Revamping Medical Care, What Are The Possibilities?

I know I am embarking on a topic of interest to every family in America and possibly all over the world. Do you have good health care? Some of you have excellent family doctors, and some of you have excellent health. I can say probably with accuracy that many of you do not go to a doctor for lack of health care, or you do not have the money to pay the expense of co-pays required by your insurance providers. I guess the first area would be to revamp the whole system to make things a lot cheaper for , Americans and to make it more efficient so that we are not repeating tests, or taking to much time to get down to the bottom of issues affecting your health.  Doctors that can trouble shoot are a blessing. 

I have heard this year and several years back, when our president first looked at making every citizen have health care. That sounds good on paper, but when you have not barely enough to survive on, then that could be a problem. For those of you that lost your health care for being let go off the job or fired, then you either cannot pay the cost of Cobra, or you may not be entitled to things like Medicaid. Medicaid currently covers families with children in need or pregnant mothers, or diabled Americans. Everyone else does not fall in that category. So you do without. I am currently awaiting my coverage in Medicare within a few months, and those that have recently become disabled can see now a two year wait to get Medicare for you. So what do you do? No money, food prices going up and gas at a all time high, then it kinda leaves you out on a limb. I feel the effects myself. So what do I do? The only thing I can do is pray a lot that I can stay healthy and ignore some health issues that I cannot get treatment for, or try to live a little healthier by not doing certain things, or electing to eat better for my health.

The next thing I want to address is the system. We are now in a system of new standards in health care. How it got to that I am not sure. I am proud of the trauma units that we have that employ helicopters and a well trained functioning team. That is something I can say in Oklahoma there is a lot of good trauma hospitals. However, what happens to those who must be severely ill, and has gone a while for lack of medical insurance or funds to take care of their health. They end up in an emergency room, and in some of our hospitals they fill it up so that it takes over 6 hours to see a trauma nurse or get into the back to see a doctor. Because hospitals have treated so many indigent or needy people, then you do not get the care you once did. So now we look at what is an emergency care unit. If you have trauma, broken bones, bleeding, or heart attack, or maybe in a coma then you get treated. Everyone else is herded through like cattle. You go in, and you go out with very minimal treatment, if any treatment is given at all. No longer do you get the real treatment that you need. I have watched people placed in emergency waiting rooms with neck braces and sitting there after coming out of an ambulance from a car accident. Placed their to sit because of lack of rooms in the emergency unit. Think if we placed more treatment rooms or spent less time in those units and diagnoses was given more quickly, then maybe people might get seen and cared for differently. If you take a ill person and you say ok now we just treat your pain, but not your condition that caused it, then your condition comes back and comes back again. The cycle starts over and over again. No one helps. The time it took to sit there is wasted, the time you took to go back to a room is wasted, and then you are looked at like you got a drug problem, when in essence they may have caused it in the first place. Bodies cry out in pain as signal that something is going on, and something is wrong with your body. So do hospitals and medical units cause this to happen?

I would rather see hospitals take a new approach to medicine. I would like there to be better care. I would opt to place more rooms in the care units, employee more staff of doctors not nurses because that is what makes up the majority at this point. I would set up specialty areas of lab, xray, and diagnostic areas to send these people to instead of sitting there and doing nothing but waiting hour after hour. I would seek to make them more comfortable if needed. People like with severe migraines, then I would have a room to make it a little less bright on their eyes so that while they are waiting you have not made it unbearable for them. I think a pain management team would be more helpful and diagnostic team than turning a patient away and telling them you cannot do nothing for them. If you do not have a primary care doctor there on your staff, then get one to coordinate the healing process for your patients. Instead you send them to maybe get health care and maybe not. Provide health care for those without funds and those in need. If you saved time and effort and make things more efficient, then you have saved a lot of money. More Americans would be helped and less would be treated like they were druggies wanting a fix. It is not about a drug fix a person in pains needs alone , they need diagnostic care. If they were addicted to drugs and are not pain patients, then get them some help to get over it. I say we just need to do a little organization, and in the process we cut out unwanted cost and become more progressive and fight diseases that put people in jeopardy. When you ignore health care of our citizens , then the cost of health care gets higher. Insurance companies charge more, and co pays should not be asked when you already pay a lot for your insurance premiums. Cost organization could make a difference.
There is no need to spend 2 hours in getting a room cleaned by calling a custodian, when I watched in health care units nurses not doing anything actually cleaning down and disinfecting beds and equipment use in the hospital. I am not saying it always takes two hours, but when visiting a health care unit , then I observed a room taking that long after the call was made to clean while patients await care. I do not like the attitude now in hospitals, when you try to ask a doctor something that you do not understand, and you get treated by escorting you by a police officer in the hospital out the door, like you were a trouble maker. Everyone should be allowed to ask a doctor about their care. This is not about being disrespectful. It is about a concern of a patient. You ask about patient advocates, and you are told that one is in the hospital but you go to call one, and they say no one was there. So that kinda sounds like they have none on staff. So the medical crisis of no care goes over and over again. Cost shoots up, and care is not given, and if I did not have a little humor, then I might get a little stressed out. Life should not be like this. In the 1980s, when I went to hospitals , then I never got treated like that. Doctors called in those needed to diagnose real problems, even though you might not be bleeding to death or having a heart attack, or in accident trauma. Where is our medical field going? A little organization could make a difference! I believe that is what is needed.