The following story was submitted by a reader:
In June, I was rushed to the emergency room with bilateral abdominal pain. I spent twenty-two hours in the ER and there was told I had a malignant mass, gastroenteritis, Crohn’s disease, an ovarian torsion, or most unlikely, appendicitis. Following two inconclusive CAT scans and a sonogram, I [...]
In a David Goldhill essay highlighted here last week, he closes a paragraph with the following:
“In case you wonder who a care provider’s real customer is, try reading one of these bills.”
Below is a single page from and eight page hospital bill from my first stay in the hospital. On two occasions, I’ve been “taught” [...]
The following story was submitted by a reader:
My dad had brain surgery this summer. He had to have fat tissue taken from his stomach so they could use it to plug up the area of the incision. The hospital defines the procedure of removing the fat tissue from his stomach as liposuction…well guess what…insurance companies [...]
In two of the better essays on healthcare, The New Yorker’s Dr. Atul Gawande and David Goldhill,via the Atlantic Monthly, portray a healthcare system dreadfully disorganized and wasteful. While this is no new discovery, each offers a different perspective (Guwande is a M.D., Goldhill a businessman), and solution.
In his trip to McAllen, Texas—a town with [...]
Last week we addressed the patient’s lack of a seat at the healthcare negotiations table. Clarification: the patient isn’t even in the conference room. They are out pacing in the hall—maybe even on the wrong floor—oblivious to what’s going in the room or at the table. Think about it healthcare for a moment. Our employer [...]
For the past three months this blog has been focused on the experience of one person, one patient. Admittedly this offers a limited scope of healthcare. With the addition of the ‘Submit Your Story‘ feature, we hope that changes.
It’s no secret that the best way to become truly informed is to be exposed to the [...]
The waiting room is full of us today, anxious people waiting to see our doctor. There are 13 or 14 of us in this room, and in a another one down the hall, 13 or 14 more. This pattern continues on for quite sometime—this is a big place, like factory big. Before we found ourselves [...]
A reader posted a comment awhile back about the hospital experience of her mother, who was just diagnosed with aplastic anemia. Briefly what happened:
“… the hospital attempted to discharge her. They indicated that she could receive the treatment for aplastic anemia on an outpatient basis. My sister challenged that as being unacceptable based on the [...]
On my days at the clinic it’s no surprise to see a long line of people awaiting a “meeting” with the billing department. Getting sick is expensive and not everybody has great heath insurance, let alone health insurance at all. There are a lot of different groups who have a interest in seeing that those [...]
I worry that this blog at times comes off as a self-centered assault on healthcare. A guy being pissed-off that he’s sick and needing someone to show up, someone to point at and say”you’re doing your job wrong” .
Through all this, I have come to understand that no situation or system is all bad or all good. [...]
A. Anemia News
