Posted on 04/20/2016 5:03:01 PM PDT by Kaslin
I write this from the hospital. Seems I have lung cancer.
My doctors tell me my growth was caught early and I'll be fine. Soon I will barely notice that a fifth of my lung is gone. I believe them. After all, I'm at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. U.S. News & World Report ranked it No. 1 in New York. I get excellent medical care here.
But as a consumer reporter, I have to say, the hospital's customer service stinks. Doctors keep me waiting for hours, and no one bothers to call or email to say, "I'm running late." Few doctors give out their email address. Patients can't communicate using modern technology.
I get X-rays, EKG tests, echocardiograms, blood tests. Are all needed? I doubt it. But no one discusses that with me or mentions the cost. Why would they? The patient rarely pays directly. Government or insurance companies pay.
I fill out long medical history forms by hand and, in the next office, do it again. Same wording: name, address, insurance, etc.
I shouldn't be surprised that hospitals are lousy at customer service. The Detroit Medical Center once bragged that it was one of America's first hospitals to track medication with barcodes. Good! But wait -- ordinary supermarkets did that decades before.
Customer service is sclerotic because hospitals are largely socialist bureaucracies. Instead of answering to consumers, which forces businesses to be nimble, hospitals report to government, lawyers and insurance companies.
Whenever there's a mistake, politicians impose new rules: the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act paperwork, patient rights regulations, new layers of bureaucracy...
Nurses must follow state regulations that stipulate things like, "Notwithstanding subparagraph (i) of paragraph (a) of this subdivision, a nurse practitioner, certified under section sixty-nine hundred ten of this article and practicing for more than three thousand six hundred hours may comply with this paragraph in lieu of complying with the requirements of paragraph (a)..."
Try running a business with rules like that.
Adding to that is a fear of lawsuits. Nervous hospital lawyers pretend mistakes can be prevented with paper and procedure. Stressed hospital workers ignore common sense and follow rigid rules.
In the intensive care unit, night after night, machines beep, but often no one responds. Nurses say things like "old machines," "bad batteries," "we know it's not an emergency." Bureaucrats don't care if you sleep. No one sues because he can't sleep.
Some of my nurses were great -- concerned about my comfort and stress -- but other hospital workers were indifferent. When the customer doesn't pay, customer service rarely matters.
The hospital does have "patient representatives" who tell me about "patient rights." But it feels unnatural, like grafting wings onto a pig.
I'm as happy as the next guy to have government or my insurance company pay, but the result is that there's practically no free market. Markets work when buyer and seller deal directly with each other. That doesn't happen in hospitals.
You may ask, "How could it? Patients don't know which treatments are needed or which seller is best. Medicine is too complex for consumers to negotiate."
But cars, computers and airplane flights are complex, too, and the market still incentivizes sellers to discount and compete on service. It happens in medicine, too, when you get plastic surgery or Lasik surgery. Those doctors give patients their personal email addresses and cellphone numbers. They compete to please patients.
What's different about those specialties? The patient pays the bill.
Leftists say the solution to such problems is government health care. But did they not notice what happened at Veterans Affairs? Bureaucrats let veterans die, waiting for care. When the scandal was exposed, they didn't stop. USA Today reports that the abuse continues. Sometimes the VA's suicide hotline goes to voicemail.
Patients will have a better experience only when more of us spend our own money for care. That's what makes markets work.
that’s cool and good.
But I probably wrongly interpreted that stossel wanted you to decide on your own meds. that’s HARD with cancer, I would assume, but not impossible with a briefing on them by a doctor
I have the cell number of a specialist I see for a rare disorder. She knows I won’t abuse it by calling her for minor problems and that if I call it is serious. She usually tells me to meet her at the ER.
Stossel is one of the good ones, and I pray the cancer leaves his body.
Asbestos fibers, radon gas, familial predisposition and some cases chronic lung diseases like COPD (with or without a history of smoking) are also risk factors for lung cancer. For some reason the rate of women who get lung cancer but who had never been smokers or lived with smokers is on the increase.
Dana Reeve the widow of Christopher Reeve was one; never was a smoker and died at age 44, less than 2 years after her husband’s death.
bmfl
Try any hospital after Obamacare came into being. Inept, incompetent, slow, reactions to drugs not noted on chart when event happens in front of the nurse, failure to include all drug bad reactions when admitted. Failure to preform right test once they think they have a diagnosis..Idiopathic Colitis is NOT Gastroparesis Slow Motility.
Having to wait hours on your next med, call buttons don’t work. No pillows, lack of blankets. Over SALTED liquid meals when your chart says LOW SODIUM for heart issues. That box of ENSURE has 15% sodium, and contains SOY....Thyroid patients are NOT allowed soy or grapefruit. The over salted broth smelt like a old fashion out house. Stunk the room up so bad even after the crap was removed it still stunk for a couple of hours with the door open to air out the room. Hanging IV meds you are allergic to in the middle of the night because NO one put it on your chart as a NO USE drug.
Cardio work up normally takes 3 hrs if you are patient 2 for the day. Took 5 hrs, incompetent tech punctured both veins and put the chems in the arm. Then had to wait 30+ mins for a nurse to be found to do her job of putting a IV cath that was the tiniest one I’d ever seen in. Nurse hit it first try.
Stress test doc was not on the floor for 45 mins with a packed house. One woman’s IV Cath fell OUT of her arm.
They don’t know what Senior Dehydration looks like much less that it needs to be treated then and there.
I HATE hospitals. ER’s come in first as they are slower moving. 6 hrs in a ER is to long to determine a GP flare from a non existent Colitis flare. Plus they can’t match IV cath gauges to your vein size and end up blowing good veins.
It’s not just being a smoker that will cause lung cancer. Lady from church died of lung cancer and she never smoked a day in her life.
Lost both of my parents to it though. All caught to late to treat. My Dad actually died of narcotic OD which stopped his heart, but Lung Cancer was the listed cause of death. Suspect same thing happened to my Mom as she survived longer than my dad did, the VA gave him 6 weeks, he was having chest x-rays every 3 months, and they failed to find it, he made 3 months, Mom was given 3 months and made 6 months.
What about all those coal minors breathing that dust way back before there were safety regs Grandpa had Black Lung from it. A bout of pneumonia actually was cause of death.
” I don’t wish cancer on my worst enemy.”
—
I agree,but I’ve seen people die painful deaths from cancer,and other diseases, that had good,healthy living habits.
It comes to us all.
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If it’s oat cell, that’s bad. Some lung cancers are operable.
Agree, Stossel is a good guy!!!
Hope he beats this!!!!
4L
God Kas, at first I thought YOU had cancer.
John Stossel, poor guy, I hope he beats it.
I do hope too he beats it.
The one word title of the article also. That made me think it was a vanity.
The Rochester Mayo Clinic is a marvel of dedication and expertise that reminds one what much of America used to be.
Even despite the destructive idiocy of Obamacare.
The article was also on the Fox News site, and Fox News reported about it yesterday on one of the morning programs.
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