Thursday I went to my primary care doctor's office for a routine check-up, but as mentioned in the previous blog entry, I have been suffering from agonizing and debilitating knee pain lately despite recent physical therapy. When an MRI was suggested, I had to inform my doctor that such a thing was unaffordable for me due to the fact that my insurance won't pay for such a thing. He asked about X-rays and I mentioned that I had recent ones done on the knee in December, so he's going to take a look at those to see what's going on. Because I am limited in what treatments I can have by my costly health insurance, my doctor decided that the most cost-effective measure would be to inject my knee with a steroid that he told me would give me months, even maybe a year free of pain. Despite some minor risks to this procedure, I agreed to have it done, but after three tries, the doctor could not even get the needle to go into the joint. This concerned him that I may be dealing with bone on bone (he'll know more after viewing my X-rays), so left with no other option to relieve the excruciating pain I'd been in, he wrote me a prescription for 800 mg. Motrin, a good high dose anti-inflammatory. Almost from the first dose the next day, I was amazed at the fact that as a result of this medication, I am able to pretty much resume a normal life not wracked by pain. It feels so good to be able to do everything I normally do without it feeling the awful pain that has hamstrung me for so long now. I know that I must be careful as the medication is merely masking the symptom, but still, it feels good to go about life like I have nothing wrong with that chronically bad knee, even though I know that I have osteoarthritis in it. The doctor also suggested that I might want to try glucosamine and chondroitin, so when this prescription is up, I will probably switch to that in hopes of remaining pain free permanently, or for as long as humanly possible.HEALTH CARE REFORM
The main issue that I am following with the Obama administration is the attempt at health care reform. What frustrates me is that it seems as if they are taking an incremental approach instead of doing something that could slow our economic decline and save some jobs that are endangered by high health care costs being paid by employers. Health care should never have been tied to employment in the first place, but apparently, during the Truman administration, there was an attempt at universal health care, but apparently what happened was a need to attract people into jobs by offering health care as a benefit, so ever since, it's been tied to one's employment, meaning that if you lose your job, you lose your health care unless you are willing to go through the federal COBRA program and pay your entire premium yourself, unaffordable for most of us. So in the meantime, Obama is taking baby steps toward universal health care, but my fear is that it won't happen at all during his first term of office, meaning that I will still be paying more for my premiums and for less and less coverage. As it stands now, I can't really afford to take care of myself as well as I would like because of my high deductible plan, meaning I am limited as to what all I can do. Should my knee eventually need surgery, I will not be able to afford it and I will have to wait until there is the political will to offer real universal, single payer health care. Right now, Obama seems to be taking a downright centrist stand so as not to piss off Republicans who are embittered about losing the last two elections and to woo the centrist and conservative Blue Dog Democrats, who are more numerous than they have been in years past. In the meantime, we old Yellow Dog Dems and progressives wait impatiently for Obama to take bolder approaches to solving this nation's plethora of problems left by the previous incompetent administration. It remains to be seen whether health care can truly be reformed, or whether the powerful insurance and Big Pharma lobbies will shoot it down in flames as they did when the Clinton administration tried to reform health care in the 90's. Stay tuned, it's gonna be one hell of a big fight in Washington! 
4 comments:
Your "insurance" coverage is nothing short of insulting. What the heck is wrong with your employer, providing such a lousy plan? (rhetorical)
Word Verification: ampeale which is when even a very small portion causes the bells to ring
Well, the problem is that the only insurance we can get is a high risk plan with high deductibles and co-pays, the result of being an "older" workplace where the median age is 45+ and 56% of our employees are morbidly obese.
We do have a wellness and weight loss plan in place, but those who really need to take advantage of it are obviously not doing it, thus keeping our insurance rates high due to their lack of interest in leading healthier lifestyles. I work out with a trainer, I eat right, keep my weight and BP down (although I do seem to have hereditarily high cholesterol) and do my part to stay healthy, but I'm only one of over 300 employees in our library system.
I still rate as an "older worker" due to my nearly 52 years of age, though.......that doesn't help much, sadly.
The last health insurance I had didn't cover vaccinations. It did cover treatment for TB. It covered the X-Ray and cast for a broken leg, but not the pain meds.
For this coverage, my university paid 10% more each year for five years.
Nearly all businesses in both the public and private sector are only able to offer low cost plans that force most of us to co-pay for our premiums and offer less and less coverage these days. It's the cost of doing business in the USA.
If we had single payer health care, it would lift the burden on employers of paying higher and higher health care costs. Employers shouldn't be the ones offering health care coverage in the first place. If you lose your job, you either go without coverage or you use the federal COBRA coverage and pay your entire premium yourself, which for the majority of us is downright unaffordable.
I know that I sound like I am endlessly harping on this subject, but as I grow older and need more health care than I did as a much younger woman, I am finding the cost of taking good care of myself to be prohibitively expensive, forcing me to postpone or outright neglect necessary health care.
It's downright counterproductive and it's costing our country more and more money to take care of sicker people who, like me, are forced to forgo necessary care until it becomes unavoidable, by which time it's ridiculously expensive to treat. It's just not right in the richest country in the world that we are forced into these kinds of situations.
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