SteemIt Day #60: My Parent's Doctor is Retiring

This post is for the 100 Days of Steem Day 60 Essay. This essay essentially asks the question: Is your health care socialized, or is it a barbaric pay for service care.

The political bent of SteemIt owners is so openly blatant as to be laughable.

Why do people think that paying for service is wrong?

Look at what we have become as a world? We are all expecting SteemIt to give us free money. We expect the government to give free care. We expect free food. We expect free housing.

When we feel that we aren't getting our entitlements we riot and loot the businesses which are struggling to provide goods in our cities.

I would really like to write an essay about why pay for service care is better than free care.

It is natural for health care services to align to the flow of the money. When the money flows directly from the patient to the doctor, the patient gets undivided attention from the doctor. When the money flows from the insurance company or the state, the doctor's attention is drawn from the needs of the patient.

For example, when I was working for the state's insurance company, I decided to go to one of the state's recommended doctors.

The visit was a joke. A nurse came into the room. She poked me with a variety of instruments and stuck me with needles to keep me current with all of the state sanctioned shots. She then left the room.

A few minutes later she rushed in and had me sit up and pointed me to the door. The foot of the doctor entered the room. He grabbed the jamb of the door and leaned inward. He said something and popped back out.

Yep, that was it. If the doctor breaks the plane of the door, then the event is an official doctor visit. The clinic was able to call the event a doctor's visit and bill the state an extra seventy-five bucks. Hooray for free care.

So, lets get to the title of the post.

My parents grew up in a completely different world. My parents have always had a family doctor. They started seeing their current doctor about 20 years ago.

My parents had annual check ups in which they actually engage in health related issues.

Could you imagine going to a doctor and being treated like a human.

I said that this is health care from a different world. The reason my parents were given individualized treatment was because they pay the doctor.

It is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. The doctor actually engaged in health related conversations with my parents. This individual attention helped my father live into his late 80s (despite some severe health problems). My mother is 90 and still going strong.

The doctor himself was a pillar of the community. He was a founder of a entity called "The Physicians Group" which provided services for other doctors. This group was acquired by IASIS which in turn was acquired by Cerebus which in turn was acquired by an even larger company.

This doctor grew tired of the bureaucracy of IASIS. The COVID19 lockdown severely impacted his business and he decided to call it quits and is retiring this month. My mother will have her last doctor's visit this month.

This will probably be the last time that she meets with a general practitioner who believes in establishing a strong doctor/patient relation.

I envy my parents for having experienced a world where doctors actually communicated with patients. It seems that we are doomed to have socialized care stuffed down our collective gullets. And very few people will even understand what we missed by choosing this route.

The picture is of the IHC complex in Murray. There were things that looked like barricades around the building to keep the patients out because of the pandemic. I wasn't really interested in taking more photos of the building.

I guess I should tell of my last visit to a doctor. I had written down a couple questions to ask the doctor. The doctor was clearly upset that I had a list of questions. He berated each of my questions. He had me take some expensive tests. At the end of the visit he gave me a prescription.

I think it was some opioid based pain killer.

I asked him what the prescription was for. He simply said you came here for a prescription didn't you?

No, I came because I thought I should get a check up and I wrote down some questions to ask the doctor! I tossed the prescription in the trash as I left and paid his outrageous bill.