Report from The Front : Texas Health Care

I asked Maple Leaf Rag how health care was in xx xxx ,  Texas, where he lived. And boy , did he have a few words to share.

I thought of some more aspects of the US medical system that you might find interesting, and that I have not heard discussed elsewhere.  These are my personal observations.

Whenever I got sick in Canada and decided I needed to see a doctor, I went in, the doc found out what was wrong, treated me, I got better and that was that.  OHIP paid my bill and I was happy.  On the other hand, when my cat, Wizard got diabetes when she was 15 years old, I took her in to the Vet, and as there is no OHIP plan for pets, and everything was coming out of my own pocket, the vet tried really hard to scare me and encouraged me to have them do some $2000 dollar procedure on Wizard or she would basically be dead within a week.  When I told them that I was completely unable to pay that kind of money and had tears in my eyes thinking that I would have to have her euthanized, the veterinary assistant took pity on me and mentioned as an afterthought that I could just start buying insulin and needles at the drugstore for 20 or 30 bucks a month and inject her 2 times a day.  I tried it and it worked.  She lived 5 more years.

American doctors operate on a profit basis much like Canadian veterinarians.  The more you see them, the more you pay them, the richer they get and as there is no OHIP to deny unnecessary procedures, they encourage all kinds of ridiculous tests, scans, & endless return visits.  They scare you with all kinds of hypotheses and frightening possibilities and drop frightening little comments and concerned looks and basically try to hook you like a fish and milk you like a cash cow.  You see their waiting rooms full of the same frightened patients week after week, going in for probably unnecessary tests and coming out with huge bags of pill bottles.  I got sucked into this a few years ago when I got a case of bronchitis that would not go away for months.  At my doctor it was "come back next week, take more pills, get more chest x rays, it's PROBABLY not cancer, etc. etc."  Finally, I took some different antibiotics my mother in law had gotten over the counter in Mexico and the bronchitis went away in a week.  Drugstores here have huge LED signs outside advertising vaccines against all kinds of diseases, from meningitis, to flu, to shingles.  Scary medical billboards flank the highways.  The USA is host to a culture of fear.  Fear of sickness, fear of crime, fear of terrorists, fear of social ostracism, fear of damnation, you name it, and it is all calculated to make you spend your money, whether on doctors, guns, deodorant, church tithes or whatever.

One of my xxxx sons has to see a shrink ever month or so.  His former doctor was a shameless pill pusher.  His waiting room was full of  people who were essentially junkies, asking the receptionist every 5 minutes when he would see them so they could get their allotment of the happy pills he threw around like Willie Wonka at the chocolate factory.  He gave my son these pills that seemed to work at first.  But after a few weeks, however, the kid started losing weight and displaying psychotic symptoms like cutting off all his hair and attacking his brother in his sleep.  He started to look like a skeletal Auschwitz inmate.   I checked into the pills online and it turns out the doctor had prescribed him what was basically speed, which apparently works on hyperactive kids, but NOT on xxxxxxx.  We got him to another doctor who seems a LITTLE more ethical.

Also, as it is all profit based, their offices and waiting rooms have this cheap, unprofessional appearance in many cases, because they skimp on anything peripheral to the operation of scamming patients.  I've been in waiting rooms that felt more like someone's den.  Better than Mexico though...  I once had a root canal and a crown done by a lady dentist down in Juarez who had her 2 year old daughter on her lap screaming PEE-PEE!  PEE-PEE!  PEE-PEE! in my ear for the whole time and her office looked about as sanitary as a bachelor's kitchen.  But then again, that only cost me $70 dollars.

A lot of American institutions seem to be run by the seat of the pants.  I blame the capitalistic profit-based mindset for this.  Very inefficient, very wasteful, very foolish due to poor decisions and trying to stretch the buck.  The xxxxx xxxxx that employs me, for example.  Several years ago they bought half a million bucks worth of some kind of hand-held data organizer and matching software for use by the xxxxxxx simply because they were on sale.  When they distributed them, they found that these things were totally unsuitable for their needs.  Whoops!  No returns on sale items.  Into the  warehouse they went, where they sit like the Lost Ark of the Covenant on a dusty wooden skid, gathering dust and getting more and more obsolete every day.  Not to mention all the corruption, misappropriation of funds etc. in local government.  In xx xxx,  it is commonplace for the FBI and Texas Rangers to step in and raid municipal government offices and local police departments in order  to arrest politicians and cops for corruption.  Recently, a County Commissioner was arrested for smuggling  thousands of pounds of pot from Mexico to northern cities.  I don't know if all this corruption is a result of being tied so closely to the thoroughly corrupt culture of our Mexican neighbors or if it is endemic to the entire US, but it is pretty much a Mickey Mouse outfit around here as far as local Government goes. 

 Ok. so ... my dreams of imigrating to the states are shattered. How about yours ?

Doctors that push pills rather than cure diseases ? Months with Bronchitis until you looked it up and handled it yourself ?

I have a real sickness (Chrones Disease) which means if I was an American I would either be hooked on narcotics by now  , or simply dead from endless misdiagnosis designed to enrich the doctor rather than cure disease.

If you do a better job looking stuff up on the internet than seeing the doctor ... something is wrong with that system.