For real, I know there are exceptions, but I’ve worked with tons of doctors and not one gave two shits about someone’s ability to pay. They would often argue with administration to help people who couldn’t pay
The doctor has $375k in loans they need to start paying back pretty soon.
It’ll be 20 years before they’re in a cushy private office with (only) a 50hr work week.
The issue largely exists in the healthcare industry (administration/insurance) that has grown up around actual medical providers and serve as middlemen and gatekeepers.
It’s not the doctor and it’s def not the insurance company (although insurance companies are evil in their own way).
Insurance companies make money from limiting what services they cover for you and by negotiating doctors down into lower rates for the services they do cover; the less money they spend on your services is more profit for them.
The people actually making money and charging obscene amount, are
facility owners (hospital, clinics, urgent care) who produce nothing, but simply have the capital to own property and start the business
drug companies that charge thousands percents of profit simply because they can (remember the epi pen scandal?)
The doctor seeing you wants to make a living doing something they enjoy and excel at; the facility owners are who hire people educated in medical coding just to tack on every possible fee they can, stopping just short of fraud.
That ibuprofen they gave you? It really cost less than a dollar to produce, package, and ship to the facility; but because you were inpatient when you swallowed it, well now it’s $35
That doctor that came by while you were sleeping just to glance at your chart without actually consulting or giving any review of care plan? That’s $600 because fuck you
Having worked in healthcare and insurance for 14yrs now, it’s just fucking depressing to see how everything works.
Given the amount of time I spend participating in the podcast this way, I would rather say that I sometimes pause my thoughts for a little podcast rather than the opposite
If you are not social and want to be, this is actually a good way to practice conversations. The idea is to pretend to be one side of a conversation and try to mimic what a person would say in a situation. It’s more practical with planned conversations, like TV shoes because those conversations are designed to lead to something. Casual podcast conversations may have more conversation threads that may end abruptly.
As the kids say: Mood. Several months ago when I was binging the show, my growing discomfort at the thought of cases going unsolved drove me to go look up the statuses; at least a few have been solved. Most haven’t though. I hope closure comes one day for each of them.
If I thought the people who run for profit hospitals and insurance companies had human souls, I’d say they should be made to do this work so they could maybe see that it shouldn’t be about profit.
But then I remembered they’re all non-human garbage who should be first up against the wall in the revolution.
Doctors should be left out of this. It’s not their fault America (and probably some third world countries) allow profit driven medicine.
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