Guaranteed Healthcare

I am a family nurse practitioner. As a primary care provider in a rural family practice, I have had the unfortunate and challenging experience of seeing patients everyday that could not access optimum care.

Easily half of my patients were Medicaid-insured. Their trial was not having ready access to specialty care because many specialists do not accept their insurance. Many more of my patients were completely uninsured, generally not by choice but because they could not afford coverage, were not employer covered, or had lost insurance due to job loss. Much of my time was spent helping my patients piece together medications, minimal lab evaluations and diagnostic testing, and followup care.

Our practice suffered financially due to volumes of people in our patient population that had no way to pay for services or whose insurance offered such poor reimbursement that we could not retrieve even minmal costs. We did our best to offer best possible care but it is true that, in healthcare, you only get what you can pay for; often you can't get what you need.

Thank you.
Tish McNally FNP