Thoughts on the current state of the American health-care system, from Mark Steyn:
They gave her the usual form to fill in, full of perceptive inquiries on her medical condition: Do you wear a seat belt? Do you own a gun? How many bisexual men are you now having sex with? These would be interesting questions if one were signing up for eHarmony.com and looking to date gun-owning bisexuals who don’t wear seat belts, but they were not immediately relevant to her medical needs. Nevertheless, she complied with the diktats of the Bureau of Compliance, and had her medical records transferred, and waited . . . and waited. That was August. She has now been informed that she has an appointment with a nurse-practitioner at the end of January. My friend pays $15,000 a year for health insurance. In northern New Hampshire, that and meeting the minimum-entry requirement of bisexual sex partners will get you an appointment with a nurse-practitioner in six months’ time.
Why is it taking so long? Well, because everything in America now takes long, and longer still. But beyond that malign trend are more specific innovations, such as the “Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology,” which slipped through all but unnoticed in Subtitle A Part One Section 3001 of the 2009 Obama stimulus bill. Under the Supreme National Coordinator, the United States government is setting up a national database for everybody’s medical records, so that if a Texan hiker falls off Mount Katahdin after walking the Appalachian Trail, Maine’s first responders will be able to know exactly how many bisexual gun-owners she’s slept with, and afford her the necessary care.
If she’s really paying over a thousand a month for insurance, she’s overpaying. She should cut back to a high-deductible catastrophic plan, and just pay the doctor (or nurse practitioner) herself.
And ObamaCare is just going to make all this much worse.
Someone told me that answering the question about the seat-belt risk-taking bi boyfriend with the arsenal in the basement is a feature of “Obamcare”, i.e. the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Something like we have to violate your sense of privacy in order to save it . . .
And yes, I am being snarky so the Obamacare defenders can just find how much they bill for a chill pill.
One thing is for sure, the service sucks for how much we spend on health care.
It’s only a matter of time before someone like me, who prefers to treat himself rather than sit in a waiting room full of people sicker and more contagious than me, will be subject to arrest and prosecution for practicing medicine (on ourselves) without a license.
I don’t know what surprises me more, that you repeat this complete drivel by Steyn, or that you seem to actually believe it?
Amazingly, having just changed doctors, with, what is in my opinion fairly mediocre insurance, not had to wait months for an appointment and it took a whole 10 minutes to do the forms.
But Rand Simberg repeating things that are wrong? Well… I’ll put it with oil not going over $70 a barrel because that’s not sustainable, Hilary Clinton beating Obama in the primary, McCain winning and Romney winning.
The stuff you repeat is astonishing!
I moved last July and finally get a medical appointment for last week. Not with a doctor, mind you, but with a Physician’s Assistant. Your experience is very different from mind. It would be just as wrong for me to declare my experience is typical of everyone as it is for you to claim your experience is the norm.