[split] General Health Care

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Kellemora
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[split] General Health Care

Post by Kellemora »

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Sounds awesome Icey!

When I was in Canada going to skewl, I had my taste of socialized medicine twice.
It has its good points, but I'm afraid the bad points more than tipped the scale in the wrong direction.
Because I was a foreign student, and the incident took place on skewl property, I was ushered to the front of the line.
I had no serious injuries, while those who did were way back in the line.
I will say they were fast and efficient, so the line moved fast, and everyone was handled within only about thirty minutes.
Nevertheless, they should have taken those with chemical burns first, rather than let them suffer the longest.
No one was seriously injured, it was just a mild corrosive which got wet causing a can to pop open and many of us got sprayed with the contents. None hit my skin, and I pulled my shirt off before it could be irritating to my skin.

The second instance was a portable stage with seating. Sorta like a set of bleachers with an overhead cover and a flat three tier platform in front. It collapsed in the middle. The stage fall backwards and the bleachers fell forward. We were all trapped inside the folded up unit due to the top covering us.
There were a few broken arms, a broken leg, a lot of bumps and bruises and few with nasty cuts.
I only had a sprained shoulder muscle where my arm was bent and caught behind me, no biggie.
Logic would dictate they handle those who are bleeding first. You know, so they don't run out of hydraulic fluid.
The paramedics used compresses and temporary splints before moving us to the hospital.
Started IV's and probably gave us all some pain killer along with it, since I didn't hurt to much until the next day.
This time we waited for over three hours before even the first of our classmates were called.
Once they did start calling us to the back, it again moved fairly fast. I don't know about the rest, but I was placed in a ward of eight beds, not that I was given a bed, I sat on the bench with most of the rest who were sent to that room.
An hour later they sent a couple of us down to X-ray where we waited another half hour, then sent back to the ward room. I never saw an actual doctor this trip. A nurse came and told me I had a minor sprain and it will be sore for a few days. She sent me to the check out area. Several were there a head of me and we waited until close to dark for a bus to come take us all back to skewl.
At least when they discharged us from the hospital, they filled our prescriptions (if any) right there in their pharmacy before releasing us. I thought this was great!
From what I understand, the schools insurance is responsible for some of the medical expenses incurred.
Icey

Re: PLEKHA7

Post by Icey »

Hi Gary. Tbh, I don't know how school insurances work, but over here, if a child's injured during their time there, parents can make a claim and the insurance'd probably pay up. However, that'd be in the form of compensation for whatever'd occurred. Hospital treatment's free to all in such cases. In fact, no one over here's refused urgent medical treatment , although it's now being suggested that immigrants should pay for it.
Many companies now provide health care plans for their staff, but that's no good if you're a manual worker, for example. Those in dangerous jobs probably take out their own insurance if they want to, but unlike over there, it'd be difficult to implement making everyone pay for treatment because so many folk just don't have the means to find the money each month. We're already seeing this with regard to dental care.
We have a huge number of people who can't get onto an NHS dental list, and therefore the state of their teeth's awful. This includes young children. The only way that this can be by-passed, is to be referred to a hospital dentist (usually by a private one whose list you can't get onto anyway!). Doesn't make sense does it, but if a child goes to A & E with severe toothache, they can get an appointment to be treated there (not necessarily at the time it's needed).
Dental checkups and subsequent treatment cost an awful lot of money, even if someone's lucky enough to be registered with a dental practice. Only basic stuff's covered by the NHS, and even then, there's a charge for adults, who, if on a low income, can ill afford even one visit. Dental decay's a problem over here, and thousands of people simply don't go. By the time their problems become urgent, it can mean having all their teeth extracted due to gum diseases. It's a terrible position to be in, but why the majority of folk thank their lucky stars for the NHS treatment that DOES still exist.
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Re: PLEKHA7

Post by Kellemora »

Naturally I can't judge the whole system based on the two visits I had.
We have good hospitals and bad hospitals over here too.
Icey

Re: PLEKHA7

Post by Icey »

That's right. I think you find that everywhere. None of our hospitals have big wards these days. I remember going to visit someone with my mother when I was a child, and this old hospital, although it offered the modern treatments and equipment of the day, still had these long narrow rooms with umpteen beds in them. It felt quite grim.

Since then, open NHS wards contain between 4-6 beds, and have curtains which can be pulled across for privacy, but only certain busy departments offer this kind of thing. Often, you'll find even less beds in a room, and the private ones have one, of course.

I have to say that the hospitals I've been in or visited recently, all seem to be kept clean and bright, and the last time I was in myself, the food was lovely! It's just a pity that there aren't enough nurses to attend to all the wards constantly. They do their best, and they'll respond to being called, but a few more wouldn't go amiss. The trouble is, the NHS doesn't have the money to employ more than it does. There're plenty of students leaving medical school who just want to get on with the job they've chosen to do, but they often have to find work in private clinics and hospitals, or try abroad. This causes friction, because we have many doctors and nurses who trained back in their own countries, and who can manage to find work before our own, and the standard of their qualifications sometimes isn't as high as it should be. This's now being addressed though. Applicants have to be able to understand their patients, and vice versa, and be able to demonstrate the necessary skills required.
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Re: PLEKHA7

Post by Kellemora »

It is amazing how the way hospitals operate has changed over the years.
Nevertheless, it still surprises me at the exorbitant rates they charge for almost everything.

I pinched my finger on a bad chair in the waiting room. It was bleeding pretty good, so I went to the bathroom and ran some cool water over it, then held a piece of TP on it until it settled back down again. When it was almost done, I wrapped some TP on it and went back to the waiting room.
One of the other people in the waiting room told the nurses desk I got cut on one of the broken chairs, and as soon as I sat down, she came running. Probably afraid I would sue the hospital or something. She insisted on taking a look at it, so I unwrapped it for her. She went back to her station and grabbed a bandaid so I didn't have to use TP.
I was billed over $600.00 for her slapping a bandaid on it!
My insurance took care of the bill, but it's the point of the whole thing.
Icey

Re: PLEKHA7

Post by Icey »

OMG !!!! No - that's seriously out of order isn't it? How can a charge of $600 be justified? It boils down to those who work in insurance just passing the bills as they come in. It's not their job to question the inflated amounts, but SOMEONE ought to! I would've contacted the hospital admin and asked them to explain how this exorbitant charge was made! They couldn't say that they were taking the nurse's wages into consideration - she'd be receiving them whatever she did - but that's the most expensive plaster I've ever heard about! : )
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Re: PLEKHA7

Post by Kellemora »

They could have made the bill higher by including ER fees, which they didn't.
It basically boiled down to like 200 bucks to be seen by the nurse, 200 bucks for services rendered, and 200 bucks for materials used. Or 600 dollars for a bandaid installed, hi hi...

You should try to understand how our medical bills are written here.
Especially if you are on Medicare Insurance.
Medicare pays a certain amount, a doctor can charge a medicare patient up to a certain amount, which is more than medicare pays, they can also show their NORMAL PRICE which is considerably higher than the amount medicare allows them to charge.
The whole purpose in all of these different prices is so doctors can get a major tax write off, by showing it as a loss.

For example:
A doctor shows his normal rate at $250.00
Medicare allows only a maximum charge for said service of $188.00
However, Medicare insurance only pays $126.00 for this particular service.
And Medicare has limited the patient co-pay for this service to $20.00

So on the bill, the doctor shows an Adjustment of $42.00 for Medicare, to come up with the $20.00 co-pay amount.
and a Write Off of $104.00 which he can deduct from his taxes as a loss on unpaid revenue.
If any other business in the world, other than the medical profession, tried such shenanigans, they would be in jail for cooking the books, and income tax fraud.
Icey

Re: PLEKHA7

Post by Icey »

Thank goodness for out NHS.

These health care plans are making some people very rich, and yet unless you pay the top premiums over here, ours don't cover every medical event.

If you have the cash, you can get can the best of everything available, and fee-paying patients just get seen to more quickly. Charging someone $200 to be seen by a nurse, and another $200 for her services ... does SHE receive this money?? The $200 for supplying a dressing's farcical! Over here, you can have a private consultation with a top doctor for about $260 or less - say you have a back complaint, for example. Your treatment can then be funded on the NHS and cost you nothing.
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Re: PLEKHA7

Post by Kellemora »

I had an eye exam to get new glasses.
I thought the eye doctor made a mistake on my script because I could not see out of my new glasses.
Turns out, the script was perfect, but how they were adjusted was not done correctly by the glasses fitter.
I returned to the eye doctor for him to redo the refractions, and they came out exactly what the script he wrote was for.
For this reason I was charged normal price for a second visit. Since insurance does not normally cover glasses, except under certain situations which I happened to land, but only once per year. So, insurance did not cover my second visit and I had to pay the full price of an office visit, plus the cost of the refraction.
I still had glasses I could not see out of, so had to return to the glasses fitter and let them know what the doctor said about how they must be adjusted. Once they adjusted them the way they should be, I could see perfectly once again.
There is NO PLACE on a Script for Glasses to put the fitting angle. I forget the fancy name he used for this measurement, but wrote it down and told the fitter what angle they had to be set at. At first they laughed and said changing the suggested angle would make no difference in what I see through the glasses at all.
An older optician happened to be in the store, I don't think he had anything to do with this store, but he chimed in on my behalf. He told the gal, when I was an optician, we had four additional measurements which are no longer used. Everything is made one size fits all now, so three of those measurements are meaningless, since you can't buy proper sized frames anymore. However, the angle a lens is set before an eye makes a major difference in the quality of vision.
She adjusted my glasses to the specs I gave her and I could see perfectly afterward.
Even though her fancy machine showed it threw the Script way out of what it should be.
She was surprised I could read the bottom line on her chart the one marked 20/30 where before I couldn't read the one marked 20/15 and made a mistake reading the one marked 20/10.
All she said before I left was I have weird eyes.
I told her, yes I do, besides astigmatism, I also have warped lenses, which is what this correction covers.
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Re: PLEKHA7

Post by pilvikki »

healthcare...

looking through old papers found a bill sent for the delivery of my daughter: $35 + $30 for stitching me up. that amounted to nearly a dollar per, as I had to have 32 of them. :lol:

in Canada things are going downhill fast. in the big cities you can sit and drip, as long as you don't gush, for ever. 8-9 hrs in the EMERGENCY is normal. you go in, wait. you get moved to wait in another room. then you get to wait in the examination room.

a friend of mine was left sitting in a chair, until she fell off and crashed to the floor. she was too week to get up and what did the nurse do? told her off because lying on the floor wasn't hygienic! they dragged her up - onto the same chair and she fell off again. THEN they finally got around to getting her a wheel chair.

thinking about that now.... it was some 4 yrs ago, I just realized they must have thought she was on drugs, instead of having the flu. way to go.

meanwhile, the hospital in the small town 2½ hrs north of Toronto managed to x-ray, diagnose, wrap up and medicate my husband's broken ribs in 45 mins. so, it would have made sense to have someone drive you up there, get treated and drive home - and be in bed in Toronto before they'd even moved you to the second stage down south.

makes no sense whatsoever!

teeth... I paid $250 for 1 filling in Canada. one. in france I paid 45 euros for same and it included the x-ray. like, seriously?

mind you, it's hard to find really good dentists here, no idea why.
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Re: PLEKHA7

Post by pilvikki »

oh, forgot: in finland kids get treated free, regardless where you're from.
Icey

Re: PLEKHA7

Post by Icey »

Over here, I think the cut-off point for a child not having to pay at an optician's until they reach 16, but I'm not sure about that. Think the same goes for seeing a dentist and getting doctor's prescriptions.

A & E waiting times're supposedly getting shorter. No one should have to wait for more than 4 hours unless it IS an emergency.
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Re: PLEKHA7

Post by Kellemora »

Heck Icey

Over here we make an appointment with a doctor.
They always tell you to come in a half hour before your appointment to fill out the paperwork.

I can understand if a doctor has an emergency which pushes all the appointments up.
Unfortunately, doctors here have a very bad habit of grossly overbooking their available slots.
So, if you have a 9:30am appointment, arrive at 9:00am to make sure your paperwork is done before your scheduled appointment. A nurse will finally show up around 10:15am to take you back to an examination room, where they go through the paperwork, basically asking all the questions you just answered, and each time before. Then they will weigh you and take your blood pressure. They finish around 10:30am and leave the room. Somewhere between 10:45am and 11:00am the doctor will come in, stay about five minutes, then disappear for another ten minutes. He comes back and then spends about five to fifteen minutes with you, then has a nurse come back in to give you the paperwork to go to the Vampire (Lab) for bloodwork. If you are lucky, you will be out of the doctors office in time to be in the heavy lunch hour traffic trying to get home.

If you are not at the doctors office at the time of your scheduled appointment, they will bill you for missing your appointment. I've learned to wait only 15 minutes after my scheduled appointment, and unless notified the doctor had an emergency, I get up and leave. If they try to bill me for missing my appointment, I take the bill double it and send it right back to them, because "I" was there for my appointment but the "doctor" was not available at my scheduled appointment time.

And here is the point you will love about the above. When I owned my businesses, I had reporting abilities to the three major credit bureaus. If any doctor reported me for non-payment of trumped up missed appointment charge. After I doubled their bill and sent it back, and waiting the required 30 days, I reported them to all three credit bureaus for non-payment of my invoice. It cost me a couple of doctors, but saved me a lot of time when I went, they took me on time!

Same way with WalMart's 35 cash registers and only two open. I've left enough full carts after shopping, I now get watched like a hawk, and when they see me heading toward the checkout lanes, suddenly the one I'm walking past opens just in time to catch me for check out. The squeaky wheel does get the grease!

It always amazed me that they could afford to install so many checkout lanes, and could afford to put away the shopping carts of food customers leave behind, because of no one to run the checkout lanes.
But they cannot afford to open a lane to take your money.
To me, this is totally illogical. Especially with twenty asst-managers roaming around the store doing nothing.
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Re: [split] General Health Care

Post by yogi »

My wife and I must see in the order of 7-8 different doctors combined during the course of a year. They all work for the same hospital. I can only think of one or two which my wife sees and who might have a waiting room full of patients that prevent immediate care. By far the majority of these doctors will have you in their examination room within 15 minutes wherein the nurse will do whatever prep work she can. It is generally less than another 15 minutes for the doctor to appear. His/her time with the patient is typically 15 minutes. Thus, in the vast majority of cases my wife and I can be in and out of the doctor's office in 45 minutes on average.

Procedures that the hospital staff may perform, such as blood tests, body scans, or physical therapy also seem to click right along as with doctor visits. The hospital, however, is terribly redundant as Gary points out. Early arrival is encouraged to fill out paperwork, and two or three people along the way want exactly the same information again. This hospital is all computerized and I find it hard to understand why each person who handles you must input the data that is already in the computer database. (I think it's due to the fact that they are still running Windows XP [sarcasm] )

Of course there are emergencies that may extend the time intervals, but I've seldom been delayed by any such thing. The no-show fees are something new to the system, but all the doctors we see now are able to bill you for missed appointments. I presume the idea behind them is to be certain the doctor has no idle time and that the maximum number of patients can be seen in any given day. I like Gary's approach to the waiting game, but over here there is no specified waiting time to see the doctor. If I leave before he sees me, it's technically a no-show.

In all fairness I must say the computerized medical care is an improvement in some ways. When I moved into this house and contacted my previous doctor about transferring my medical records to the new doctor, he wanted $65, or 25 cents per page, to copy and mail them. This copy fee was made a law in our state. I've talked to a couple of my current doctors about transferring my medical records to a new doctor out of state - we may move some day. There is no fee to do that because it's all digital now. I'm sure this is a result of a federal government effort to make medical records universally available, which turns out to be a good thing.
Icey

Re: [split] General Health Care

Post by Icey »

The system's much quicker over here. If you have an appointment at your doctor's surgery for 9 a.m. for example, it's possible that you may have to wait for 10 minutes if a previous patient's overstayed their allotted time. People DO sometimes moan at that, but then if YOU need a few minutes extra, you get it, so it evens out really, and this's with NHS doctors, so it's not bad.
A doctor might be called away on an emergency, in which case you can either wait, in hope that you'll eventually get seen to, make a new appointment or possibly see another doctor who may be on, but in general, this doesn't happen very often.
There's no paperwork to sort out beforehand, and certain appointments're for certain treatments - i.e. if you're having your BP taken, need an injection or some other minor detail, you'll see the nurse. If you have an ongoing complaint or are suffering with a new one, you'll see the doctor.
Hospital (NHS) waits can be longer though, but most patients get seen to.
Private patients get in to see either a GP or hospital consultant pretty much on the dot of their appointment times, but I have to say that in respect of queuing, both are quite good considering the volume of patients.
There's no charge for missing an appointment, and if you change to a different practice, there's no charge for transfer of notes.
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Re: [split] General Health Care

Post by Kellemora »

Well, appointment with a surgeon is a little different. Normally there is no waiting period at all.
I was talking about the normal doctors, and also the hospitals.
Way too many people rush to the hospital when they should be going to a GP instead, which really bogs down the system.
Icey

Re: [split] General Health Care

Post by Icey »

I agree with you. The abuse of A & E services is phenomenal. I think some people just use it as an excuse to go to hospital and wangle some time off work, but being able to say that their problem was "urgent" because it meant attending hospital, especially if no appointment with their GP could be made on the day they wanted it.

I wasn't talking about an appointment with a surgeon either. Those usually run to schedule, whether you pay or not, but over all, our system works well.
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