reimbursement based on customer satisfaction scores. The hospital she worked at was slow to adjust and they went broke. They had less then a million dollars on hand when they where bought out. If that had not happened, they would have closed down a month later.
During this process, my wife left her position at there and went to work at the University of Tyler to teach nursing. The UT system has extremely good health insurance through the State of Texas and Blue Cross Blue Shield. This isn't available to non government people. It's only available to full time employees, and even then, not everyone. This double standard was created by Obamacare. This allowed us to only have to pay $5,000 out of pocket for her cancer treatment from a $120,000 bill. We pay $200 a month on that amount. We also pay $10 for prescriptions and $30 for a doctors visit, or $40 to see a specialist. As for care at the hospital, when she worked there, we never paid for anything. We never got a bill. When she was hospitalized from her cancer treatment, she was very good friends with the Director of that floor, the VP of that part of the hospital and the CNO. In fact, the CNO comes over to our place with her grandkids to see the farm and hike our trails. All of them know who the very best doctors are. I'm sure you have heard the joke "What do you call a doctor that graduated with a C grade? You call him Doctor" Nurses, and leadership at every hospital know who the C doctors are, and who the really good ones are.
When my cousin first got sick in Canada, he saw his doctor and got into the system of treatment. The amount of time it took to treat him was crazy. My wife went in for a colonoscopy on a week day, they found the tumor during the procedure. They biopsied it that week and the following week she was on her first Chemo treatment. She was done with treatment and cancer free 3 months later. My cousin had to wait longer for his first exam then it took to treat my wife. His entire treatment, starting from the time his doctor said he had cancer, until he passed away, was over 3 years. It just grew and grew while he waited for treatment. He was a successful CPA that raced an old Mercedes for fun. He made really good money, but couldn't get decent medical care.
I agree that there is a double standard. Sadly, if you do not have connections, you will not get the same treatment that I will. When I first got sick, my wife called up the CNO of a different hospital in our area that she is good friends with. He scheduled me a time to get tested by his best Nurse and then when I came up positive, he had his best Doctor look at me. I have no idea what it would be like if I just showed up to get tested, but because the CNO arranged it, I got very good treatment.
I can say that the same thing happens in the construction world. If you can make friends with an Inspector, you can get away with fixing problems afterwards and continue on with the job without having to schedule another inspection. And in some instances, you can get an inspection signed off without having the inspector come out to the job. Just show him a picture your phone and that's good enough. Same thing with dealing with banks. I know a few lenders that will accept a picture that I text them to release funds for the next stage of the job, while others that I do not know will come out and poke around before paying. and of course, if you are friends with a police officer, or maybe the chief of police, you just BS with them when they pull you over and joke about the other guys that they give tickets to.
