Medical Cost

[orezok]

I have AFIB and have been told I should have an ablation. How has the ablation worked out for your wife thus far?

100% normal sinus rytmem since ablation

 

[mrmikey]

Go to the emergency room? They have to treat you?

Problem here is a lot of times the ER's are closed due to lack of Dr's. You may go to an ER having a heart attack with no one there and end up waiting for an ambulance to take you to another one..... that is as long as there's an available ambulance.
Our health care system here in NS is severly f....ahhh screwed up.
Another case in point. I called my Dr last Friday the 18th of July to get my pills renewed, can't get an appointment 'till Aug-14.

 

[Jstpssng]

Problem here is a lot of times the ER's are closed due to lack of Dr's. You may go to an ER having a heart attack with no one there and end up waiting for an ambulance to take you to another one..... that is as long as there's an available ambulance.
Our health care system here in NS is severly f....ahhh screwed up.
Another case in point. I called my Dr last Friday the 18th of July to get my pills renewed, can't get an appointment 'till Aug-14.

Not limited to your side of the border. I've been having foot problems for years, which finally got to the point I was on crutches. I couldn't get to see my regular Dr (PA) for 2 months. Luckily they were able to get me in to see someone else.
It's only going to get worse as the population ages... thankfully our fearless leader is discouraging potential future doctors from studying here or flat out deporting them.

 

[Dftodd]

Problem here is a lot of times the ER's are closed due to lack of Dr's. You may go to an ER having a heart attack with no one there and end up waiting for an ambulance to take you to another one..... that is as long as there's an available ambulance.
Our health care system here in NS is severly f....ahhh screwed up.
Another case in point. I called my Dr last Friday the 18th of July to get my pills renewed, can't get an appointment 'till Aug-14.

Seems like they could have at least called in a temporary supply to get you through until the office visit

 

[mrmikey]

Seems like they could have at least called in a temporary supply to get you through until the office visit

Dr's office won't but the drug store will, they'll give you one refill which is what I had to do. I figured I'd be safe trying to get a dr appt. a month before I needed it, apparently not. They'll only make appt's no more than a month ahead so you can't call a couple months before to be sure of getting in.

 

[Torvy]

Most of the high cost of medical in the US is directly due our tort system. Most countries limit how attorneys get paid and how much people can get from lawsuits.

We all pay extra so everyone in the chain, can pay extra for liability insurance and run extra tests to CYA from lawsuits.

Until that gets fixed, it will never be affordable.

 

[2manyrocks]

In my personal opinion, the fact that medicare will pay X for each specific billing code box checked might be viewed as a minimum price floor. With insurance companies negotiating discounts, also hard to compare prices for services, especially when any major medical event will involve multiple providers. Who would know how to even ask what services are going to be rendered and who is going to provide them to make a pricing comparison before hand. Then add in the notion that most think their insurance will take care of it.

 

[Dftodd]

Dr's office won't but the drug store will, they'll give you one refill which is what I had to do. I figured I'd be safe trying to get a dr appt. a month before I needed it, apparently not. They'll only make appt's no more than a month ahead so you can't call a couple months before to be sure of getting in.

If i'm good with what ever time I can get in, i can see my doctor within a week for a regular appointment.

If i have something to see him about sooner, I need to be caller number three as soon as they open for a work in appt.

That means watching the clock and hitting dial as soon as the clock hit's 8am

Usually if I can't get one of his highly sought after work in appointments, I'll see his nurse practitioner who usually has a few openings for that day

If we are out of prescriptions, the pharmacy will not fill it.

 

[QRTRHRS]

My wife had an ablation a year and a half ago. Her lower left chamber was okay. The upper right was all scar tissue so five hours of surgery could only accomplish so much. (She never smoked)

She just had a pacemaker put in this past April. She had a lot of complications with swelling, oozing, etc. but it calmed down and is working (constantly).

She went on Medicare before I did. The agent that we worked with for her supplement recommended the "F" plan and I followed suit. If we get a bill, the "radar" goes up. It happens on occasion but a phone call usually clears it up.

But we had one that billed us about one year after my wife had a procedure. They claimed that we had not provided our secondaries info. Lie! They said that we had not signed me as okay to converse with. Lie! I forwarded two hipa forms which they claimed to have never received. I called my secondary. Turned out that they sent improper paperwork three times to our secondary. The last time that they called, after they told me that they needed to speak to my wife and could not speak to me, I told them to see us in court. (My wife is hearing impaired so I do all of the phone work.) I then sent Medicare all of the info. Not sure if that worked but we never heard from them again.

I would have to look at our statements to see what her TAVR, ablation and Pacemaker costs were. If I recall correctly, my knee joint alone was around 50k just for the joint.

By the way, I go over all of our Medicare statements looking for false claims. I have called Medicare for at least three Covid test kits that we never asked for or received.

 

[ultrarunner]

The irony is there are still hospitals shuttering all the time… can’t pay the bills to stay open.

A second is many Docs no longer encourage their kids to go into medicine.

In 35 years I have seen both nurses and doctors increasingly foreign born…

We did not have a single foreign born nurse 35 years ago and half today are from the Philippines… very good nurses I might add.

The days of the sole practitioner are all but gone… it’s not possible to be compliant and run a practice today… it’s a full time job coding and billing, another is compliance, etc…

Plenty of mine fields also…

We had a foreign born nurse with 23 years experience ask a patient through family what language does the patient speak and how long the patient has been in the United States and learned 17 years… the nurse said 17 years is a long time to not learn any English… family filed a formal regulatory complaint.

Another investigated complaint when a nurse asked a non binary person male or female to determine if pregnancy test needed prior to surgery… another complaint that was followed up at the highest level…