I’ve written about the American Health System before: http://theromaniandream.com/blog/2010/02/01/taboo-%E2%80%93-american-health-system/
It’s not that my naivety level has suffered any major changes lately, but my experience with my health care “provider” (aka Group Health Cooperative)  is a surreal one.
Lately I have been having some mild pain in my right hip and I went to have it looked at. After a somewhat short visit at the primary care physician I was referred to orthopedics and physical therapy. The first surprise came when scheduling the PT appointment. The time I have to wait for someone from PT to consult me from the moment I made the appointment: 3.5 weeks. That’s not surprising considering my previous experiences, but 3.5 weeksis too long. But wait! After the visit to the orthopedics, I found out that I need an MRI for them to be able to tell what’s wrong. I attempted to schedule that today and the happy event will take place on the 20th of July. That’s about 9 weeks, or if you want it in months: more than 2 months. I’ll say that again: 9 weeks! What kind of health care is this?
What do you suppose will happen in the following 9 weeks if there is something fundamentally wrong with my hip? Do you think that the way these guys choose to provide medical services is at least flawed if not absolutely moronic? Do I need to say that this is for an insurance that’s supposed to be one of the bests that there is, at least in these area?
At least, back home in Romania, if you have the money and you are willing to shell it out for a quality medical service you can do that. Think about this for a second and you’ll see how wrong the system is over here on so many levels.
That being said, I’m officially giving the longest finger to the nice Cooperative and I’m looking forward to switching to Premera, where hopefully things will suck less and I will manage to get some bang for the buck the insurance company gets.