Provider Friendly Healthcare = Unfriendly Patient Care

When it comes to getting medical assistance, we all know that we are subject to the constraints of our health care insurance provider. I was just helping a client last week who had a medical emergency. The client is 86 years old, ambulatory, but could not drive due to her vision. The client required that she be admitted through the ER at her hospital instead of through her regular physician because her doctor was located in a different state since she usually resides in Florida. Although I suspected that she wasn’t properly informed about her healthcare policy procedures, I honored her request, and gave her a ride to the local hospital, who treated her promptly after 6 hours in the waiting room. The doctor prescribed medication that had to be picked up at CVS, but there was a power outage due to a severe thunderstorm. When I got to CVS to pick up her medication, the pharmacist stated that I had to call the hospital again to resend the prescription. I was on hold on the telephone for 40 minutes, and finally got through. CVS filled the prescription in 15 minutes. The entire ordeal took an inordinate amount of time, and one would wonder if you are living in a communist system of healthcare. But that’s not the point of this week’s blog. The point is what my client told me afterwards, who said, “What is the matter with this system? I used to have a doctor make house visits who took care of everything on the spot.” Ahhhh….the effects of government intervention and institutionalization. You have to have a fully functional body and mind when you need medical care. The more intermediaries there are, the more everything gets amuck. The cost keeps going up because so many middlemen have to be paid, and the quality and true cost of care becomes outrageously expensive. Such is the state of home health care in many states, especially New Jersey. Every company paid so much attention to your money while forgetting about you. Imagine how easy it is to fix this if the priorities were reversed? It is possible. But it starts with the realignment of the environment. It starts with the whole person. And it starts with all of us.