What I’ve Learned About the Healthcare System
This coming Tuesday, Lord willing, Becca will be getting her hip repaired and she will start the long process of recovery. It’s been a long 7 months since all of this started, and we have learned a lot in that time. One of the areas that we had the most to learn about was how the health care system works. This is an incredibly relevant topic if you go by what I see in my news feeds. Just a couple years ago we started having our first experiences with health-care as adults, and I have to tell you it’s absolutely confounding to approach it unaware.
Costs
I originally thought that health-care worked like any other commercial industry where you go to a service provider, they quote you a price for a service, and you decide whether you want to get that service there. I was suprised to find out that getting a price out of a medical provider is nearly impossible, I felt like the medical providers expected us to trust these poorly understood entities (insurance companies) that will take care of things.
The role and nature of health insurance is not at all immediately obvious. The details of insurance policies are confusing and take a while to get your mind around. Having a high-deductible plan means that I essentially have to pay for everything out of pocket up to a certain amount every year. Finding out if a medical provider even accepts your insurance often takes too much work. I felt like we spent too much time worrying about the rules and procedures of navigating the system.
Some providers have been helpful, and the customer services agents at the end of the insurance company phone number try to be as informative as they can be. Unfortunately the pressure and frustration builds too quickly in overworked medical care providers and in the bewildered patients and family like me.
Information Technology
One way I think we can address some of the issues is through clear and open communication. And, I feel that the best way to facilitate communication in the modern era is through the internet. Apparently there has been some push to get the medical industry to digitize their systems in the next few years. I have my doubts about how well they will make that transition considering e-mail has been in use for 20 years and not a single medical care provider knows how to use it! They still fax papers to each other! And trying to get two different medical providers to share information with each other, or with you is nearly impossible. “Oh, you want a lab at a hospital to send results to a doctor 300 miles away? You need get that doctor to call us and give us their fax number so we can send it. No, you cannot tell us what it is, we need to hear it from them.”
The potential efficiency and control offered by Google Health and Microsoft’s Health Vault seem like a fantastic idea. Let each person manage a central repository of their own information. This would let us each grant access to add or retrieve medical information from our personal files, as we see fit. This system stores medical images, prescriptions, immunizations. Everything is on paper records right now! I’d love to see more doctors utilizing information technology.
Conclusion
Anyway, we have many things figured out now… I think. If you spend enough time on the phone pestering enough people, things will eventually get done. It’s a strange system. I don’t know that the government would be able to actually make things any better, but I encourage someone to do something, anything! Because the system that we have now, is less than optimal. I have sensed this frustration from other people I talk to. I wish I knew the right way to make it all improve, but all I can really offer is the perspective of someone who has just recently been introduced to the world of health-care, and found it bewildering.