Hustling for healthcare | Where's our post pandemic paradigm shift? By me.
https://lnkd.in/e6sV-m6N
The post below is personal, but keeping it quiet in the background hasn't done much good either. We are headed toward something different, I hope, and can't get there fast enough.
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"In early June 2022, I took a pretty bad spill. Hands flew up in the air and I came crashing down on my rib cage. It took a few minutes before I could catch my breath and I felt sharp pain walking, inhaling, sitting, trying to get to the subway. When I got home, as I normally did when something hurt or I felt sick, I needed to give it a night to see if it would heal on its own. In the morning when I went to make my coffee in the morning, I blacked out on the kitchen floor from pain. Too nervous to go to the emergency room (where bills can be thousands of dollars that I didn’t have), I found out that Urgent Care would charge a flat fee of $250 for an evaluation and would flag additional costs before performing any other services. I went immediately and found out I had a fractured rib.
I was used to this dance. It had happened a few years earlier when I had a gum infection and started going in and out of consciousness from the pain. I had tried to avoid eating on that side of my mouth for weeks and the pain became unbearable. I didn’t have the money to go to the dentist (bills that also often come to $1K or more for procedures that go beyond a filling) so I waited, and waited.
I had also gotten used to hearing, ‘why did you wait so long?!’ ‘You should take better care of yourself.’
I saw recently that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation put out a call for proposals to research the impacts of the ‘Financialization of U.S. Health Care’. I cried again. This is the kind of research we need, less about quality outcomes on limited resources (they are only limited because of what we have normalized in this country). I can’t wait to see what comes from it and whether there’s policy influence attached to it."
Image from article: https://lnkd.in/ecviEDq9