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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (15128)	11/4/2003 12:24:45 PM
From: Lady Lurksalot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793649

For many, many years, even though I had excellent medical insurance through employers, on those rare occasions when I felt the need of a physician, I selected my physicians and paid their bills from my own pocket, believing that medical insurance was for medical catastrophies and not the ordinary stuff. An analogy to my thought process could be likened to the lunacy of expecting insurance to pay one's grocery or utility bills. Skipping ahead another many, many years, I again had excellent medical insurance through my employer. However--and a BIG however--at the time I was hired and instructed to fill the out voluminous forms and select a personal physician, I mentally threw a dart at the hospital staff list and selected a physician's name, my thought being merely to get the forms put through to the bureaucrats' satisfaction, smugly convinced I probably would never need this coverage. Well, within a mere week, I sustained a singularly nasty ankle fracture and found myself in the emergency room, parroting the the name of that randomly selected personal physician I had designated on the insurance application--a physician who did not know I existed--on paper or in life. To make a short story even shorter, when I arrived (in leg cast and wheelchair) at the office of the orthopedic surgeon to whom the emergency room had referred me, I learned said orthopedic surgeon could not treat me--even though I agreed to personally pay for his services on the spot and even though all the potentially involved physicians were on the same hospital staff and approved by my employer's health plan. There is more to this story, but you get the idea. Increasingly, physicians are declining to treat people who do not have some form of medical insurance, be it provided by the government or by private plans. Personally, I would welcome a return to fee-for-service medical care. I paid much less for medical care in the years referred to in the first paragraph than I pay for my current medical insurance coverage--even when factoring for inflation and advanced technologies. Speaking for health-care professionals and for patients, had we had the foresight to demand and maintain that status quo, I do not think we would be in the sorry mess we find ourselves today.