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my husband wrote this today:
So, last night was a crappy one. In the middle of the night, I started to think of my own circumstance as respects my doctor, who has been my personal physician for over a decade, his brother being my personal physician for the 20 years before that and I've even been treated by their father, who was retired but used to fill in for them when they were on holiday. So I get a letter just before the holidays last November saying that he now wants $2,000 to keep me on as a patient. It isn't enough that doctors and hospitals charge for services at inflationary rates that don't begin to mirror the rest of civilized society, all the while putting all their money into research and development and clinic expansion and hospital expansion, all so they can provide more services for which they can charge higher fees and at the same time they are laying off nurses and other staff, charging prices for drugs that are up to TEN TIMES what other countries charge for the same drug and the insurance company lobbies, AMA lobbies and drug company lobbies all join hands and sing kumbaya while the rest of us poor dumb schmucks pay and pay and pay and when I had to visit my father in law in the hospital when he went to ER at Ma-in-Law's insistence 2 weeks ago because he kept losing weight and couldn't eat and as I walked through the door I saw the walls and halls of the ER lined shoulder to shoulder not just with the true emergencies but with the poor who have no other resource BUT the emergency room which is the most expensive treatment available anywhere, but because they have no insurance they can't afford to go to a regular doctor because the regular doctor wants cash they don't have in order to treat them and if they could get into the doctor's office in the first place they would probably not get adequate treatment anyway because they've laid off so many of the staff: and I'm laying there in bed thinking about all this and how I need to make an appointment with my head doctor, and I don't mean "chief physician" but THAT head doctor cuz I am in need of some tweaking, but unless I shell out the two grand in case management fees, my doctor doesn't want to see me anymore but will be happy to refer me to another physician; like I really want his referral if he is too dingblasted important to see me at the 'normal and customary' rate that the insurance company is willing to pay, and can I see Dr. Gary the head doc without a referral from Dr. Gary the internist and general practitioner who wants to bleed my personal pocket because he's not getting enough out of my TWO INSURANCE COMPANIES plus my CO-PAY to support himself and his practice in the manner to which he's become accustomed, and the longer I lay there and think about this the more anxious I become about what is going on in the world in general, not just about health care, but individual service in a lot of areas and how we treat each other as human beings and how the world has changed in my lifetime and how much more removed people seem to be from each other except on a very very personal level, but in spite of trying to maintain healthy relationships with friends, take care of my family, maintain a healthy outlook on life, attend to my physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing, I am surrounded by a world full of IDIOTS who man the pharmacies, the health insurance companies (not to mention my OWN insurance company where I show up to work every day and shuffle papers around in the game called "get it off my desk and onto YOURS" - aka "corporate America"), the IT departments, and pretty much every service oriented business in the land, all the while calling what they do "customer service", and the more I thought, the more I tossed and turned and about the only good thing about this?
My little 7 month old kitten not only snuggled up at my feet, but when I got out of bed and went out to the sofa so I wouldn't disturb my wife with my dark thoughts in the dark of night, the kitten followed me out to the sofa, curled up and purred in my lap until I finally relaxed and fell back to sleep.
Life may suck sometimes, but with a kitten in your lap, it isn't ALL bad.
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