Sad State of Healthcare

People ask me why I don't regularly go to the doctor, and why I seem to be distrustful of those in the medical profession in general.  This is why. Healthcare in the U.S. has become a giant exercise in risk management.  Our overly litigious society caused insurance costs to skyrocket, so now it's become ridiculously expensive to guard against malpractice and it's taken power that belongs with doctors and healthcare professionals away and granted it to insurance companies.  We've also further chipped away at their power by handing the burden of our healthcare maintenance over to insurance companies as well.  Now who is managing the day-to-day detail of our health?  Insurance companies are.

Healthcare professionals are not without blame, though.  Instead of fighting to get back what was taken from them, most of them have simply elected to let the rest of us experience exactly what a society looks like that cedes control of its healthcare to bureaucrats.  They tell us things like "I'd give you Drug X at Y dosage, but your insurance company won't pay for it, so I'll give you Drug A at B dosage instead."  They make it painfully obvious that they'd prefer to pursue a particular treatment option, but they can't because they're afraid of getting sued.

Why?  Because they're people.  And they're people who put their own interests first, as they should.  Why jeopardize a great job that pays well?  Following whatever guidelines the insurance companies mandate will take care of most of the cases and make malpractice insurance less of a burden than it might otherwise be.

Doctors are people, too.  While it's true that most cultures elevate doctors to a near-mythic status with its own set of expectations, doctors are only human.  They make human mistakes.  A doctor this weekend made a really dumb one - one that I've seen people in my own business make.  She left a critical task for a Friday between Memorial Day and Labor Day.  The chance that you're going to get another professional on the phone for a critical consultation on a Friday afternoon during the summer is pretty much nil.  Everybody in my office knows this, from the C-level executives to the interns.  Our doctor didn't.  As a result, someone spent the weekend suffering and perhaps didn't need to.

I've been reminded of this many times recently.  A doctor I called this weekend chose to send us on a wild goose chase trying to track down someone who could treat over the weekend.  It wasted hours.  (And it was probably designed just to get us off his back and pass the buck to the next person who could stall us.)

My own doctor called me recently to tell me that a Lyme disease test didn't deliver the clarity of results he was looking for.  I had gone in for an appointment earlier and someone along the line had told me that the Lyme disease tests weren't in yet.  Yet I went in for my appointment and was given the all clear signal.

Talking to my doctor on the phone, I wanted to ask him why he didn't just tell me that they made a mistake, that my Lyme disease test came in late, and that it was positive.  Instead, he's muddying the waters and telling me I need to take another test because the first one was inconclusive.  That wastes a week - a week I could be taking the doxycycline and getting this crap out of my system.

Truth be told, I know exactly why he won't admit his mistake.  It's because he operates in a culture where admitting to a mistake might cost him a lot of money.  Is it any surprise that there's no admission?

So, when people ask me why I'm distrustful of doctors, I'm going to start telling them that I'm no more distrustful of a doctor than I am of one of my fellow marketers, or my mechanic or the guy who winterizes my pool.  It's just that when we're talking about our health, there's so much more at stake than shelf space for a product launch, or a need for a tuneup, or a leak in a pipe.  Our welfare is at stake.

Yes, we have to learn to trust another human being to help us.  But when that other human being is handcuffed by bureaucracy, I worry that my trust is misplaced.  This is especially true when someone won't level with me and tell me that their hands are tied.

So, that's my long-winded explanation of why I distrust doctors and don't like going to visit them.  Maybe we'll get this figured out by the time I reach the age when I need things like regular cholesterol checks and colonoscopies, but I doubt it.

Kate Photo of the Day

Before I was a parent, I promised myself that when I did become a parent, I wouldn't bore people with pictures of my kids.  During my single days, I'd be presented with stacks of kiddie photos and I'd have to fake my way through them, "oohing" and "ahhing" at each one when I really wanted to flip through them like a deck of cards.

Now that I'm a parent, I think I've done a good job of not subjecting people to photos they're not interested in seeing.  Maybe I've done too good a job, since whenever I run into relatives and friends, they seem to want to know why I haven't put more photos on the blog.  So here you go.  I'm going to keep doing this until people tell me to stop.

Fudgie the FailWhale

This was the wonderful Carvel cake the team presented me with yesterday at the end of the work day.  I'm told a certain team member needed to go out of her way to find a Carvel.  I'm also told that another team member bought some blue icing to paint the little birds on it in an attempt to make it look like Twitter's FailWhale.

Thanks to the team.  It was a fun time and the cake was delicious.

Oh, and by the way, the Fudgie the FailWhale idea was shamelessly stolen from Sean Bohan.

Yo Gabba Crappa

So my nieces have been over the past few days, visiting Lauren and Kate. They seem to be fans of Noggin, so we had the TV tuned to that for a while. Here's my question - when did kids TV go off the rails? When I was a young tot, it was all about Sesame Street, The Electric Company, The Magic Garden, Zoom and other educational TV shows.  My nieces were watching some crap entitled "Yo Gabba Gabba."

Sesame Street seemed to have characters that made sense.  Big Bird was a big yellow bird.  Cookie Monster was a monster.  Snuffle-Upagus was an effeminate woolly mammoth with a heroin addiction.  ("Hi Bird... Got some smack?")

What the heck is this thing?  You've got something that looks like a feral cat, a giant one-eyed red thing that looks like an anthropomorphic sex toy, a pudgy pink petunia, and something that looks like a ripoff of Oscar the Grouch with three traffic cones growing out of its head.  The only thing that remotely makes sense is the yellow robot.

Then there's the host.  Picture an 18-year-old Bill Cosby, except that instead of hanging out in the vacant lot playing Buck Buck with Rudy, he went to techno clubs and consumed psychedelics heavily.  He's a far cry from Fred Rogers.  That's for sure.

The episode I saw involved all of these freaks riding around on a train, alternately whispering "quiet voice" and screaming "OUTSIDE VOICE!!!" as the train went from place to place.  I suppose this is a 2008 lesson on when it's appropriate to shout, which would be great if it actually made sense.  What happened to teaching kids to count to 20 in Spanish?  I guess that's Dora the Explorer's domain now.

I vote for a crossover episode where Big Bird, Snuffle-Upagus and Grover come over and beat the crap out of all of these freaks, while Waldorf and Statler from the Muppet Show make snarky commentary from the peanut gallery.  Oh, and that Count guy sitting there going, "Vun!  Vun cap busted in your ass!  Hah hah hah hah!"