Thursday, December 11, 2008

Not Happy

Speaking of medicine, as I was… Ronni of Time Goes By has some things to say about it. Things that we should all be saying to our elected representatives. (I promise to write to mine today)

But first; we need to decide whether we want healthcare to be improved or not? I think it's obvious that we didn't want it to be in the past. How else would you explain to anyone from a different planet, the mess we have? And it should be a simple yes or no. Not a 'yes, but…' kind of answer.

If you are at all like me, your mind gets overwhelmed when you view the healthcare mess. Medicare, Medicaid, Insurance, Doughnut Holes and more. It's time to get back to basics here! And it shouldn't be my job to get it done. Or yours. Not with over 500 elected representatives paid to do those things for us. Where are they and what have they been doing?

A sample of my gripes: I was using Google the other day to see if a certain medical procedure was covered by Medicare and if so, how much of it was covered. How much would I have to pay? Gosh; that seems like such a basic need for any wise consumer. But no, not with the tools that are given to that wise consumer. Almost every source of government information was a .pdf file; not the easiest document for a computer novice to navigate. If you selected the right document; a big 'if', you had to do a search within the .pdf to find the search term you were looking for and then you could only imagine the context once you found it.

Since I used to teach people how to use their computers, I had an advantage and found part of what I was looking for in about 10 minutes. But it was only a small portion of what I needed and useless without the rest. And I was tired of waiting for Acrobat documents to load…so I quit.

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