I've had it with the American healthcare industry. Years now of dealing with my dad being sick, fighting to get appointments, fighting to get diagnosed, fighting to get tested. He's hardly been able to even stand and move for two months and it's becoming almost a full time job chasing down the doctors who were supposed to refer him to test facilities, and test facilities that require pre-testing that the doctor didn't order, but you can't call the doctor anymore or the doctor's office, all the phone numbers lead to call centers where they'll get a message off to the doctor's office so the office can tell the doctor what needs to happen, but then days go by without anything and the test people are waiting on
me to get the prerequisites done, so I chase the doctor's
office call center every day and they keep saying the doctor will get to it, then eventually they find out that the request was sent to the wrong office so they correct that and say the doctor will get to it, then the next day I call again after hearing nothing and they finally admit the doctor has been out of the office, meanwhile the specialists have been waiting for two months to get my dad in for the scan but they can't even schedule him before the prerequisites are done and I didn't even know that for the first month the specialist was making all sorts of calls to his doctors that weren't getting returned because the doctors didn't send them all the proper information and they didn't know how to get ahold of me because of course my number wasn't sent either so it was by pure happenstance that I managed to call the specialist to figure out what was going on after a month and they were all "oh thank god you called, maybe you can help get us this info," and I got temporary relief until I eventually looked back and realized it's now been
another month of fighting to get them the information they requested and get those prereqs done, and finally finally finally I got a scan scheduled and it shows he has masses in his lungs they can't identify so they need surgery to call me to schedule a biopsy and a week later surgery calls at 11:45am and I missed it so I call them back after lunch and it turns out they close at noon and it's Friday so I have to wait a couple days now to call back and see if they answer this time and the
whole goddamn time I wonder to myself if the system is this fuckin dysfunctional
on purpose to persuade people to give up and stop coming because there was one particularly bad span about a year ago where my dad was doing so badly that he kept going to the ER because when he'd call his doctor they'd schedule him like two or three months out but he felt like he was losing breath
now so he'd go and after the third time that happened in a couple months we literally got a call from a corporate rep asking if there's any way we could reduce the frequency with which he goes to the ER and my dad literally said "yeah, get some doctors who don't schedule us months out when were need help
now" and the rep kinda chuckled and said "oh we hear that a lot actually" and we're like "yall ever consider doing anything about it?"
Anyway yeah, that's just been the last couple months. Shit has been basically like this off and on for years. There were other instances of him having problems where he was suffering badly for
months while pleading with the doctors to get him tested for things and they outright refused. I literally had a doctor at one point last year tell me to stop asking (and eventually it got so bad that they begrudgingly caved to my request and got him tested, turns out my dad
HAD been suffering from a disease that the doctor spent the previous half-year or more insisting he didn't have). This system is a nightmare and I can't believe we have to pay for it and then listen to people insist that we pay for it due to it being "the best care in the world." So goddamn disgusting.
So yeah I've had it
That's what this thread is for, right?