yeah, mental health needs massive investment into research, coverage, and fund the providers at every hostpital and clinic. one of those things that completely gets railraoded by conservative thinking.
i’m trying hard to think of a joke along the lines of what’s the insurance rate for a good blood letting, or a quality leeching, in this century, but i’m coming up short.
I don’t think this should color your opinion really. “They charged her for crying!” is obvious hyperbole / egging it on for the Twitter crowd. Claiming a rare disease is far more binary. She could be straight up lying about it, but in my experience, the rest of the story checks out (struggling to find care, emotional during clinical visits), and being wrong is way worse than being right.
I’d expect vets to be at higher risks for these things than the gen pop, so I suppose that kind of makes sense.
Anything is possible I suppose, but ime people who clearly lie/exaggerate about one thing online are doing it more than once. Especially when it’s a friend or relative having some vague issue that just happens to hit some policy button perfectly.
This doesn’t sound like a situation where there was “triage” per se. Most likely it was a scheduled outpatient appointment at some standalone doctor’s office (the shittiness of the billing software seems to suggest that).
Is it possible that some nurse that put the patient in an exam room administered a standardized instrument to assess for depression or whatever? Yeah, I guess it’s possible. Was it necessary? Also possible.
Judging the appropriateness of that charge based on just that tweet is impossible, as I’m sure you’re aware.
Clinics have triage too.
The constant attempts by you to lecture me about medical stuff is super annoying
I was thinking the exact same thing. It was especially rich when you were a medical student. If anything you were more obnoxious and confident then despite knowing even less than you do. So I guess this is an improvement.
Obviously some clinics have triage. It depends on what they do. If this was done at a dermatologist’s office for example, there is generally not any real “triage” in the sense that the term is commonly used.
Lol the doctor saying confident things about medical things they know about! Quelle horreur. Melk trying to figure out what triage is while correcting someone is the way.
I was talking about some dumb medical student who went by the handle ikestoys taking confidently about medical stuff he clearly had only the slightest notion of. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.
Your confidence now is a bit more justified I suppose. The problem now is you won’t admit you’re wrong when you’re actually wrong. That’s still the same.
indeed
dude you need to get another doctor
You sure about that?
You’re probably right, but it might be hard for him to pull the trigger on that.
I think it’s Optum policy, which is like my only choice around here with my plan.
Is a few seconds of getting felt up once a year worth the shitty service?
Unless she’s doing a bit more with her hands than that, it doesn’t appear worth it.
I was just kidding. I’m 99.9% sure that factor doesn’t enter the decision-making process for him.
It’s not really about referrals to see a specialist. That is a different issue.
I remember having a discussion about this issue a couple of years ago, so I’ve forgotten some of the details but here is a rough summary of it. I may be off on some details, since I can’t be arsed up to look it up right now.
There are basically two separate charges. One is for an annual check up and another one is for dealing with specific medical problems. If some other medical problem is encountered during the check up (it should be non-trivial, which is of course subjective), then dealing with it is an extra charge because that work is not covered in the annual visit charge. What is and is not covered by a particular billing code is well-defined and can easily be looked up. There is a bit of subjectivity in interpretation, but it’s not like the doc is just making this is up. This is the system.
Docs deal with this in different ways.
Some just do the check up and discuss/manage anything else that come up and then bill for both things. In this case, problems can potentially arise. Sometimes the insurance company rejects one of the two charges because insurance company gonna insurance company and then the doc’s office has to fight with them to get paid. Some times that cost gets passed on to the patient (or even if it doesn’t) and the patient gets pissed off that there are two separate, very similar charges for one appointment. Then the patient complains or writes a shitty yelp review or tweets out some shit or whatever.
To avoid this problem some docs just do what Suzzer’s doc does and they just do the annual check up on one day and then make the patient come back on a different day to address any specific problems that turn up. If the charges are on different days then the insurance company is far less likely to reject, it makes more sense to the patient (i.e., 2 visits, and one charge for each visit), and (I think, but I’m not sure, it may depend the specific insurance coverage) the doc may be paid a higher amount overall. The downside is the inconvenience of making the patient drag their ass back down to the office one additional time.
Long story short is that primary care doctors get fucked by how billing is done in America.
Well the architects of the system would tell you that they agree with you and the system is designed to handle that. There is basically one fee if you do a check up and find nothing of concern and a higher fee if you do a check up and find something, because that is more work. How is that unreasonable?
And a doc who wants to do these things on different days would also tell you that they agree, but there is nothing wrong with addressing those concerns on different days. It causes less billing problems and it allows more efficient scheduling. If you know you are only doing an annual check and nothing more, then you can anticipate exactly how much time you will need. So you won’t run behind or make other patients wait. Or schedule too much time per patient and then have idle time when you are booked out for months or whatever.
I’m not making any claims about the legitimacy of above responses. But I’ve heard them.
I think it can depend on what it is and the doctor. Something that is going to require more than a quick once over is probably more likely to be pushed.
My doctors office has this as at least an unwritten policy but my doctor has always been good in dealing with whatever but I go to my doctor once a month for medicine I take.
In oreo’s case it sounds like a Canadian thing. A cynical person would tell you that the system is set up that way to help ration care. If you can only do one thing per appointment it will keep the health care system’s cost down.
In the US you are correct for the reasons I explained above.