The Penguin Gammer

So last night I was getting ready for bed and went out to have a goodnight smoke when of my neighbors came up to me asking if I had 23 dollars he could borrow until Saturday so he could pick up his meds. Unfortunately it was the day before payday so I had nothing left to give. He then started talking about how bad the state healthcare program he was on is, how even though he gets meds for basically nothing, and yet he still can barley pay the rates. He told me about how his wife was told when she broke her shoulder how there doctor told them not to even bother coming in to see them until they had 250 dollars to pay for the visit and x-rays, and how if he takes his proscriptions any where else to get filed other then the places the state program he is on how they will not fill the order, meaning that even if he could get some meds cheaper else where off the health plan he is still stuck. I am not sure how much of his story was just poor me, and how much was the truth, but my jaw almost totally dropped when he asked me if I herd about Obama’s speech he gave the night before. I had and he then went into how he hopes how Obama’s plan will hurry up and get put into action. This shocked me not because it was another person thinking that government health care meant cheap doctors for them ( even though it will be far from that), no I was in shock because he just spend the last 20 minutes telling me how bad his state health care program was and now he is hoping for a government one??

I asked him a couple of times if he understood that any government healthcare plan would basically be the same thing, and every time I asked he would just start in again about how bad his care was and some one needed to fix it. While I do agree that there needs to be fixes to our country’s health care system I do not see how socializing can help. I informed him how Canada has not e-vac helicopters because there to expensive, and how in England they will not perform certain operations on you if you’re a senior cause they look at it as a waste of money, and when I asked him if he would like to see some one make that kind of choice for him, tell him what care he can or can not have based upon his age, or any other factor for that matter he just went on about how we need change cause our health care system stinks.

I do not disagree our health care system stinks. If not for my employer I would be paying 300+ a month for insurance to basically cover nothing, but the most outrages emergencies, no medication, or doctor payment help, All because I have diabetes. Before getting this job for almost 2 years I was barley making ends meet, barley having $50 a moth left over after paying for food shelter, care and utilities. I could not get health care from my work, nor could I afford even the worst plan there was, yet I made just over $20,000 a year so I could not get state of government help. I ended up getting an infection in my foot that after 2 years of it remaining there the doctors had to take my toe. If I had health insurance I could have avoided the mess a long time ago buy simply taking some antibiotics. But since I was not able to afford to see a doctor regularly let alone pay for meds costing me more then 50 bucks in the same month I ended up losing my toe and going into almost ¾ of my income in debt. But not all of that situation was my fault. I could have picked up an extra job or two to get the money, If I had taken care of my self better I might not have even been in that situation in the first place. My point is that while I believe that we need to make healthcare more affordable to the low pay brackets in this country, I also have to take some responsibility for what happened. Take that Neighbor I was just talking about. He also is a dietetic. He not only takes the same pills I take but also take 2 forms of insulin, yet his sugars are 290/300 all the time, When I started to say it was his diet  he tried to say all he ate most of the times was veggies. I tried to explain how a proper diet works, how you need to build your diet, what kinds of food you need to look for when your a diabetic, but he just kept talking about how he ate correctly and still his sugars where high, and how his Doc can not figure out why. I asked him if he kept a journal of what he ate, when and how much and he once again said he is eating right and it is not the food. Well from personal experience I can tell you that it is very hard to eat right, let alone for a diabetic that needs to keep tight control on it otherwise you can very easily spike your sugars. I have fallen of that truck more times then I care to remember. I can also tell you how when you do eat right and drop some weight you can see a HUGE difference in your numbers. Meds alone will never fix a diabetic; only proper habits can do that, meds just help make the changes more effective. My point is that while my neighbor was screaming about how expensive healthcare is and how some one needs to fix he, fails to realize that the biggest problem with out country’s healthcare system is people that fail to do the right things like eat good foods and get some form of exercise, and while I understand that changes in lifestyle are not easy, I myself keep falling back every time I make an effort to be a bit healthier,  it  is the abuse we put our bodies through then expect the doctors to magically fix it. But that is just one of the problems with our healthcare system. You also have to consider that there is really no competition in the healthcare market. If a drug manufacture company was to make a cure for AIDS tomorrow they would have exclusive rights to that drug for something like 10 years before any one could start making generics of that drug, meaning that unless another company happens to stumble upon the same discoveries the maker of said drug can charge what ever they want for those 10 years and there is nothing to stop them.

You also have no way of knowing how much each doctor charges for what procedure, how much they charge for different tests they run. The only upfront price you will get from there office is how much the visit is for the Doc just to see you. Even if you know what labs your Doc is going to run on you they still will not tell you what the cost could be because they either out source the tests and truly have no clue, or simply because there is no real use in telling you since there is no real point in knowing because it is not like you can alla-cart a visit anyways. Because even you if brought your own lab work in form some other doctor or clinic they will just insist on running the tests again them self’s so they do not have to worry about getting sued. Which is another problem with the costs of healthcare, so many doctors are afraid to get sued that they often run un-needed and costly tests just to cover there buts, and because of all the lawsuits, ( some even totally outrages) that the cost for malpractice insurance is so high they end up passing that cost on to you.  HOM’s is another problem. They dictate what a doctor can and can not do, they charge the doctor to be part of there plan so there patients can use there insurance there. Drug makers are also a problem as well. There reps spend tons of money on perks to give doctors to encourage them to use and proscribe there products. They give them every thing from Pens and paper, to coffee mugs, to paid lunches for there staffs, MP3 Players, you name it some one is giving it to a doctor to win there favor. This of course costs the drug makers millions of dollars a year, which of course is then past on to the consumer to pay. There is way to many problems with our healthcare to fix it over night. We need a combination of people all working together to set things straight again. Government is not the answer. While they might have a role in the solution such as passing bills and laws to cap costs or making doctors and hospitals disclose the costs of every thing they do before they do it, there is just no way however that giving control of a major sector of our economy is going to solve the problem. For one we would be taking a huge risk buy giving up our right to choice, and 2 there is 2 many issues to correct with just one answer. It will take effort from not only the industry as a whole, bills and laws to help keep some things in check, and each consumer taking control of there treatments to really make any real headway in this situation.

that is the real drain to our healthcare system.

If you want to fix the healthcare problem the ban McDonalds and fast food joints, make it so if some one wants to watch TV they need to pedal on a stationary bike to make the juice to turn it on. The real problem with Healthcare is that people think they treat there bodies like a trash can then expect some one else to pay for the mess. Now I do understand that there will always be situations where even when you live a healthy life you will get health problems, like high blood pressure, or be born with diabetes, or get cancer even though you never been around a smoker, but for most of us that will not be the case. Most of us choose to live unhealthy lifestyles and then complain when we get problems. And I speak from personal experience. I am still a smoker, and even though I was told when I was 18 I had diabetes I still chose to eat junk food and drink sodas like they where going out of style, I understand that if I get cancer that it is not any ones fault but my own. I understand that If I do not eat right I will just end up taking more pills and paying more money for more doctors to tell me to stop doing what I did that got me there in the first place. I also know that If I chose to do things like eat good foods and exercise even a little bit a day that in the end I will not have to pay all the high costs of doctors and meds because I will not need to see them or take them as often. So the next time you gripe about the rising cost of healthcare in this country, ask your self honestly, what can you do to help lower your risk, and keep you out of the doctors office in the first place. Healthcares problem is not just the industries greed( though it does play a part in it) . It is also people like you and me that choose not to do the right things