The Wild and Wacky World of Health Care Today

This is a true story, though no one would admit it. I heard this from an emergency medical assistant.

A woman came in to the E.R., panicked, with a tick on her neck. She was scared to pull it off. The secretary called her HMO, which classified it as a non-emergency. They told the doctor to just put a gauze on it and send her to her primary physician.

So, the doctor should have told the patient something like this, “Well, Mrs. Public, I know you have a blood sucking parasite on your neck, but the odds are it isn’t carrying a disease. I’ll just cover it up so you don’t have to look at it. You just go on home and get a good night’s sleep and call your doctor in the morning.�

Instead he just removed the tick, no reimbursement.

If you think universal health care would be too expensive, think of all the time and energy spent by highly paid people in expensive places fighting with insurance bureaucracies. Mrs. Public could have been in and out of the emergency room in ten minutes. Maybe she was kind of wimpy to not pull the tick off herself, but we all have our tolerances. We all need help sometimes.