Category: The Best Healthcare in the World

America!

~ susie

Last week, the cancer surgeon prescribed Tramadol pain pills for my fractured vertebrae, but the CVS told me they would only give me three weeks’ worth without a prior authorization from the doctor. Is this a CVS thing, or does it happen everywhere?

Anyway, I cut them in half because I’m sensitive to most drugs. Boy, was I right! It was the first time in four months that I wasn’t in constant pain (it even got rid of the arthritis pain in my thumbs) BUT I was high as proverbial kite. Or drone. So I can be pain-free, but won’t have my functional wits about me.

So I decided to cut the halves in half again. (Not easy, because the pills are oval.) They took the edge off the pain, but I still felt woozy. I decided I would not take them today.

But here’s the weird thing. Everything hurts even more without them. It’s only been three days. Are the pills engineered to keep me taking them? I know that happens with oxycontin. Oh well.

It’s always something

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Ever since covid, I’ve had all kinds of weird symptoms, especially with my heart. Well, yesterday I was in the hospital for an endoscopy — and my heart stopped. It didn’t sound like a big deal when the anesthesiologist told me about (I was still kind of loopy from the drugs), but an hour or so later, I looked it up: happens 1-5 patients per 10,000.

When the surgeon walked by, I grabbed him. “Tell me about this,” I told him.

He said it was only for a few seconds, he suspects it was a parasympathetic response to the procedure, but it’s not normal. They gave me a printout of the EKG to show my cardiologist and suggested further testing.

I blame Trump, or covid. Same thing!

Sicko

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I always take for granted that most people have seen this, but they haven’t. For those who saw it, it changed their attitude toward what passes for American healthcare. I suggest watching!

Just like Jesus would do

~ susie

BREAKING: Mike Johnson just said he won’t call a vote this year to extend enhanced subsidies under the Affordable Care Act — effectively guaranteeing they will expire at the end of this month.

Via ACAsignups:

Meanwhile, the main House GOP bill (which doesn’t include any tax credit extension) will move forward anyway…and the Congressional Budget Office has published their official ten year score of the budgetary & insurance coverage impact of the bill:

H.R. 6703 would establish new rules for association health plans, modify requirements for individual and group health coverage, require contracts between plan sponsors and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) to meet certain standards, and appropriate funding for reductions in cost sharing. CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimate that enacting the bill would reduce the deficit by $35.6 billion over the 2026-2035 period. CBO estimates that enacting the bill would decrease the number of people with health insurance by an average of 100,000 over the 2027-2035 period and reduce gross benchmark premiums by 11 percent, on average, through 2035.

Those last two points (100K losing coverage & gross benchmark premiums dropping 11%) come with some major caveats, however; read on…

As I noted in my writeup on both bills last week:

  • Association Health Plans have long been rife with fraud and abuse which have left employers and employees with hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid medical bills

The CBO projects that this provision of the main House GOP bill would shift around 500,000 people from fully regulated small group coverage into poorly regulated association plans. They also assume that perhaps 200,000 currently uninsured people would gain this type of “coverage” which I guess is supposed to be considered a good thing.