Open Thread #76

I went to see a doctor yesterday because of a throat and ear infection that my body could not shake. When I arrived at the doctor’s office, without an appointment, the nurse asked for my foreign residence card, the Korean spelling of my name, and what was wrong with me. After quickly typing the information into her computer, she asked me to have a seat.

Four or five people were in the waiting room ahead of me, but I only had to wait for about five minutes to see the doctor because it only took the doctor about a minute to diagnose each patient. The doctor’s computer was connected to the nurse’s computer in the waiting room, so he knew what to expect before I even walked through his door, but he still asked me what the problem was.

I told the doctor that the left side of my throat and my left ear seemed to be infected. He looked at my throat and ear and confirmed that they were, indeed, infected. He told me to go back out into the waiting room, where the nurse would apply some heat to my ear.

I walked back out into the waiting room, where the nurse immediately led me to a chair that had a small heat lamp plugged in nearby. After about five minutes of heat treatment, the nurse called me over and gave me a prescription for antibiotics. I left the doctor’s office and went downstairs to the pharmacy, where I received a 3-day supply (9 packets) of antibiotics. I was recorded, examined, treated, and received my medicine all within less than 15 minutes.

The charge for the doctor’s visit was 2,500 won, which is about $1.65. The charge for the antibiotics was 3,200 won, which is about $2.10. That totals up to about $3.75 (5,700 won).

I do not know how much it would have cost me if I had not been listed on Korea’s national insurance program, but I do not think it would have been very much. Also, I do not think it costs very much for Korean national health insurance, anyway.

Can anyone imagine walking into a doctor’s office in the US without an appointment and getting the same kind of treatment? Can anyone imagine all the rigamarole an American must go through just to get medicine for a throat infection? Can anyone imagine what it would have cost an American without insurance?

The US health system is screwed up. There are too many specialists, too many posh offices, and too much paperwork.

There are many, many things that are right about Korea. I just wish Korea would get over her ridiculous obsession with Japan and history. Always trying to demonize Japan by lying about Dokdo and the colonial period hurts Korea much more than it hurts Japan. I hope Koreans will someday realize that.

A November 20, Yonhap News article entitled, “S. Korean Lawmakers to Visit Washington Over Dokdo Issue,” says that a bipartisan group of South Korean legislators are going to Washington to “make sure that the incoming Barack Obama administration clearly acknowledges Dokdo as South Korea’s land.”

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

With all the economic problems facing Korea, the US, and the rest of the world, why would a group of Korean politicians be wasting time and money to go to the US to talk about a small group of desolate rocks in the the middle of the Sea of Japan instead of more important, pressing issues?

Korea already knows that the United States does not want to get involved in the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute. Also, why would Korea want to refocus world attention on Dokdo, given that Korea’s historical claims to the islets are just a bunch of lies?

Besides getting a free vacation to the United States, the only other possible explanation I can think of for these politicians going to Washington to talk about Dokdo is that they are mentally challenged.

Wjk wrote:

can the doctor and the nurse even EAT, if that is all they get? Surely the govt must be kicking in some more, right?

As I wrote, the doctor was literally spending about one minute with each patient. That means that if the other patients were also paying 2,500 won for their consultation, then the doctor was making about 150,000 won an hour without any reimbusement from the Korean government. If you add on whatever the Korean government gives them, then Korean doctors seem to be doing all right, even though they are not getting the ridiculous fees charged by Americans doctors. Also, my 2,500 won charge supposedly included a 30% school discount.

This past February I went to the United States because my father was sick in the hospital. He had pneumonia and his kidneys had stopped working. By the time I had landed, his kidneys were working again, but he was still in the hospital with pneumonia. A couple of days later they moved him out of critical care, but he still had at least three doctors stopping by his room for less than a minute almost everyday. One was a lung doctor, one was a heart doctor, and one was some other doctor. I can only imagine what they were charging for each of those short visits.

Actually, the heart doctor came with his assistant and would sit in a chair for more than a minute at the end of my dad’s bed just staring at my dad. He did not examine my dad or say anything, even though my dad seemed to be waiting for him to say something. The doctor would just sit there with a concerned look on his face. I guess showing concern is worth something because my dad said he liked that doctor, but the doctor never really did anything for my dad. He was a heart doctor, and nothing was wrong with my dad’s heart at the time. It was like he came to my dad’s room to rest and earn a little extra money. After a little while, he would get up, say “goodbye,” and walk out of the room with his assistant, who was not bad looking.

The lung doctor said he was 99% certain that my dad had small-cell lung cancer and wanted to cut into his lungs and make sure. My dad told him to go screw himself because another doctor had told him the same thing ten years earlier and had also said he had probably less than three months to live. The lung doctor was almost certainly just looking at my dad’s old medical records and making his diagnosis based on those, ignoring the fact that people with small-cell lung cancer do not live ten years with the disease. In fact, they rarely live even six months.

Anyway, my dad got out of the hospital a few days later and is now doing just fine. He did go and see another doctor he trusts at another hospital. The doctor told him that he did not have small-cell lung cancer and that the lung doctor was full of shit.

Luckily, my dad did not have his first heart attack until he was sixty-five or sixty-six and had Medicare to supplement the medical insurance he had with the fire department, so he did not have to pay anything for the critical care, the operation to insert two stints, and the subsequent visits to the doctor. After the doctors knew he was covered, they were scheduling appointments for him every month or so.

Just before my dad turned seventy, he accidentally bumped into the side mirror of his jeep one day and hurt his chest area. After a couple of days, it was still hurting, so he decided to go to a doctor, thinking that he might have cracked a rib. The x-ray showed something in his lung that looked like a spider’s egg sac. His doctor sent him to a “lung doctor,” who diagnosed him with small-cell lung cancer and gave him less that three months to live without treatment. He said that with radiation and chemo, he might live six months and maybe even a year, but no more.

My dad decided to get the treatment. The chemo was much worse than he expected and the radiation essentially destroyed his lung, but that spider sac was still there. The people at the cancer center just kept scheduling my dad for appointment after appointment until my dad finally got tired of it and stopped going.

Four or five years later, my dad’s regular doctor told him that he could not have had small-cell lung cancer because he would have been dead by then. Now my dad is 79 years old, 240 pounds, and gets out of breath easily, but has no serious illnesses. He does not even have diabetes.

My dad gives his doctors some credit because they have saved his life a few times when he has had a couple of bouts with pneumonia and heart attacks, but he still curses that lung doctor for putting him through chemotherapy hell and destroying his lung.

My dad has been really lucky. Doctors have gotten rich off of his insurance, but it hasn’t cost him hardly anything. I think my dad would have died ten years ago if he didn’t have insurance, and he would definitely be broke.

America’s heart and lung specialist have got a sweet deal. Whenever they get a patient with good insurance, they will suck everything they can out of the insurance company, which means insurance costs go higher, pricing it out of the reach of many people.

The American health care system has developed into a blooksucking monster that feeds off the rich and those with enough money to afford the expensive insurance policies while stomping on the poor and low-salary workers. It is time to drive a stake into the heart of the monster.

Kimchipig (#45),

I am not sure what I am, but if democrats believe, as Obama does, that raising the capital gains tax and keeping the corporate income tax high would be good for Americans, then I am not a democrat because I am not that stupid.

Jewook (#88),

You obviously know very little about the history of Dokdo because if you did know about it, then you would know it would be better, as a Korean, to keep your mouth shut.

Jewook wrote in #46:

The rational thing to do is ignore people who make idiotic claims.

Were you referring to Korean or Japanese claims?