ptsd New Doctor Said , "file A Complaint"

[Guest jangrin]

Good Morning Everyone,

Finally, after waiting five long months, Chuckles had his first doctors appointment since our move. The VA Clinic that is now our primary care provider, has 2 doctors and one nurse as well as one nurse for the lab and one family counselor for the mental health clinic and group sessions for mental health and PTSD.

We asked, "how many patients does this clinic service"? The doctor replied, did you have a long wait for your appointment?, and then she told us that she and the other doctor supervised the care for between 4,000 and 5,000 patients. And to please feel free to file a complaint.

She asked how long we had been waiting for service connection and just shook her head when we replied over a year She scheduled blood work right away for yearly check-up on Chuckles DMII and is going to evaluate Chuckles medications, she increased the HBP meds and scheduled a new EKG.

We, JUST WANTED TO PASS ON THIS INFO AS WELL:

She also told us that in the event of an emergency, do not try and come to the clinic or drive the 60 miles to the VARO. SHe said, all verterans should go immediately to the nearest emergency hospital. Tell, the hospital that you are a veteran and you get care from VA and as soon as you are stable you need to be moved to the VA medical center. She said too many veterans are worried about the money instead of their lives. The VA will pay for care in emergencies.

I know we will be filing a complaint about the understaffed facility.

Jangrin

Edited March 15, 2007 by jangrin

[Ricky]

Jay - VA health care in a sense is socialized care. Now you see how it works. I kinda like to be able to pay for my private insurance which allows me to see any doc that I want to. Under your concept you would be assigned a primary doc who is responsible for an untold amount of patients. No matter how sick you are on a Thursday you will be forbidden to seek care else where so you could stay sick for weeks without care. jmho. and this should be moved to the social chat area since we have moved completely away from the original post.

[Jay Johnson]

Jay - VA health care in a sense is socialized care. Now you see how it works. I kinda like to be able to pay for my private insurance which allows me to see any doc that I want to. Under your concept you would be assigned a primary doc who is responsible for an untold amount of patients. No matter how sick you are on a Thursday you will be forbidden to seek care else where so you could stay sick for weeks without care. jmho. and this should be moved to the social chat area since we have moved completely away from the original post.

Not even remotely true and it is on topic; changing our system of medical care would drastically alter both veteran's health care AND compensation.

I won't go into details for why you are wrong, but I will give you some links, so you can educate yourself on the topic (and I don't mean to sound condescending; I recently wrote a paper on this and have a LOT of sources):

1) Study 1

2) Study 2

3) Study 3

In short what you'll find in the above is that not only is our system BY FAR the most expensive (per capita) in the world, it's also far from the best. Also, most anti-universal health care folks are under the delusion that we have a private system at the moment, which couldn't be further from the truth. People who are uninsured still need emergent care and hospitals are required by law to give it, so we end up spending more, in tax write-offs, than we would to just insure said people. Also, your "private" insurance is nothing more than national health insurance that is being triple billed....in other words, the government gives tax breaks to companies to give out "private" insurance, which, in turn, raises our tax rates to compensate, so you're already in a national health care system, but this one doesn't cover everyone and we have several middle men profiting off of other's illnesses needlessly.

As for your VA comparison: That is an issue of proper funding. England has had issues with their universal health care system because conservatives in that country refuse to spend enough to properly fund the programs. One should also note that england currently spends about 1/3, per capita, on health care as we do and they insure everyone in the country.

Personally, I favor a national, single payer, insurance program like the one detailed in the harvard study listed above. It allows for the providers to remain private, but does away with the "middle men" (IE - insurance companies).

Either way, any type of national health care system would be immensely better than the one we currently employ and it would drastically change how both the VA and military deal with health care...also, as I mentioned before, it would free up BILLIONS for VA compensation because there would be no need for VA health care.

By the way, my paper was a research paper and NOT an argumentative one, so I had to research the opposing view on this as well and all of the opposing viewpoints were based on ideological beliefs and not practical, real-world data. In other words, those opposed to this are opposed because they "believe" private health care is better and that government health care is bad, but the data clearly shows that universal health care beats our system. I think you'd be hard pressed to find dissenting views that aren't based on ideology.......

Edited September 9, 2007 by Jay Johnson