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POOR QUALITY HEALTHCARE
*IS*
THE PROBLEM
By Gloria Merle Huffman
9/10/2009
804 words
[NOTE: The following email was sent to Republican Senator John McCain on 9/10/2009 in response to an email sent out by his office asking people to reject Obamacare because cost, not quality, was the real problem with health care in the U.S.A.)
Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2009 19:34
Subject: Re: Did you watch Obama ... (Poor quality health care IS the problem)
Dear Sen. McCain:
You sent me a petition to sign that rejects President Obama's $2 trillion healthcare proposal, saying that it is not the quality, but the cost, of health care that is the nation's problem.
I disagree.
The quality of our health care IS the problem. The cost is simply related to the merry-go-round that has been constructed to spread money around to drug companies, insurance companies, and the hospitals and doctors.
When you go to a doctor armed with a photocopy of a page from his own medical school textbook and he denies the words that are clearly printed on the page, there is a problem with the quality of the healthcare you are receiving from him.
When you get a 2007 Xray report that says your spine, which has been visibly curving into scoliosis since at least 1993, has 'overall good alignment,' and no one warns you of the dangers of your progressing scoliosis, there is a problem with the quality of the healthcare you are getting from your high tech (and costly) tests.
When you are breathing with the loud sounds of stridor and your doctor, who is listening to your breathing with his stethoscope on your back, says, 'Don't breathe so hard,' there is a problem with the quality of the healthcare you are getting from him.
When not one single medical professional points out to you the connection between iliotibial band contracture, scoliosis, lung and diaphragm atrophy, increasingly inadequate lung volume to cough up lung secretions and the negative health consequences of the resulting abrupt decline in cardiopulmonary function, there is a problem with the quality of the healthcare you are getting.
When your concerns about respiratory muscle injury are ignored and your local hospital sleep center does a polysomnogram and throws a CPAP machine at you and says in so many words, 'Now, get lost,' there is a problem with the quality of the healthcare you are getting.
When your friendly medical equipment supplier pulls out hundreds of dollars from Medicare each quarter for its 'services' while sending duplicates of the wrong CPAP hose once a year and hangs up on you when you call to insist on the correct one, and the sleep center physician says you have to contact Congress to complain because he has nothing to do with the medical equipment supplier and, besides, you're on Medicare, there is a problem with the quality of the healthcare you are getting.
You don't have to shoot the old people to get rid of them: just put them all on CPAP machines! The diaphragm atrophies, and you slowly die of apparently 'natural' causes. This is a problem with the quality of the healthcare you got.
How can we bring down medical costs? Simple: by curing people instead of manipulating their drugged and/or medically-neglected bodies into surefire cash cow teats for those who are profiting from the skyrocketing costs of -- no, make that the skyrocketing prices assigned to -- the procedures and drugs the doctors know they can get away with prescribing (they've actually studied the insurance companies' procedure codes and know what they can and cannot do accordingly) ... in order to pay their own salaries and all their overhead costs, including the employees who do nothing but process insurance claims all day.
People think they aren't getting quality health care because they can't afford it directly, or because they can't afford the health insurance premiums (which are, ironically, supposed to help them afford health care). They truly believe that quality health care exists somewhere out there. Once they get onto the medical conveyor belt, it may take them years to realize, usually too late, that the medical carrot-on-a-stick -- quality health care -- is still eluding them.
Why do doctors specialize in evasive 'doctor sentences' instead of helping you attain optimal health and peak performance? It is because the system is not set up to help you attain peak health. It is designed to patch people up just enough to keep them functioning as cogs in someone else's (the employer's) money-making machine, just as sports medicine is designed to keep players in the game as cogs in the pursuit of a coach's reputation or a sports team owner's profits.
Quality? What a slippery word! Quality could mean just about anything a person wants it to mean, couldn't it?
Sincerely (and I voted for you!),
Gloria Huffman
...
© 2009 Gloria Merle Huffman
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