We pretty much knew this already. If you have dental issues; get them taken care of now. If you need that surgery on your knees or shoulders, get it done now. Tomorrow, it may not be available.
Don’t get sick. Seriously, don’t. As much as it pains me to say it, American medicine…no, the entire healthcare system, is, to put it plainly, FUBAR. Those of us with boots on the ground have known this for quite a long time; I suppose we’ve been riding the decline, knowing full well there wasn’t a damned thing we could do, much like Major King Kong riding the bomb down to eternity in Dr Strangelove.
This really isn’t any different from how those of in the “liberty community”/alt-right/Dissident right/Normie/Flyover Americans feel about effecting change in our obsequious, overbearing, bloated central government. Ironically, the last few years of the Covidiocy have, without a doubt, demonstrated that politics makes strange bedfellows…who’d ever thought I would’ve found common ground with RFK, Jr? I spoke at over thirty rallies across Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee for the Tea Party, outlining the flaws and ramifications of Obamacare, before it became apparent that the Tea Party was just another political black hole. Hyperbolic Congressman Alan Grayson predicted what would happen
but he just bet on the wrong horse to deliver the predicted result. The Uniparty inflicted a mortal wound upon health care with Obamacare, and COVID-19 applied the coup de grace, aided and abetted by an embarrassingly large, spineless proportion of the medical profession. It’s a bit embarrassing now to be lumped in with those weak-willed, intellectually vacuous practicioners who swallowed the narrative hook, line and sinker, and COMPLIED, even though it was apparent that the data was massaged and obfuscated; many of us defied the authorities and licensing boards and gave our patients early treatment, regardless of being told not to do so under threat of some level of penalty or punishment. Some suffered loss of employment and/or loss of licensure, but at least their conscience is clear. God bless them.
I’m a cancer surgeon. Lots of folks with bad problems. Lately, I’m seeing many more folks with really bad, advanced, high-grade cancers, mostly vaccinated, and a great deal of delayed wound healing. Some are due to delay in seeking evaluation. My observations and experience, while anecdotal and not quantifiable, are mirrored by many of my colleagues across the country. We are busier than ever, yet working with supply chain disruptions and understaffing, and finding it increasingly difficult to GET THINGS DONE.
It’s everywhere, not just my little backwater metro location in the Deep South. Compounding the effects of these are the cultural changes wrought upon medicine by the triple whammy of the POTUS 44, COVID-19 and the World Economic Forum. We won’t even include the influence of the sock puppet in the White House and his handlers, although their impact on the economy is difficult to ignore or downplay.
It’s harder to get these folks taken care of, from the gitgo. Weeks to start treatment rather than days compared to two decades ago. I sent one of my patients to a local ER to get a CT scan to rule out a lung clot three days postop, and they tried to transfer her to another regional facility with whom financial arrangements had been made for referrals rather than call me with the result on the cell number provided. You see, consolidation of health SYSTEMS is all the rage and removal of control of the patients from physicians is of paramount concern to the success of such endeavours; their perspective is that they “own” the patients.
Ultimately, the patient left the first ER and came to an ER near me, and was there sixteen hours before someone called to notify me that she had been admitted to an impersonal, generic hospitalist. Someone who didn’t know her and had no idea how to manage a postoperative patient. I finally got her to my facility by private vehicle, 500 yards from the second ER, and discovered nothing really fundamentally wrong after evaluating her. At no point did any physician at either hospital reach out and call me despite being given my cell number BY THE PATIENT herself (as all my patients have).
We called the first hospital in advance to notify them of her impending arrival, an old school move to facilitate care. The result? An inordinate amount of time and money wasted, but the electronic records were completed and all appropriate billing performed. Check the boxes, fill in the blanks, and move on. Faceless, nameless, SOULLESS. American health care has been Balkanized and Sovietized.
These stories abound, thousands every day around the country. Your health care system, like the greater economy around it, is in freefall, stumbling and careening toward collapse. Please, avoid interacting with it unless absolutely necessary. Your life and the lives of your tribe may depend upon it. If you have to break down and go seek care, look for some gray hair……
No comments:
Post a Comment