My Chronic Life

I don’t want to be a doctor, nurse, medical tech or anyone who works in the medical field now. I was happy when I was able to work as Social Worker for a home health agency way back when, but things have changed a lot since then and we have our government and health insurance companies to thank for that.

You see when I was able to work outside my home, Medicare actually paid for medical care that allowed a doctor to stay in the examining room with you for a while. S/He would be able to ask you a lot of questions about your health condition. S/He would be able to help you prevent medical conditions from occurring. You could stay in the hospital when you had surgery, especially if you were elderly and frail and had no one to care for you at home. You could get home health care if you lived alone and couldn’t for any reason, do your own insulin injections. The agency could provide a home health aid for you to help you with your personal care if you needed assistance, a social worker if you were depressed or dealing with stress and/or a nurse to check on your wound care id you were diabetic, or if you needed IV treatment and were too sick to go out daily to get it from a clinic.

Now you’re lucky if you spend more than 10 minutes with your doctor. There’s more out-patient surgeries that used to be done in hospital. If you can’t bathe yourself, too bad, you can either try sponge baths, hire someone or not bathe. If you’re sick and need IV treatments you need to find transportation to the clinic that opens at 6AM for patients. So sorry if you’re weak from the infection.

It’s a sad state of how things are now. It must an awful feeling for many in the medical field who are really concerned about patient care to know that their hands are tied in so many things they want to do.

I’m blessed because I have doctors that care and go above and beyond and because of the type of health insurance I have. I see how difficult it is for others especially the elderly, people without insurance, people with multiple health problems and those who have Medicare or a Medicare HMO and for anyone who has Medicaid.

I pray that our next president will do something to make changes in health care in the US.