Shoulder update

So a while back, I blogged that I had a shoulder injury and now I know that it's called "adhesive capsulitis", or "frozen shoulder". I've had physical therapy on it but I managed to hit my 10 visit limit and now I am fighting for more visits, but it's pretty hard to convince insurance companies to budge once they have made up their minds. It absolutely infuriates me to have to fight insurance companies in addition to having to spend the emotional energy mending from an injury. I got a cortisone shot last week to help to ease a lot of the pain but it still aches when I do certain things and I have to sleep with a pillow under my arm to ease the pain enough to help me to get a full night's worth of sleep/ What's really upsetting is that, even with treatment, this condition will take a year - or more - to mend completely. I guess this means that even after the insurance company decides that I can no longer receive physical therapy treatment, I will have to continue working on this on my own. Fortunately, I have bought all of the same PT equipment that we use at appointments to use at home so that I can keep going on my own in hopes of regaining full range of motion. I also plan to drop in and talk to my PT on a weekly basis just to touch base and see what he has to say. This is not going to be an easy or short injury to rehab, not by a long shot, but I am ready to go the long haul on it if need be. I'm just frustrated as hell by the fighting with the insurance company over their artificial and arbitrary limit on physical therapy. I've already written to the Ohio Department of Insurance, but the trouble is that they have the money and the power to buy policy and we ordinary Americans do not.

The trouble with the Affordable Care Act is that it left the for profit insurance companies in power and that was wrong. I wish that we could transition to a single payer or national health plan, but the political will to make it happen just does not exist and probably never will. The GOP in its current iteration has pulled this country so far to the right that people would never support such a thing. They would fear "socialism" or some other thing that they have made into a pejorative. If our current President supported it, it would be lambasted and fought against tooth and nail because the GOP has some kind of weird case of Presidential hatred, seeming mostly to come from southerners, no huge surprise there. So it's entirely likely that we'll never see any kind of national health insurance or national health plan or anything of the kind. The infrastructure to make that happen also needs to be in place like having more primary care doctors. One thing that we as a country are doing right in that category is to put very affordable "minute clinics" in grocery and drug stores. They are staffed by Certified Nurse Practitioners and they can do all routine care that a primary care physician can do. You do not need insurance to be able to afford primary care at those clinics. It's very reasonable and it puts primary care within reach of even low income people. Maybe we need to improve that model and find more ways to make primary care accessible and affordable. Your primary care practitioner is your gateway to preventive care, so making it available to more people is always a good thing, so perhaps this is the way things should go. There is a serious shortage of doctors practicing primary care because of the low pay compared to specialists and sub-specialty specialists. Certified Nurse Practitioners and Nurse Midwives can practice primary care at a far lower cost and they do not take as long to train as an MD or a DO. I do hope that, if we can't get rid of insurance companies, we can at least do more health care reform to make medical care more accessible to more people and to stop putting so many limits on access to care when doctors and other professionals feel that it is necessary for their patients. That would be a step in the right direction, I think.