Bureaucracy Blues

Over the summer, Jonah took a class at the local community college. At the time, he was considering a double major in science and politics, so he needed some extra credits to graduate on time. He studied hard and did fine.

The next step was getting the credits transferred over to his college. It should have been no big deal. It was all within the same state, and our public colleges have a relationship with the community colleges. But it was.

Jonah, who has become adept at managing courses with adjunct professors who don’t answer their emails, using a overloaded bus system with an hour commute between classes, and cooking a pasta dinner for six hungry teenagers in their off-campus house, could not move those damn credits from one place to another.

I had to step in. I was sending too many texts that nagged him to follow up with various bureaucrats. It was distracting him from his studies. So, I latched onto someone in the advisement department who returned my e-mails, and we worked it out. It took nearly a week.

One of the issues was that the registrar at the community college uses a third-party to send transcripts to other colleges. But that online system would only send electronic transcripts to the admissions departments of other colleges. That process works for transfer students at Jonah’s college, but for a kid just transferring a single class, the credits had to go to the advisement department. Jonah’s advisement department had no access to information sent to the admissions office, so it could not get the electronic transcript. (It took about seven emails for me to figure that out.) So, I had go in person to the community college and pick up a paper version of the transcript in a sealed envelope. Jonah then had to come home, get the transcript, and then walk it over to the advisement office. Finally, credits moved from one place to another.

I manage a lot of bureaucracies. Over the years, I’ve tried to get Ian’s therapies covered by our insurance company, because it is SUPPOSED to pay for autism services, but really doesn’t. Every month, I fill out the paperwork, scan the form, and send it to the agency that gives him a few dollars for respite care.

Right now, I have no idea where Ian’s state standardized test scores from last spring went. He goes to an out-of-district school, so the scores seem to have gotten lost between our home district and his actual school. I’ve sent three emails to various administrators to help me find them.

He’s turning 18 this April, so we have to go through the gauntlet of state rules, lawyers, and justices to gain guardianship over his financial and medical matters. After that, if he qualifies (a major if), he’ll receive support for health, work, housing, but I’ll have to manage all the paperwork in completely different state bureaucracies.

Over the years, my mom has managed bureaucracies not only for our family, but for her parents and other assorted old, family-less people, who somehow became her responsibility. And that’s why, she’s against universal healthcare. She’s never met a bureaucracy that works well. She’s sure that a horrible system will only be made worse, once the government gets involved.

There’s a lot of people like my mom out there. They’re skeptical about Warren and Sander’s Healthcare for All. Sure, everybody should be able to go to the doctor for a flu shot, but if it means that they’ll have to fill out forms in triplicate and have month-long waits for routine procedures, they’re out. And costs will probably go up.

There is a lot of room for a moderate Democrat in this primary. Biden held that territory for a while, but he is performing so badly in the debates that others are stepping into that territory. We have to keep any eye on Klobuchar. I think she’s going to give Warren and the Twitter Democrats a run for their money.

39 thoughts on “Bureaucracy Blues

  1. Over the years, my mom has managed bureaucracies not only for our family, but for her parents and other assorted old, family-less people, who somehow became her responsibility. And that’s why, she’s against universal healthcare. She’s never met a bureaucracy that works well. She’s sure that a horrible system will only be made worse, once the government gets involved.

    And yet, she and the people she takes care of are probably on Medicare and happy to be there. (“Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”) Irony is alive and well and living in New Jersey.

    I am sure Medicare has its own paperwork but really, is it worse than dealing with the bureaucracy involved with private insurance companies? Based on the lived experience of myself and literally every single other person with private insurance, I have my doubts.

    I *have,* however, lived in two countries with universal access to health care. Both were essentially Medicare-for-all-with-add-on-optional-private-insurance. What we would have if we just took existing Medicare and allowed everyone to join. Both systems were much superior to ours, producing equivalent or better outcomes for far less money. I’d take either in a heartbeat over ours.

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    1. Medicare is pretty easy, at least in Nebraska. Far easier than any health insurance I have had since about 1996. You have to enroll, but after that the only complicated part is Part D.

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      1. One of them was the UK. I have a kid on the autism spectrum. My experiences were better there, again in spite of the US spending twice what the UK spends per capita on healthcare.

        Making arguments by anecdote really isn’t convincing. You can find any number of horror story clickbait about any country. The data about the supposed superiority of our way of doing things just isn’t there.

        What I find really annoying is that it is possible to make arguments against universal healthcare, but most people who make them do so from a position of vapid ignorance, making statements about the way healthcare is delivered in the UK or Australia (the two countries I lived in) that show they know less than nothing about how these systems really work. It should be a prerequisite that before one makes these arguments they should really have to learn about that of which they speak about.

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      2. “Making arguments by anecdote isn’t really convincing.” I agree, but I was responding to a post of pure anecdote, about Jay’s individual experience in two countries.

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      3. “Making arguments by anecdote isn’t really convincing.” I agree, but I was responding to a post of pure anecdote, about Jay’s individual experience in two countries.

        Yes, but like I’ve said several times, the actual data is reflective of my lived experience. These countries (as well as most other European countries) really do spend far less money for equivalent health outcomes. Go with the data rather than anecdotes if you like. You will end up in exactly the same place.

        My anecdotes are not arguments for what we should do but merely counterexamples for the uninformed horror stories that are used to argue against universal health care.

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  2. She’s sure that a horrible system will only be made worse, once the government gets involved.

    Echoing Jay to say, right, because private insurance bureaucracies work so well for regular people.

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  3. Agree with the previous comments.

    1) A couple of years ago,we lived in a European country for a year. Even though we were not citizens and therefore not covered by their universal healthcare system, all of us were able to see doctors right away (for free!) to deal with all the medical issues that came up for all family members. No bureaucracy, no forms, just immediate treatment.

    2) now, back in the US, we have supposedly « good » insurance through a major university.

    I have a chronic condition, but it’s impossible to schedule an appointment for needed tests until 6 months from now. I end up skipping needed medical care because it can’t be scheduled in a timely fashion.

    I have rarely seen an actual medical doctor, because all care is delegated to nurse practitioners (who are very nice, but I would like to see an MD once in a while)

    Just last week, I tried to schedule an appointment for an acute problem, only to be told that the next available appointment was in mid-November and, if I wanted to be seen sooner, I should go to an emergency room.

    I’ve never understood the argument that M4A will require long wait times.

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    1. Mary said,

      “I’ve never understood the argument that M4A will require long wait times.”

      If you put more people into the system without enlarging the system and while attempting to cut reimbursements to existing providers in the system, of course wait times get bigger.

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      1. I think somebody smart campaigning for Obamacare or a single-payer system would figure out a way to force the opposing candidates to say that aloud.

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    2. I’ve never understood the argument that M4A will require long wait times.

      In practice it won’t necessarily require longer wait times. It will require *different* wait times. For essential care (cancer screenings, for instance) people will be moved through the system quickly. For other things (knee replacement, for instance), there will probably be wait times. For people in the US who have gold-plated insurance right now, the times will seem longer. For people who don’t currently have insurance that covers these things, infinity is a long time to wait and when you take the average of infinity and a short time, that is still a bigger number than it would be under M4A.

      The UK spends half of what we spend on health care per-capita for equivalent outcomes. I think the math works for us. We are already spending the money, but we are not getting the outcomes. The extra money is mostly going to insurance middlemen and hospital administrators and New York investment bankers who invest in the healthcare industry. These are expenses I could willingly forego.

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  4. That’s great that many of you have lived in other countries and have positive experiences. But the vast majority of Americans have not. They need to be reassured and not ridiculed. After all, most Americans have had negative bureaucracy experiences one way or another.

    If the system will really be better for them, they need to hear about that. When they hear about changes in the healthcare system, they immediately think about phone trees and 20 minutes on hold trying to get approval on getting a plantar’s wart removed from their third toe. They’ll have to learn to navigate a whole new system, when they’ve barely figured out the one right now.

    And I’m not even talking about the rise in taxes on the middle class. Even though Bernie et al say that their costs overall will go down, they don’t believe them. Politicians are not exactly trustworthy.

    We have to have some empathy for regular voters. They’re not greedy or mean. They’re afraid.

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    1. . When they hear about changes in the healthcare system, they immediately think about phone trees and 20 minutes on hold trying to get approval on getting a plantar’s wart removed from their third toe.

      This happens now, here, when they are dealing with their private insurance.

      To see medical professionals in the countries I lived in I was on a phone tree precisely never.

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  5. Isn’t the key to think about “who benefits?” That is, private health care bureaucracy is arranged with a for-profit motive of, legitimately, not paying for anything they’re not contractually obliged to pay for (which is super complicated to determine because it depends on contractual relationships between the insurance company and every specific provider, as well as the contract with the insured patient), and, illegitimately, to avoid paying for care even where they are contractually obliged to pay by making it burdensome for the patient.

    Medicare for all, or whatever you want to call single payer, is going to inherently be both much simpler, and it won’t be profit driven. The whole class of interactions with providers where you’re trying to figure out if they take your insurance will be gone. The whole class of interactions where you’re trying to figure out if you need an authorization for a specialist and if so from whom and how to get it will be simpler, because it’ll be the same process for everyone. The whole class of interactions where you’re trying to figure out if something is or is not covered will again be simpler, because it’ll be public and uniform.

    A big part of the stress of dealing with health care bureaucracy is the variability and the secrecy of what will get paid for and how, and not only does it make sense that that would be simpler, everyone in countries where there is some kind of universal coverage reports it as simpler.

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    1. Yes. Not just the bureaucracy, but the cost. Healthcare, if you figure how much is actually paid for my insurance, is my biggest expense after housing. Or maybe more than housing, depending on what happens that year and if you count dentists and glasses.

      And I’m still mad that it’s been since 2008 for Obamacare and there is not even the hint of a Republican plan despite trying to destroy it.

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    2. My last physical, they screwed up my insurance and sent me a bill. It was $900 for a physical and a blood test. There’s already a large, unaccountable bureaucracy running health care here (UPMC). It’s not going to get any worse on that count. If it gets some delays because more people are able to get services, I’ll take that as something I ought to endure out of basic decency.

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  6. They’ll have to learn to navigate a whole new system, when they’ve barely figured out the one right now.

    I also want to push back a little on this. People’s insurance changes all the time; if you change jobs; if your job changes providers; if your insurance company changes how it does stuff. So people mostly don’t have a stable set of skills they rely on for how to deal with their specific insurance, they have the skills they use for navigating bureaucracy generally. (Like, your mother isn’t relying on her knowledge of Blue Cross/Blue Shield of NJ, she’s helping people out with whatever their insurance is, all of which are kind of different in the specifics.)

    What’s the basis for thinking that navigating the switch from anyone’s current insurance to M4A would be meaningfully harder than the sort of switching between providers that’s baked into the current system? (Maybe the answer is “There’s no good reason to think it would be. But voters believe it would be, and we have to figure out how to talk to them about it in a supportive way even though their beliefs are ill-founded.” That’s definitely a difficult problem.)

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  7. And the US way of doing things is an overall drag on the economy, too. I’ve worked for or with numerous small businesses in Germany, and y’all know how much time the owners and managers spend thinking about employee health care plans? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Nichts.

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    1. Yes, the current system is clearly hurting small businesses. I think that helps bigger businesses keep labor costs down. That and the fact that it makes it easier for the elderly to see a doctor (because Medicare is easier for them and pays better) are why the current system gets Republican support.

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  8. I’m not a libertarian and am for universal health care. I’m not sure why I’m making counter arguments today, but I just feel like it today.

    Look, from what I hear from the old folks, Medicare isn’t great on its own. Many seniors have to purchase additional insurance from AARP. And I hear lots of complaints about drug coverage.

    And I’m very empathetic to people who fear changes, because they are worried about phone trees and run arounds. Anybody who deals with bureaucracy for disabled or elderly people has had their share of headaches.

    Many of you are choosing to avoid the bureaucracies and hassles at public colleges by paying for your kids to go to private colleges. Let me tell another story about Jonah’s public college. He had an issue with financial aid this semester. Again, I stepped in to help because he was getting nowhere with them. The first time that I called, I waited on hold for 30 minutes. When I finally talked with some low level person, they filled out the paperwork for me and told me that they would put our file in the urgent pile. I asked how long before they got to our paperwork in the urgent pile. They said 7-10 days. After 10 days with no response, I called again. Waited on hold for 30 minutes and then got disconnected. I called back, this time I chose the option to leave a message and someone would call me back. Nobody ever did. My contact in the advisement office ultimately sorted it out for me.

    And public K-12 schools are a public bureaucracy. By law, they are supposed to provide my son with a free, appropriate education. Hahahaha. I screwed up my academic career by working my ass off to get him the education that he needed — sometimes by persistent, endless meetings and emails, sometimes by paying out of pocket for services.

    My folks have the good luck of being healthy in their mid-80s. But that also means that they have gotten stuck filling out paperwork and managing the finances of their friends, who have been abandoned by family and the government. My mom is trying very hard to not get too involved with a situation in the Bronx, where a friend (not even a good friend) is living in a bed-bug invested apartment with stacks of old church bulletins and sheet music that’s she hoarding. Dementia has set in and she can’t remember to pay her bills. This woman has no safety net.

    Now, I’m a progressive liberal, who wants more money and services for disabled people, old people, people without health insurance. But I think we should also listen to those who have gotten burned by the system.

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    1. You should keep track of all the hours you are spending on bureaucracy for Jonah throughout his college years and then do a report after he graduates on how much it cost you to do this. I’m sure you would still come out way ahead financially, but this would add another layer to your analysis of college costs.

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    2. The safety net for dementia is really bad because it’s Medicaid not Medicare. Private pay assisted living is like paying for two years of private college tuition every year.

      Medicare is still by far the easiest and cheapest thing I have dealt with for health care. I know there’s a lot of old people trying to avoid the donut hole on paying for their meds, but that amount is barely a rounding error in what my mom is paying.

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    3. And then Trump cut what was deductable for medical expenses to give a tax cut to wealthier people plus plunged the soy bean market into the toilet for a trade war in which he clearly had no coherent plan to either win or end.

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    4. Many of you are choosing to avoid the bureaucracies and hassles at public colleges by paying for your kids to go to private colleges.

      Again, this is weird to me. My daughter’s at a public college (UCSC), and bureaucracy hasn’t been much of a hassle — that is, nothing she couldn’t handle by herself without parental intervention. And back when I went to U Chicago, it was a bureaucratic nightmare. I nearly didn’t graduate the quarter I meant to because their communication about how to do it was so bad. (It was okay for people graduating in the spring quarter, the way most people did, but trying to graduate after the summer quarter was a mess.)

      I feel as if I’m just being contrary here, but you seem to be appealing to a shared experience where private organizations are smoothly well-run and easy to deal with, and public organizations are burdensome and difficult, and that’s not familiar to me: they’re all kind of lousy, but public is definitely not systematically worse. I have had in the last few months had to spend over an hour in the DMV (new drivers license) and at the cable company (finally getting the cable out of my ex’s name), and the cable company was the place where I had to raise my voice and explain that what the clerk was telling me was insane and there had to be a solution other than the one they were giving me. The DMV was fine, just processing so many people that it took a while.

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      1. lol. You are the ONLY person who has something good to say about the DMV.

        btw, I was at the Indian Road Cafe in Inwood last sunday. I gave a couple bucks to the school up there. Forget the name. It begins with an A. There were having a tag sale on the street.

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      2. Amistad? If that’s it, it’s the school my kids went to. Loved it.

        (And the hour and a half at the DMV sucked, it just wasn’t as demented as the hour and a half at the cable company.)

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      3. I like our DMV (so there are at least two people!). I renewed my license a month ago, and yes it was no fun, but that was because of the federal rules for enhanced licenses, not the service at the DMV. The service worked very smoothly.

        I would pay (and thought I was paying) to avoid the bureaucracy of public school when the kids were in private school, but, so far, the system had worked smoothly at my kiddo’s public HS. There was a magical moment in which a required credit was transferred to his online transcript without us having to do ANYTHING! (the schools had interacted at the request of another parent).

        I agree with elizardbreath that I have not found private services to be noticeably less bureaucratic (i.e. our bank, cable company, gas company, health insurance, private school v DMV, electric company, public school. . . .). That does not mean that I want all private services to become public, but I think there’s some other criterion we need to be applying, rather than just private v public. I feel the same way about nonprofit v profit (i.e. nonprofit is not immune to the negative impulses of profit driven organizations).

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      4. Say, I actually believe that banks don’t want customers anymore. I think they’ve become some kind of weird tax hedging institutions (maybe to process tax credits for wind farms) or some other business I don’t understand. Kind of like when car companies started become loan companies.

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      5. Though it was a long time ago, I attended both private and public institutions of higher education, and I can’t say that one was more or less bureaucratic than the other. I don’t remember having bureaucratic frustrations with either, to be honest.

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      6. DMVs in small towns are just fine. Ours is very efficient. Well, except for the makeshift drive-through they put in to service renewal stickers – but I made the mistake of going in the afternoon on the last day of the month. Our City Hall is also very efficient – easy to pay a late water bill, get trash stickers, get permissions for block parties, etc. Even in mid-sized cities, government offices I’ve been to have run pretty smoothly. I worked at a city agency for a year and it was no more or less bureaucratized than any other job.

        If you want to talk about private companies, let’s pause for a moment to think about trying to get anything done with, say, Comcast. Or any place where you’re paying money monthly and you’d like to stop – Sirius, a gym membership, all of those places where you MUST get on the phone with someone. Private insurance companies have an incentive to be like Comcast or your gym when it comes to doling out money or benefits.

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  9. My adventures in health care this week:
    Saturday: Kid comes out to the deck where I was grading exams. Kid: “Where is my EpiPen?” Me: “I think it’s … Wait, why do you want to know where your Epi-Pen is?” 6 hours later we get home from the ER (he ate peanuts by accident). It was all pretty easy. Police/ambulance came; ER took us quickly; we had to wait for 4 hours to make sure there was no rebound after the epinephrine wore off. When they released him, we just walked out. I didn’t have to stop and pay anyone anything. But I am expecting a bill of some sort.
    Yesterday (and 2 weeks earlier): Other kid is going to study abroad in Spain next semester (a university outside of Barcelona, fwiw). She needs some sort of health insurance letter to show she would be covered in Spain. I call BCBS and get someone who has no idea what I’m talking about or what I need. Eventually, I get them to agree to send a letter saying that she has coverage directly to my kid, who needs it to give to the Study Abroad office. 2 weeks later, she is telling me she still doesn’t have it, so I call again, except this time I call the number on my card instead of the number on my HR site. I get a lovely representative who literally gasps in envy when I tell her my kid is going to Barcelona. She tells me precisely what to do to get this letter, which involves the website and is very easy. I hang up the phone then bang my head on my desk for a while.
    On the other hand, my mother, who pays for health insurance through my dead father’s workplace or whatever and also has Medicare, just had to pay $7000 to the rehab where she was from late July to mid-September for a broken leg. Two kinds of insurance. One broken leg. $7000. Sigh.

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    1. Correction: apparently it’s very easy to get the paperwork IF my kid can manage to register on the website. *sigh* Now she’s getting error messages.

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  10. I think talking communicating effectively is a very reasonable goal and expectation, and I think people are, here on this comment thread. Jay’s comments, for example, that some forms of care will take longer to get, is trying to describe the system that other people have and what some of its costs might be.

    When I think personally about my health care, I know what I want is one-stop shopping, where I know where to go and what I’ll get with the least intellectual and emotional investment on my part. I had that, for the only period in which I used health care intensively — when I was pregnant, through my university-sponsored, cooperative health insurance (health insurance through an established health care cooperative). But, I am fairly pathological about bureaucracy and paperwork (my kids haven’t had to face much — I don’t know what I would do if they did). I am also willing to accept poorer service (waits, weird things like having to get a lab test at their facility before they will believe you are pregnant, little choice of doctor) in order to get the one stop service. I don’t comparison shop for my groceries and I really don’t comparison shop for healthcare (though I have not had to deal with a serious illness or chronic condition).

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  11. What do others want? I don’t really know, but I know I’ve heard of different models.

    1) the family doctor, of the old style, in which a doctor run a small business with a constant clientele of patients who were part of their community. I think this business model is dead or dying. Doctors don’t want to do it; medicine has changed, requiring greater use of technology and specialized expertise. The rural communities that use to rely on that model are dying, too, and when they still exist, they can’t find doctors.

    2) the true insurance model, in which one shops for care and only uses insurance when the equivalent of your house burns down. I think the flaw in this model is that most people are poor consumers of medical care (it require expertise) and many of us don’t like to be model consumers (me, for example). And, most importantly, everyone’s house burns down.Eventually, since medicine has gotten so much better, many people die slow, consuming lots of care along the way (i.e. dementia).

    3) whatever the current model is, which includes comparison shopping, insurance, bureaucracy, government regulations and insurance (44% of coverage) and employer dependent plans (which employers are finding increasingly inefficient to subsidize) and a growing gig economy of people who do not have employers. I don’t think this model works (it doesn’t work for me particularly well, now). I think this model relies heavily on not covering everyone, i.e. providing less medical care.

    So what about single payer models? consequences might include startup costs (when we cover more people while trying to scale up), lower compensation for providers, including pharmaceutical companies and doctors, a balancing of care that might result in some people having less service than they had before, . . .

    But, increased bureaucracy doesn’t seem to be one of the most likely issues.

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  12. I think it is sensible for Americans to worry about bureaucracy, because from what I see from my family members, it’s insane. I have a relative who had a hospital stay for a weird issue that resulted in many tests and she had to take an entire day off work to sort it out…she’s a very high-level HR executive. The co-pays alone would drive me nuts. I live in Canada and the most I have ever paid for a hospital stay has been parking.

    In Canada, there are _definitely_ times the bureaucracy is bad. Autism support in my province has been especially awful from what I understand. But in general, to get healthcare I:
    – have a provincial health card
    – can walk into a walk-in clinic any time and get seen
    – have a family doctor (this can be a problem in some areas) that I can see same-day most days
    – have always received fast entry for big problems. I joke, but not really, that you know how bad it is by how fast things move. When I got a specialist appointment the day after a mammogram I was sure I was dying, and in fact, had the diagnosis been the worst one, I would have been.
    – wait a loooong time for weird issues, like I had peripheral neuropathy and I had to wait 6 weeks for an MRI and then my appointment was at 1:45 AM, because they run the MRI machines 24/7.

    A lot of the question will be, will Americans decide to make healthcare available in a generous spirit or not. And by that I don’t mean cost-wise; there are always limits on costs or on availability. But here in Canada in general the system is set up to try to provide good care based on balancing need and resources, not on an idea that every abuser needs to be kept out of the system. So doctors have incentives to keep their testing under control, for example, and not book unnecessary MRIs, and sometimes that is right and sometimes things are missed and that sucks.

    But they are doing that because MRI time is limited and because they don’t have a financial incentive to overbook, nor a huge likelihood that they will be sued into oblivion if they don’t, which is probably one of the biggest hurdles in the American system where costs are concerned. And if my neighbour down the street goes to her doctor “too much” or has an unnecessary dermatologist (you will wait forever for a derm here if your condition doesn’t look like something life-threatening) well, I don’t really worry about it, because the medical system is for her too and hopefully she gets anti-anxiety meds at some point instead.

    Some other ways this culture is different… My daughter died 4 days after her birth due to medical error at childbirth, and at the time the largest payment ever in my province that had been awarded to parents whose child died via perinatal loss was…$75,000 per parent. So $150,000 or barely the cost of an obstetrician’s salary to the hospital. For children who survived and needed care, millions, but punitive damages…that was it. So you can imagine the difference in insurance costs but also in underlying medical culture. This means some people die because their doctors didn’t take them seriously or didn’t do the right thing, like my daughter. It also means that doctors don’t order tests/procedures in order not to be sued. They generally order them based on standard of care.

    Obviously I am still furious that she died due to incompetence, but at the same time, I understand that mistakes happen everywhere and from what I can see, our medical outcomes over our population are the same or better because I live in a country where few people die for lack of medical coverage and where doctors overall are professionals doing their best to make good _medical_ decisions, not business decisions. I have not really grown up in a culture where I would expect to sue that hospital out of oblivion; I in fact decided not to sue since $150k wasn’t going to change /the hospital/ and instead I went through the ombudsman and simultaneously the head of obstetrics resigned. I am a product of the system that way. My overall sense of the greater good means that I do not, personally, vote on the basis of or worry about making sure No One Ever Gets A Dollar of Healthcare Extra. I can do that, because I have some confidence that if I am really sick, I will get help whether I have a dime or not.

    What I find shocking in the US is that the bureaucracy starts not just over money but over /treatment/. Insurance companies can say no to treatment. (This has happened to relatives of mine, that the doctor thought they should have something that is fairly standard and the insurance company said no.) That would freak me out! So I understand that in the US the idea of the government having the same power is freaky. For me, I’d rather the government have it and everyone be covered and people not have to worry about healthcare at the same time they’ve lost their job but I do see where the concern comes from.

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  13. That’s just horrible, Jenn. I’m really sorry.

    Mistakes happen here all the time, too. My OB sliced open my bladder during a c-section to get Jonah out of me. I needed a six hour operation to get sewed up, after I had spent 30 hours in labor and getting a c-section. I was seriously a mess. Even though it took me months to heal and I peed into a bag strapped to my leg for months, I healed. And if you heal, you can’t sue. If I could have, I would have. I consulted many lawyers about it. After all these years, I’m still mad.

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