Oklahoma doesn’t have health care, medical education or insurance coverage
This is not a complaint because I am not a victim: fortunately, I know how to solve problems. But it is killing people. This is a warning.
I had the misfortune of being at an incident that caused a major injury and neurological damage on June the 3rd. I should have gone to the ER, but was advised not to: I wouldn’t be seen in hours, under bluish fluorescent light (having just had a seizure) and wouldn’t be given pain medication. OK physicians are under the “opioid paranoia”. and they won’t prescribe pain killers even when they are necessary. The number of suicides related to lack of pain care is rising (got it in a newsletter yesterday).
I saw three physicians here — reported two to the Board of Medicine. An orthopedist who can’t read an X-ray and a neurologist that can, at most, apply tests that my elementary school nurse did are not physicians.
The GP I saw concluded “there was something wrong”. Wow. Months later, with still “something wrong” and no help from the neurologist, I asked the GP if we could do a blood work to check for thyroid function. You know you pay for those, right? No insurance really covers 100% of test cost. He requested about 25 unnecessary items and failed to request the ones I needed to read thyroid function (yes, me, because, honestly, the OK college of medicine makes the worst schools in the Third World look like Harvard). He requested TSH and failed to request free T3, RT3/T3 ratio, etc. As a result, I had to perform clinical analysis for a DH.
The problem is OK, right? No. The worst malpractice cases I saw in my whole life were in DC, in its best hospital, and in FL, at Shands. Because of the settlements signed by the patients, I cannot comment on them. But they were something you don’t expect to see during a natural disaster at an ER in the Third World.
AMERICANS, WAKE UP. You are paying one order of magnitude more for health care that is indigent. The urine collection cup at a clinic costs 22 times more than in any South American countries.
You can’t buy basic medication because you need a doctor to prescribe them, and they will choose the one that is under patent protection (because they are those guys in class that weren’t exactly the brightest ones, if you remember high school) when there are perfectly good older (and dirt cheap) alternatives. But, sorry: I haven’t met one physician here yet who knows their pharmacology.
I don’t need a lot of money. But like other highly qualified immigrants, I need money to go back to Brazil once a year to get health care.
I don’t think most of you remember a time when it wasn’t this bad. But it is. I insert a couple of test questions in my conversation with any physician. Here, they fail 66% on average.
The cost of your insurance premiums is scary but the quality of the service you get and the cost of medication is terrifying.
The alternative now are the private labs where you can order any blood test you want. It’s expensive, but you would pay it anyway the way insurance is going. In many states, like in OK, insurance doesn’t cover many specialists, many tests, etc. With a lab test, if you are medically trained, you can have an idea of what your problem is. You can purchase some medications for “research purposes” and use them at your discretion.
I am doing this.