Guaranteed Healthcare

When my 9 month old had seizures while we were in Venezuela, we had an ambulance take him to the hospital where they performed all kinds of tests. They told us they should send him to another hospital because they could not find anything wrong with him. The second hospital did their series of tests and reccommended we send him on to a Children's Hospital.

Each time he traveled by ambulance and finally at the Children's Hospital they came to the conclusion that he had a fever from a cold that settled in his ear (ear infection) and us traveling in high altitudes on the airplane, added to his fever and his body went into a seizure because of his fever, dianosed as "febrial seisure." After he was ok, they sent us downstairs where the pharmacy is (still in the hospital) and gave us different prescriptions (three I think).

I was scared to death and couldn't even imagine what we would owe everyone. When they figured up everything it was... are you ready for this... $685.00. We had that in vacation money and paid before we left, owing nothing. As you can bet I was more than interested to find out how their country could manage this and us Americans are having to deal with so much greed in our health care system.

So I asked questions and found out that in order to be a doctor and have your own practice you have to donate three days a week (or so many hours) to the hospital. EVERY WEEK. This rule is not taken lightly, If you fail to do your voluntary time than your office/offices for which you have a practice are closed for a few days/a few weeks (depending on your failure) and fees have to be paid to re-open. Wow, how easy is that?

Luckily my husband has good insurance through his work, even though every year we're scared what they will change next. For the last five years we keep getting less and less coverage. My parents are the ones suffering...all of the retired and senior citizens, and think about it, that is when our bodies get sick when we are elderly. It is not fair that our parents have paid expensive insurance rates the entire time they work, claiming little and then when they retire and need it our government turns their backs...It's a shame.

As you drive down the street and see a Walgreens and CVS on every corner and all of the expensive buildings going up "specialists" that our family doctors get a cut on for sending us to them, it's not hard to see where American have to spend all of our money. And I'd like to add that when my youngest son was born, my gynecolgist performed a circumcision. We received a separate bill from our family doctor who we didn't even know was at the hospital. No one called and ask him to come, but he claimed he watched my gynecologist perform the circumcision so he needed to bill for that......what a monopoly!