Healthcare

I came home the other day to an invoice from Qwest Diagnostics. The bill – for just shy of $200 – baffled me: I have insurance, surely this had to be some kind of mistake. As someone who’s constantly reminded that I really shouldn't qualify as a grown up, I pored over the document. Sure enough, the $185 was the remainder from the test that had not been covered by my health insurance plan. The test itself had consisted of a "medical professional" taking my blood and a phone call a week later from my doctor informing me that I was, indeed, healthy.
I had visited the doctor after my health insurance from my job finally kicked in, to deduce whether or not I was gluten intolerant. Both my younger sister and I have had chronic stomach aches for well over a decade. She found that by eliminating gluten (adios, delicious carbs!) her stomach issues had been greatly diminished. Having far less self control and patience than a 19-year-old, I opted to take the easy way out and ask my doctor if he could just tell me whether or not gluten could be blamed for my stomach. Which is how I landed with a $200 bill and the advice (once again) to “stress less,” as that was probably the cause of all my problems. I guess here’s where I throw in the obvious ‘how can I stress less with $200 doctors bills?’ but I digress.

Obviously this does not even rate when it comes to the problems associated with our healthcare system. It's incredible how many people I know who have disaster-only insurance, or none at all. None of them would get that bill because none of them go to the doctor.

Since starting my new job, my free time for reading has shrunk significantly. After numerous recommendations to read an article on the state of healthcare in The New Yorker, however, I sifted through my ever-growing stack of ‘to-read’ magazines and found the June 1 issue with The Cost Conundrum by Atul Gawande.

So now it’s my turn to make the recommendation: you should read this article.

I don’t pretend to know a lot about the many nuances of the healthcare system. Even when (especially when?) I covered the health beat for the Free Lance, I consistently found myself baffled by its many complexities. This particular article looks at a city in Texas with one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. In looking at one of the most expensive cities, Gawande posits, maybe we'll figure out what makes our countries health care the most expensive in the world. The article really doesn't give any easy answers, although it's incredible thought provoking. I attempted to summarize parts of it initially and, in the end, decided that a summary is actually doing disservice to the article. So I'll just leave it at that. Read the article and please feel free to comment.