Need help explaining the health care law

[truedelphi]

22. Well maybe this will help you figure out the cricumstances of the

People interviewed by the SF Chronicle about paying for health insurance including a disabled child - they are not living in 2014.

Nor are any of the rest of us. And most people do not understand what is in the 2,700 pages of the ACA.

Also although twenty years ago, I would have agreed with you that a policy that covered catastrophic situations was a good way to go. But that was back in the day when cancer and cancer treatments were considered to be a catastrophic situation and they were covered procedures.

Today, the only part of cancer treatments covered by most catastrophic insurance companies happens to be for the care given when a person is an in patient at a hospital.

And so yes, if I have to get a breast whacked of because of breast cancer, my one and a half day (And that would be a rare and extra long stay) hospital stay will be covered. But all the radiation and chemo won't be, as it is done on an out patient basis.

So with a catastrophic health insurance policy I have to hope that when catastrophe hits, it's in the form of being hit by a truck rather than cancer.

This discussion brings me to my other point I'd like to hammer home - regardless of all the in's and the out's of the piece of crap legislation, the fact remains -we are forced to buy mandates from companies that are in collusion with the Big Hospital Chains. We pay more than any other nation pays, per capita, and we pay for a much more inferior product.

I ave been in the trenches regarding this.On many occasions, I have been hired to take care of people who are tossed out of the hospital a mere 18 hours after going in. They fasted the night before, they went under anesthesia, and then had a body part amputated, and now after 18 hours, they are being sent home to deal with the aftermath.

I'll cite two different cases where I did private, in home nursing assistant work. One was a lady in her mid sixties who was a Kaiser patient. Kaiser chopped off her leg at the knee. This due to poor circulation. (In may nations of the world, this wouldn't even happen - acupuncture treatment possesses the ability to restore circulation to people with bad circulation.) And get this - Kaiser gave her Tylenol for her pain. Tylenol!

The family spent much of the next ten days attempting to find some doctor who would prescribe morphine for the woman. (This would have been standard patient care item back in the fifties and sixties for such a procedure.) They finally managed to find a doctor who did this for the patient.


Second case that I had that deeply disturbed me, a nurse called me up and asked me to go to her home and make it ready for her arrival by taxi cab on a particular afternoon. Surgery was planned for the early morning hours of that day. She felt I would be needed for at least three days to help her with not only getting her her meals, lite housekeeping and all that, but also to do dressing and wound care.

When she arrived at the house, I was amazed at her condition. Her bandages covering where the surgical team had removed her right breast and much of the underarm lymph nodes was already in need of being changed from all the discharging fluids.

How any hospital with any type of decency could send someone home in that type of situation, still woozy from the anesthetics, still dripping discharge fluids, I have no idea. But this was the prominent hospital int he area, not a County or charity hospital.

And the insurance companies had gotten the hospital to release people undergoing this type of surgery. (This is one reason why so many of our best doctors quit doing medicine in the nineties - they couldn't participate in being part of a system that is run by big insurers, rather than by established medical protocols.)

She immediately instructed me in how to go about changing her bandages. She also gave me the hospital booklets on wound care. So I got a very quick mini course in post surgical care.

By the third day, she was getting better, and we started talking about how I could now go home. And maybe come back every other day or so for the next week. With the understanding I would return to help if there was any crisis.

What was most amazing about all this is that she had told the hospital that she planned on having help -and several people inn the hospital told her - "Naw, you'll do fine on your own."

Really? Too drowsy to stand upright without feeling faint? In too much pain to deliberately move the arm and use it to bandage herself? How can people think this is okay?

She said she believed that most patients ended up believing the discharge staff. But since she was a nurse, and had a tremendous understanding of the effects of anesthesia and of lymph node removal, she knew better.

But most people could very well end up going home and getting an infection because they wouldn't be able to cope with everything they needed to do.