Surgery--Again

It's been about twenty five years. Should I ever get accepted for a paid for hearing aid, I will be one surprised woman.

$178 for one month's supply of a medication that you really need is absolutely awful! In England it's £7.40 - about $11.25 I think - for a month's supply. And a lot of people are exempt from that.

Bugger! Not right!

The actual health care can be pretty good.....if you can buy it.

Health services vary. I'm fortunate to be in a city where one of the public hospitals is top notch. A teaching hospital. Bellevue.

My first encounter there involved surgery and a hospital stay. The cost was more than $100,000. I had no coverage. They didn't turn me away. I applied for Medicaid before the surgery. When it finally was approved, it covered everything.

I believe that healthcare issues in this country are a national shame. A disaster. If you don't have good health insurance and you get sick, you are screwed.

I dutifully made the deposit on Aug. 1. I expected to see the overdraft from a couple of days ago. I haven't used my debit card since then.

Charges that I made before I made the overdraft didn't show up on my account until after the overdraft. Translation: Instead of paying for one overdraft of $35, I have three overdraft charges of $105.

I want to cry. Or kill. There's almost nothing left of the check.

BTW, I had a prescription refilled. Total price: $4.51. One of the few I can afford. With the overdraft; $39.51. One of life's little ironies.

I just got off the phone with Edna at my bank. (I make a point of remembering the names of people I talk with.) Edna gave me a one-time courtesy of refunding the seventy dollars.

Thanks, Edna. She should live and be well.

may she live long and prosper, that edna.

I woke up to rain. unforecast.

good for my tomatoes and tropicals.

not so much for the soupy humidity...

I was admitted to hospital earlier this year for emergency surgery. Big teaching hospital.

One week in hospital. Cat scans, MRI, x-rays, ultrasound, surgery, post surgery follow up.

Cost to me = 0.

Actual cost - I have no idea.

The only cost was the ambulance from the local doctor's surgery to the hospital - around $400 - and this is covered by my health insurance. Oh - and the $4 for car parking at the follow up visit! This was out of my own pocket!

We do pay a Medicare levy of about 1.5% of income to cover all this.

Second day without the second asthma med. Breathing problems. I used my nebulizer. Felt better.

I'm gonna have to bite the bullet, get some money from an overdraft, and get some meds. Another critical med is running out. Bad side effects if I miss taking. Cheap. A mere seventy bucks.

I hate this. My dirty word vocabulary is expanding. It's not that I'm learning new words. But I'm making some interesting combinations.

I don't know what Medicaid and Medicare are - here we are so lucky, just paying a small amount weekly throughout our working lives for the National Health Service to cover us for anything and everything! One can pay for private medical care, but it isn't always that much better. One might see a surgeon earlier, and have a private room in hospital, but I've always had first class treatment on the NHS totally free! People complain about prescription costs, but really - as compared to those in the USA - they are really inexpensive.

It seems really awful that you should have to go to such extremes as needing to resort to an overdraft to pay for something so essential as medication. Aren't there any organisations that can help you? It's a disgrace that you should be having breathing problems because you ran out of one of your asthma medications - oh, I do hope you'll be okay. It's all so worrying.

You WERE? Why haven't I heard more about this? How the hell are you?

What she said. It's a bloody disgrace.

Things were getting pretty dicey. Under different circumstances, I might have gone to the emergency room. But I know exactly what they would do. Give me nebulizer treatments. (I've got a nebulizer at home) and give me steroids (I've got a supply at home). Then they woulda sent me home--where there are no meds.

So I did the overdraft. I got three asthma scrips filled--but not the most expensive one. I got two other scrips filled. For one of the asthma ones, the pharmacy told me that my insurance didn't cover it and that I would have to get clearance from my doctor. By the time I saw the doctor, I wouldn't need the medicine anymore. I asked what it cost without insurance. $16. I can do that--**** the insurance.

Picked it up today.

I'm breathing a little better. I might start taking the steroids. I'm gonna give it one more day with the meds I have.

Not only can I not pay my household bills, but the same damned thing medication wise is gonna happen next month.

I'm in a rage and depressed. Sometimes I think that depression is rage that doesn't have anywhere to go.

Phooey and a half.

pior to any aspects f Obamacare taking hold, the US has about the highest healthcare costs on the planet. The Health care system is run for the financial gain of the pharmas, insurance, and long term care INC.

Its a fuckin disgrace that we cant afford the medicines we invent, yet the rest of the world gets a special deal.
We still have "Summerbusload specials" of medi-tourists flocking to Border towns in Canada to buy their meds.

I am so damn annoyed at how we cant all have access to meds and care . Its a disgrace that Robert cant get her asthma meds without going into debt.

FM, I agree. If I lived closer to Canada, I'd be on one of those buses. I went online to do some investigating. What I found was hundreds of people who had reached the donut hole with Medicare and had to stop taking their meds because they couldn't afford them. I'm outraged.

I was out of all kinds of life staples. I used some of the overdraft funds to stock up. I tried to keep it under $50. Didn't manage that. $59. A goil has to have milk, toilet paper, lettuce, Pepsi, chicken (I don't like chicken), etc.

Your thread vanished! Not the first time I've lost it - still not too good at negotiating A2K.

Glad you managed to get some staples in, even if you did have to overdraw to do it!

There's pissed off. There's very pissed off. There's extremely pissed off. And then there's me.



I ran out of my expired prescription for the solution for my nebulizer. I went off my insurance to pay for the new scrip (all reported here). I open the new scrip and find that it's different from the old one. The old was was little ampules of liquid. Open, pour into nebulizer, and turn on nebulizer.

The new one is a little glass bottle with a little eye dropper. I read the instructions. I need saline solution to mix in with the liquid. I go to the pharmacy to get the saline solution. Turns out the kind of solution I need to use with a nebulizer requires a prescription. Do I have one? No. So I can't use the nebulizer.

I have an appointment with the asthma doc on Wed. I'll ask for another scrip. And I'll have to pay for another scrip.

I've had it.

Even I am running out of dirty words.

saline solution is salt water.

wtf is a prescription for salt water all about????

$$*%^%(^$%#^&*(((((%#$%^&!!!!!

(((B)))