The Bureaucracy of Illness.

Salutations dear reader,

Hopefully you had a nice Thanksgiving. I spent mine working on my Artwork’s permanent home. But that isn’t why I’m writing….I had an interesting conversation today with my doctor’s office.

As I’m sure your aware I’m having a new hip put in. I’ve been trying to get things done in advance so that I won’t hafto deal with it while I’m struggling back to an upright position…take for instance the post surgery “skilled nursing facility” that I’ll hafto do between the hospital and freedom. My medical insurance covers it (ie there will be a deductible that I’ll hafto pay but the lions share will be covered by them) however when I contacted my Insurance to find out if I was covered and how I needed to proceed I was told I needed to contact my doctor to request that he contact them with the request that this care was needed and they would send him the forms to fill out. I did. I got a call today from the doctor’s office saying that they had a prescription for this care waiting for me at the office. I was under the impression that as far as I was concerned I was out of the loop. They transferred my call to the operations coordinator who assured me that this would indeed hafto be dealt with by them after the fact, that it was under control and I shouldn’t trouble with them about it. To be honest…the surgery hasn’t been scheduled yet….they still need to call me with the date this up coming month so I can have it done in January. But as I told the woman who handles this…I was just doing what I was told to do…The Doctor’s office was the ones who called me. I have sent forms to this doctor to fill out and have been told that I will get some more to send to him, Insurance forms and the like…not to mention I’ll need to keep a folder of the bills up to date with a running tally for Tax purposes at the end of next year. I truly believe this will be the most documented aspect of my life to date. I can’t be sure but I don’t think my trip to New Guinea and subsequent journeys homeward through the Southeast Asia and Middle East required the reams of paper that this one joint replacement will generate. I findit amazing that the fact that people have been getting sick since we were in the caves, that it’s been blamed on everything from bad spirits to bad humors and has evolved with miraculous cures but at the price of a forest’s worth of paper that needs to be filed and documented. I recall that when my mother finally succumbed to her illness my father took about 6 months of filling out forms and dealing with the paperwork afterwards. Long gone are the days when the kid was sent to " find Doc Pritchard and tell him to come out to the ranch” and you paid him with chickens. It seems the more serious the incident anymore the more people hafto be involved with it and have a hand in accomplishing it. Why is it mankind builds a civilization on this kind of bureaucracy? Why is so difficult to get things done when one is making an attempt to make things better or simpler? It has to do with record keeping and responsibility I’m sure…everyone needs to know what is expected of them and when fingers are pointed the weak point in the chain will be eventually uncovered. But then they make a new form to make sure that this will be the exception to the rule….and the people that are responsible for these quicksilver decisions make a great deal of money doing it… I wonder just how much of my payment to have this new hip in will be sucked up by the people that need to keep track of the paper work that will allow my doctor to fix me? I guess it’s true. Life is a bitch and then it gets more complex...I wonder if socialized medicine in places like Canada or England have a better or worse medical bureaucracy? I think it would make an interesting study.