jr conlin's ink stained banana

i have a tenuous relationship with health care.

For the first 18 or so years of my life, i was on the "public option" plan in that as a military dependent, i would go to base doctors and have checkups/treatments. i received both good care, moderate, and what i now realize was fairly bad care kind of independent of where i happened to be. Pretty much like any other plan i remember being on.

i'll note that one of my grandmothers died from an over-prescription of aspirin (ASA), and that my father has been hospitalized at least twice because of pharmaceutical reactions, so i tend to avoid drugs unless absolutely necessary and for as minimal a period as possible. (i also want to know the exact nature of what i'm taking, what it does, and what it's effects are. i don't take anything that's not well understood.)

Because of this general suspicion around the medical profession, i tend not to visit doctors nearly as often as i'm informed i should. i go about once every five to seven years for a general check up. For the most part, doctors tell me i'm in good shape, which both they and i find surprising. (They because it's reasonably rare, me because i'd make the most boring action figure you can imagine.)

Thing is, i've been shopping around for a new doctor, and have discovered a few things. One of the first things i've discovered is that there are precious few plain ol' Doctors in San Jose. Most Personal Care Physicians (no, seriously, did they even think about the acronym that combination shares consonants with?), are specialists, which is great if you had respiratory issues and was interested in someone who might also look at a limp. Not so great if you don't have any over arching issues but want some help about some tendon issues in your hand. This is probably because there's damn good money in being a specialist and getting to charge high rates for said specialty. My last "general" doctor expanded his service to include a slew of other things i wasn't quite so appreciative of, quite possibly because he was interested in making more money.

This kinda leads me to the next discovery i'm not so happy to make. i think that HMOs have basically won the war. i'm on a PPO, which means that i am able to pick my doctor and service. i pay a bit extra for that privilege, but honestly, if there aren't any general practice doctors i can call on, it's kind of a useless privilege. Having zero experience with HMO's other than previously related horror stories, i'm thinking that this is where the GPs of the world have gone. You walk into the processing facility, tell the triage person what's broken, get farmed out to Dr. X who determines remedy or shunts you to Doctor Y who repeats the process. You only really hit a problem when you suddenly fall outside of that system. By trying to be smarter about things, i've managed to pre-select myself for the more difficult world.

There are a few "freelance" GPs in my area that i'll try to work through and hopefully i'll find one before i really need one. Kind of like trying to find a good car mechanic, really, only a lot less information and a lot more restrictions on where you can go.

i guess that's one of the reasons i find the whole "Health Care Debate" currently going on so damn moronic. Honestly, i don't care who pays for the service (i already know it's going to be me in some form or another), i just want to have care that doesn't make me feel a little sick every time i think about it.