ER Visit

            I was in the emergency room yesterday for another kidney stone (actually, two). The pain was worse, the situation different (I had church the next day instead of school and I was more experienced in the art of passing these stones), and, perhaps most importantly, my thoughts were different. Okay, so my thoughts are always different, and on a variety of things. But for awhile my thoughts camped on how much our healthcare industry could change in the near future.

            When I walked into the ER, I immediately went up to the desk and told them, with the help of my mother who was at the time more apt to speak than I, what it was that was ailing me. They promptly sent me back to a room to process me and get my vitals. Then it was immediately off to my room.

            In my room, the doctor was in to see me expeditiously. Following was the nurse, who was in a number of times to take care of various things as well as just to check up on me. Also in was a lady to take care of payment and insurance, and the CT scan workers to take me to and from the room to get a scan. Finally, at the end of the night, the doctor checked in on me again and two men stopped in to check me out.

            Everything moved like clockwork. When I was feeling better, there was even a TV to pull over and watch. All tests were processed on time, and the nurse wrote out the proper prescription for the future. And all of this cost my family $150. Yes, a $150 copay is a lot of money for my family, but it beats the thousands that would have been paid otherwise any day.

            The goal with the Affordable Care Act is to change all this. This is not to say there were not flaws in our healthcare system, but this law has us moving in the direction of socialized medicine. Yes, 20% of our economy now goes through the government. Seeing the people the Barack Obama has been involved with in his past, as well as the law’s language that has caused 5 million to lose their health coverage (as well as countless others’ to go up, my family’s by $1000), I believe it is the goal of “Obamacare” to move us into a single-payer system. This system would have everyone purchasing insurance from the government, and middle and upper class citizens footing the bills of lower class and “underclass” citizens- those on welfare and other forms of public assistance.

            If I were in Canada on their socialized medicine, I would have still been waiting when I was discharged. If I were in Europe, we would have paid much more through taxes than we did to our insurance company. Yet this is the very system we are headed to. I will have more on the Affordable Care Act on a later date.