Everyone has to take a stab at the American care system, and today it’s my turn.

I was so stressed out by the whole drawn-out process that I really couldn’t think of anything else to draw besides Brasse facing the Avatar of Medco.

I am Canadian.

After seven years of being in the US, I am still not used to the sheer mass of middle management, ineffeciency and paper pushing in the American health care system, and if it’s better (as so many claim) I sure haven’t seen it in my experience.

We’ve had an ongoing billing dispute for over a year now with a specialist’s office and our medical insurance provider. Every time we think we have it resolved, there is some change in staff somewhere and we get another bill, and have to slog through another series of conversations with someone who has never heard of the issue. We are almost frustrated enough to just pay the damn bill before it ends up affecting our credit and… guess what? That is exactly what they hope for.

When I had my wisdom teeth out, the financial aspect was explained thusly by the staff at my dental surgeon’s office:
“Ok, so we’ll bill your medical for this. Then they’ll decline the payment, and send you the bill. That’s when you call us and we resubmit the bill under a different code. They may send you a few more bills, but just ignore them.”
Uhhh…. wtf?

Today’s issue arises from the fact that we moved 18 months ago, and Medco (our prescription provider) can’t quite grasp this. I don’t know how many times and how many people we have talked to about our new address. The last order arrived just fine. This one? It was sent to the old address… and I was out of meds. Not a good thing (no, they’re not anti-psychotic pills, but good try, buddy).

So I spent today on the phone to Medco, four separate times. Ohhhh so many recordings on which buttons to press when… so much hold time. I did this in between waiting and waiting at the doctors (two offices) and fortunately, both were willing to issue an interim prescription to tide me over.

This sucked up the better part of my day, and I resent losing that much off my lifespan.

I am going to start saving up to afford the kind of medical plan that allows you to get your needful meds from the corner drugstore. In fifteen minutes!



All that said, I never lose sight of the fact that I am fortunate.
I have a car, the internet, a cell phone and a medical plan (as much as I think it sucks). Many don’t even have that here in the US, much less in other countries that we share the planet with. We really, really need to fix that.