One of the main talking points I keep hearing from the right about national health care is that, by some voodoo I've yet to figure out, we'll lose our choice of doctors/hospitals should we switched to nationalised health care. Please follow me below the fold where I'll use my personal experiences and show how the reverse is really true.
I'll start off back when regular doctor visits and prescriptions became a regular cost for my family. A couple years ago my wife started having unbearable pain in her back and shooting down her leg. There's two hospital systems here that we could choose. Having had multiple bad experiences with one it was an easy choice. At this time we had no health insurance. A costly MRI showed that the discs in my wife's lower back are FUBAR'd and the doctor diagnosed the shooting pain as a problem with her sciatic nerve. Not having insurance, surgery wasn't an option. Even if we had insurance the surgery for this isn't a good option anyway. It tends to cause more problems than it solves. The doctor told her she'd need to come in once a month to be seen and written out a new prescription for muscle relaxants and pain pills. Total cost was about $200 or so a month.
What changed:
I started a new job and 90 days later we had insurance. The company I worked for took $300 a month out of my checks and that got both of us the big 3. Medical, dental and vision. Co-pays $20 for regular, $40 specialist and $20 Rx with a $500 deductable. The first time we used the insurance we noticed a little problem. The doctor we were seeing was out of network and so our co-pay was $40. To top that off, also because he was out of network, the portion they would pay went against my deductible. Leaving us paying $300 a month for premiums and footing everything but the Rx minus co-pay on that. We had no real choice. We had to start going to an in network doctor.
Even worse:
The hospital we're forced to go to sucks. I'm sitting here all drugged up. Had a problem tooth develop last week and it was removed this morning. Wife had her once a month doctor visit so I went in as a walk in after she was done being seen. Doctor harassed me about pot and, even though I was forthcoming about any question asked no matter how irrelevant, pretty much flat out called me a lair when I said I hadn't smoked in a few days. After deciding he had treated me like crap long enough, the doctor wrote me a prescription for antibiotics and "enough pain medication for a week." I went home and, to my despair, was unable to get a dentist appointment until today. Doc said he gave me enough pain meds to cover the time. My despair grew day by day as the pain meds bottle emptied quickly. Reminded me of one reason why I say this hospital network sucks. The hospital policy is to treat everyone like drug seekers, no matter what evidence to the contrary. If you can even get them to break out the Rx pad they'll only give you low grade pain killers no matter how much pain you're in.
This left me in a horrible position last weekend as I tried to stretch the time between pills as much as possible. Well, it didn't work out. Saturday night I took my next to last pill just before bed. Early Sunday my wife started making calls to the hospital network. The office where I was seen was only open Mon-Fri so my wife was calling around trying to find a number for a doctor who was on call. Turns out to be a waste of time, there is no doctor on call. She calls up to the urgent care clinic up the street and they're open and also turn out to be in network. She wakes me up and I swallow my last pill getting ready to run up there. I was dreading going to a "clinic" because my big city experience was that they were underfunded and overcrowded. I was heartened to find the place empty. My hopes of a quick in and out then a stop by the pharmacy on the way back home were quickly dashed. The nurse asked me who my insurance was through then what the problem was (The pill I took hadn't kicked in yet and I was in to much pain to be outraged by the order that was asked in). She then informed me that they would have to code the visit as dental and wouldn't be able to charge my insurance for it and they didn't take my dental plan. She said to see if there was a doctor on call at the office or go to the ER.
I was trying to avoid doing this but was left with no choice. We headed over to the ER. The pill I took was starting to kick in. Problem is that I was having to take at least 2 every couple hours and was still having pain come through sometimes. Last time I had an emergency tooth situation we had no insurance and went to the other network's ER. They were pretty busy but got me in pretty quick, gave me a couple pain pills while waiting for the doctor to come in and wrote me a script for antibiotics/pain pills. Got me in and out in under 2 hours, with something given to get me out of pain in under a half hour. To top it off I was given courtesy and respect through out. All the while they knew I had no insurance.
Contrast this with my experience with the ER that is in network. Even as my pain started increasing I couldn't begrudge them the fact that it was Memorial Day weekend and they were busy. After about 45 minutes the waiting room started clearing out and my last pain pill was just a memory. After a little over an hour my wife went to the nurse's station to update them on my increased level of pain and see if there was any way they could give me ANYTHING, even just some OTC level. They couldn't and told her it would probably be another hour before I was seen. Two hours later and I'm wanting to bash my head against the wall to stop the pain. By this point it has become apparent that I've been relegated to drug seeker or so low of a priority that I'll only be seen once the waiting room is empty. By this point I'm sitting on the floor in a side hallway because the noise of the TVs and chatter in the waiting room is making everything way worse. My wife drags me up to the nurse's station after seeing them take someone back after only about 15 minutes with a twisted ankle. Her being chatty was a major contributor to the noise level in the waiting room. She starts telling them to look at how much I'm hurting and have been waiting for 2 and a half hours and asking why they're making me wait while bringing in people with minor pain. After having been there three hours we left, I got wasted and we went to the other ER. Spent 15 minutes in the waiting room and an hour and a half total. Wife was handed a prescription for Percocet 5mgs with X2 every four hours and strict instructions to grab me something to eat on the way home, put me to bed and not give me any pills until after eating again when I woke up.
Would anyone in their right mind choose the first hospital over the second? No way! But I have unsocialised insurance. And, even though right wingers insist I'll lose my choice of doctors, I don't really have a choice.
Who does get a choice?
My Grandmother, who is on Medicare, can choose to go with either network. She chooses the second hospital's. My friend's girlfriend, who was on Medicaid, was pregnant. She could choose her prenatal and delivery at either network's hospital. She chose to do both at the second hospital. Members of Congress, who receive government provided health care, sure as hell wouldn't choose the first hospital either. They get to choose because of socialised medicine. This not only refutes the "lose your choice" talking point, it also shoots down the "free markets" BS that right wingers spout. In a free market I would be free to choose which hospital to go to. Insurance totally screws up the market because I, and many others, are forced by our insurance to go to the worst hospitals because they're cheaper. In a free market the poor hospitals would have no patients and close while the better hospital expands because all the patients go there. The market is tipped by insurance companies propping up these badly performing hospitals. In a US of A with single payer health care people would be free to choose which hospital they went to and my area would either see the first hospital improve or be forced to close.
In a US of A with single payer health care I could have had that quick in and out at the clinic, which was my first choice. Instead, in this US of A with employer provided health coverage, I was forced to take a much more expensive trip to the ER where I never received treatment and an even more expensive, for me, trip to an out of network ER to even get seen!
Single payer would have been quicker, would have been cheaper and would have been much easier on the patient.