We look at all the problems in healthcare for today’s Medicare members and ask ourselves, what can we do about it? Well now, it turns out we can do a lot.As a retired elder abuse investigator I have all that public information which is right out there for everyone yet not labeled simply enough for every one to be able to decipher the procedure of regulating and disiplining within the healing arts. ( that is what medical personel, hospitals,testing facilities, ecetera are classified under. First of all we all like to sue, however realistically it is not a great solution. why.? if you get an attorney to take the case more than half the settlemet will go to the law form due to the cost of an expert witness, administration fees , investigatpr etc and of course their forty percent. With the cap on malpractice this can lave yoy with less than half of what you settle for and believe me malpractice insurnce attorneys are ruthless and will throw figures at you that are isulting while they drag it all out!It is a hair pulling experience and can drg well over three years. During which time they will have invstigatots watching you to see if you recovered or not. Well, You on the other hand need to get back to your life of paying bills and living, so you will heal and you will compensate and do whay you have to do. They know this. That is why they are able to beat most victims down. Your own attorney knows this and that is why they pick and choose cases very, very carefuly. If you did not die or are not crippled for life you are not worth a lot of money. Sad but true! It is common sense and it just makes good sense that you want to be able to be treated for your illness or injury and you don’t want to be a victim again so you file complaints and if it is a bad healthcare professional you want them stopped.
We need to look at all the problems and let’s focus on them one by one, then look at the solutions. For every problem there is a solution. Sometimes we don’t care for the solution, then we have to ask ourselves is it the problem or the solution that I don’t like? Because we inevitably have to live with one or the other. Preferably the solution is one of our own liking.
So shall we?
Hospitals:
We unfortunately are admitted to hospitals more often than we care to be. Most of that is because our providers are no longer our primary Doctors with hospital privileges. We are finding more and more that we have a Nurse practitioner or a Physician’s assistant as our primary provider. They may have hospital privileges, however they are not allowed to attend independently, they must have oversight by a hospitalist. The best they can do is call an ambulance if they feel we are in a medical emergency and send us to the hospital.
Once we arrive at the E.R. an E.R. doctor will make the initial diagnosis, treat us and stabilize us, then send us to a floor where a hospitalist will take over and call in specialist for our various medical maladies.We are actually handed over 4 or 5 times and the end result is the specialists know absolutely NOTHING about us! Not personally, not Medically. They only know what diagnosis we now have, what medication treats what symptom and what test they need to have done or X-ray to confirm what they believe should be the treatment. They have no idea what drugs we may not tolerate, what drugs are harmful to us, what we may be getting treatment for already or what medications we already took that day. Kind of like playing Russian Roulette.Once we arrive at the E.R. an E.R. doctor will make the initial diagnosis, treat us and stabilize us, then send us to a floor where a hospitalist will take over and call in specialist for our various medical maladies.We are actually handed over 4 or 5 times and the end result is the specialists know absolutely NOTHING about us! Not personally, not Medically. They only know what diagnosis we now have, what medication treats what symptom and what test they need to have done or X-ray to confirm what they believe should be the treatment. They have no idea what drugs we may not tolerate, what drugs are harmful to us, what we may be getting treatment for already or what medications we already took that day. Kind of like playing Russian Roulette.
So they have carte Blanc to run MRI’s, Cat scans, blood work, urinalysis, electrocardiograms ,ecetera to their hearts content. Hence padding a fairly nice hospital bill. See They are able to do this because they are starting from scratch and able to give us a whole basket of ailments! They can also call in all their buddies who are specialists in what they don’t cover! Is this becoming fairly clear as to how hospitals work ? Now this gets even better . you see Medicare allows anyone over 65 to be admitted for at last 36 hours to rule out anything serious and protect our elder lives. Leave it to the Doctor’s and the CEO ‘s to figure out how to cash in on that one!
Yes folks, once we turn 65 and become Medicare recipients , we are CASH COWS!
I had a Lacunar stroke, Diabetes, and A-fib! Interestingly they never did Diagnose me with hypertension. Although I was being treated for it, They gave me 2 different hypertension drugs every single day of the 11 days I was in the hospital. They started to give me Rehab and stopped because my insurance denied it. When I left the hospital I got prescriptions for 11 different medications. But not a word about seeing any of those specialists. Now doesn’t that just make you go Hmmmmmm?
Now, I am sure they thought they just had another old lady they made a bunch of money on. They were wrong. I made absolutely sure I got my medical records in their entirety within a few days. Then this retired Investigator went to work! I knew who to complain to about what, I started with the doctors and Nurses, went on to file mandatory complaints against the hospital to all three agencies and sent copies of my pertinent records to substantiate my complaints. Then finished up with the office of the DOJ about the Medicare overcharges. I then followed up with a complaint to the archdiocese about the hospital being bought by a primary equity group whom still used the catholic name but had no catholic services available. I figured that kept them busy for a while.
There are many things you can do. There are regulatory agencies for every single tier of Health care. Here is the problem. We have to complain. we have to stay on top of our health servics but,we don’t. We have allowed them to treat us like human sacrifices and just look the other way. Why? Because we still believe they are God! Here is a news flash! they are not! It is OUR responsibility to police our own Healthcare! I will be posting the agencies, how to file the complaints etc, I will put this together because we must make healthcare better before they just kill us all. I will even put a tutorial together to turn in Medicare fraud. The days of suing for malpractice are over. Our president changed that a few years ago when he put a cap on the amount for medical malpractice. Lawyers don’t do it anymore there is not enough money there. However there is a way they can be sued. but, not for med-mal. I will discuss that as well and explain how that is done. The point of all this is: we have to stop them. We deserve decent healthcare and God only knows, we pay enough for it. We have to stand up for ourselves and then and only then will it change. I do realize most people do not know how or where to complain. The health system has done a wonderful job of keeping that clandestine, so to speak. That is why I am going to make this info available. Follow to learn more.This is all public information.The worse that can happen is the Healing arts professionals start caring about their profession and doing the job we entrust them with. As for big pharma. There are ways to complain about them as well. They are NOT untouchable.
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