On the Chainsawed Edge of Medicine

Obamacare barely scratched the surface of what's gone wrong with medicine in the US. I'm not going to complain about my health problems here, but about the system set up to ignore them.

I get most of my medical care from a community clinic. Today was that awful time to refill my prescriptions. I needed to have a refills called into the local pharmacy. This procedure has always been an ordeal with this clinic. There seemed to be no easy way to do this. The clinic has an in-house pharmacy, which isn't in my cheap Medicare part D insurance network. The clinic's voice mail gives an option for refilling your prescription with the in-house, but not anywhere else. Is this like, a monopolistic practice, or is it just stupid as it looks. I presumed the place to talk to about a refill then, would have to be adult medicine, but they were unreachable by clinic's phone system (I think the garbled option was the one I needed) and I waited a half-hour to speak with the "operator" before I gave up and decided to walk in.

I arrived and found the waiting area full. It was Monday morning, a lot of sick people waited for Monday. The receptionist gave me a paper to fill out explaining what medicines I needed to be refilled. Luckily, I brought the number to my pharmacy. While I was completing the form, a man walked up and asked if he could get an appointment. Judging by his accent, dark complexion, and the lost look in his eye, he seemed to be an immigrant. He asked the receptionist if he could make an appointment. She told him appointments were filled for the next two months. He shrank away. I was busy filling out my request so I only thought afterward that I should have directed down the hall to Urgent Care, which doesn't need an appointment. For some reason, the woman at the desk, who was in the care industry, didn't advise of this, either. He was gone before I looked.


That was a man who glanced at our health care system and recoiled in dread, and he wasn't given the least amount of information that he needed. If he's sick in some way, now he's going to get even sicker. He's from the third world. Industrialized countries, the civilized ones, look at our health care system with revulsion and disgust. I can see why. Even with a community clinic, there wasn't much in the way of care. This isn't health care, it's health bureaucracy.

Yes, it's true. It also takes me two months to get in to see my primary care. The last health problem I tried to get treated cost me three hundred dollars total, which I'm still paying. I still have the problem, they never found out what it was, didn't treat it, they merely ruled out it being life-threatening or (too) degenerative and sent me home. In other words, they ruled out the possibility of a lawsuit. Three hundred dollars for nothing.

I went through all these sorts of troubles before Obamacare, so it isn't the source of the problem, no. This is for-profit health care, where even the charities are drawn into standard industry BS. This is the health care that the wealthy have judge as adequate for the rest of us.