i ask you for a moment of your time...and i thank you ahead of time for it.
i have twenty cents to offer here as well...not just as a potential colleague but as a patient with lots of experience after already having had 22 surgeries, multitudes of different insurance plans and being uninsured. i am now on disability, receiving medicare, and hoping to recover some hope for my future by trying to be productive again. i am also a public health student with interest in healthcare delivery.
to begin, regarding hilary clinton, there are a couple things about her healthcare idea that bother me. first, as one poster mentioned, she wants to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. this is hard to do considering she receives some of the largest contributions of all the candidates from big pharma. secondly, on the surface her plan sounds great; however, it's to my understanding that her way of covering everyone is to mandate we all buy health insurance without addressing how we are supposed to afford it. from what i also understand they tried this in the state of massachusetts and so far it has been a failure.
next, regarding "socialized medicine", here in the us we hear about expansion of medicare for all. first, i would like to emphasize that by doing this, we are not engaging in full-fledged socialized medicine. socialized medicine involves the government employing medical providers for their services. now, they do this i believe in the va and the military, but in the private sector medicare still pays for services to private entities that are not employed by the government. secondly, as much as medicare has its issues (part d i think sucks), overall i am very satisfied with it and wouldn't go a day without it.
third, when it comes to long wait times as complained about in canada, just think...what if we had 47 million uninsured people back standing in line here in the us? it would be no different; however, i think we waste more money on healthcare here in the us by paying a thousand different middlemen (not an exact number, but feels like this). also, for many of us (me included) we already wait here in the us. medicaid is a prime example. granted it's a government program and most docs won't take it, but the money for medicaid has been getting cut from our budgets for other things. in just one instance, what if we took the money we are paying our middlemen insurance companies and put it back into something like medicaid? it's my belief as a patient that healthcare in this country is based solely on how much you can pay and nothing else.
i don't believe i'd be on disability today it i had access to the care i needed in the first place. and, thanks to my ever increasing medical issues and expenditures, i've had to battle with homelessness for over 3 years now because i am bankrupt so badly i may never be able to recover. (i don't stop trying to recover, however). in short, i think i may die because of healthcare, and join the other 18,000 that die each year because if lack of care.
i live this nightmare of fearing a lack of access to care and lacking the ability to pay for it everyday, and in the recent past i've been subjected to direct personal attack on me and my reputation, both verbally by a physician's office staff and in writing by a person collecting for a doctor. sadly, paying for care is one thing, but a bigger problem for me is that i can't keep up with endless mail of medical bills. in the meantime, physician offices have started to see and/or treat me as a lowlife despite this. (i am single, and with my healthcare i go it alone because of lack of a strong social network of assistance--family, friends, etc).
fourth, in my educational travels, an instructor of mine said something that i've never forgotten--we don't really have a healthcare "system" per se in the us. we have a healthcare conglomeration. to have a system implies order and regulation--here in my opinion we have organized chaos.
fifth, also during my education so far i've had to watch michael moore's "sicko" and critique it. though i am not a moore fan and think that he could have done a better job with showing the healthcare systems he did show, he did a great job showing what many of us are going through with dealing with healthcare in the us. the cases he presented are like ones i have either experienced personally or know a lot about. i cried my eyes out, not just because of the cases themselves, but also as a patient i felt his movie gave me vindication--vindication that's long overdue for the suffering that patients have to go through.
even though many of you may disagree with mr. moore, i would ask you to see sicko if you haven't already and please consider the thoughts i'm sharing here.
as a potential nurse, i also think we need a drastic change. i would like to go into a field with some hope that many of my patients won't die needlessly simply because they didn't have the money to even get basic access to care. even if there was the chance of lesser income, if i had any opportunity for greater job satisfaction as i believe can happen with a change i would gladly reconsider whether i really wanted to quit my profession. granted, there is no perfect panacea for our healthcare woes, but i would gladly help my fellow americans get the care they need, especially on the basic, preventative levels. though changing our way of delivering healthcare is only part of the equation, i think it would be a very big first step.
in the meantime, in light of all the heartache i've already seen in healthcare, i am not sure if i could go forward into this profession unless there is a change. though this may sound selfish, this is a feeling that i think may drive many dedicated folks right out of healthcare altogether, especially nursing.
thanks again for listening! you are all dear to my heart. nurses work their guts out to help patients every day--thank you! :redpinkhe
MBANurse
132 Posts
Well I would be pleasntly surpised if they didn't. But non-citizens that do not pay taxes are generally not entitled to the benefits provided to the tax paying citizenry.